Cornering the Market : Drugs, IDs, Sex Sold Openly in Lot at Bristol and McFadden

Three teenagers, sporting wraparound sunglasses that mask their faces beneath an overcast sky, sit impatiently in a white Volkswagen Jetta parked in front of the taqueria.

They have a craving, but it’s not for tacos.

A group of young men standing on the sidewalk nearby casts a stealthy glance at the teens. Moments later, one of them, clad in baggy shorts and leather sandals, saunters over to the Volkswagen to take an order, of sorts.

He ignores a police car cruising by and seems undaunted by the presence of a police substation just a block away.

“Those kids are regulars here,” says Arturo, who says he is one of several drug dealers working the parking lot. “Sometimes they come in different cars. They mostly buy cocaine, but once in a while they’ll also buy a little mota [marijuana].”

Soon, the man in the baggy shorts finishes his brief business at the Volkswagen and makes a beeline for the telephones outside the market. The teenagers drive off.

“He’s calling in their order now,” explains Arturo, who spoke only on the condition that his full name not be used.

Ten minutes later, a courier delivers a plastic bag of coke, good for a few lines and a midday buzz, and the Volkswagen with a No Fear decal and custom wheels reappears. Money and drugs, wrapped inside a folded newspaper, are quickly exchanged and seller and buyers go their separate ways.

This is a drug deal in plain sight, part of a high-volume, subterranean economy that flourishes at a strip mall at the southwest corner of Bristol Street and McFadden Avenue in one of the worst crime areas in the city. Here just about anything--drugs, fake ID cards, even sex--can be purchased. On any given day, amid the bustle of legitimate shoppers going to and from the mall’s 44 stores, drug dealers, pimps and others scurry through the parking lot to conduct business virtually unnoticed, police acknowledge.

Located one block from Mater Dei High School and about a mile from the Civic Center, the shopping center, built in the late 1950s, has changed over the years, along with most of the neighborhoods surrounding it. During the 1960s, most of the mall’s customers were white. Me-N-Ed’s Pizza Parlor used to be a hangout for surfer kids.

The pizza parlor is still there, surrounded by stores that sell clothing, electronics, ice cream, bridal gowns and other merchandise. A dentist’s office is tucked away in a corner of the mall and offices in the second level offer a variety of services to immigrants, from legal assistance to helping them register their cars with the Department of Motor Vehicles.

In the 1970s and 1980s, when white residents began leaving the area, many merchants changed direction to meet the shopping needs of the Latino, African American and Vietnamese residents who moved in. Now, customers are overwhelmingly Latino, and the window advertisements in nearly all of the stores are in Spanish. During the day, a giant-screen television at Me-N-Ed’s is tuned to Spanish-language soap operas.

The area has evolved like other urban communities across Southern California whose demographics changed beginning in the 1970s, when mainstay industries, such as aerospace, began to disappear and inner-city neighborhoods were hit by economic hard times.

The merchants are unwilling to report illegal activity for fear of retaliation, so they try to coexist with the illicit trade, police say.

If the drug dealers are concerned about police, they do not show it. They know the Santa Ana Police Department’s neighborhood substation is one block south of the shopping center, but only shrug when told of plans to close it in December for budgetary reasons. The substation costs $50,000 a year to operate and is used by 51 officers in staggered daily shifts, according to the department.

“They never bother us,” a dealer contends.

The substation’s commander, Lt. Mike Foote, calls the strip mall “one of the major problem areas in the city,” and contrary to the dealer’s claim, Foote says officers made more than 200 arrests there in 1995 for drug trafficking and other offenses.

But there is only so much that police can do about the crime at this busy shopping center, adds Foote. After all, he explains, the overall scene looks so normal, it’s hard to pick out dealers and their customers from the throngs of innocent shoppers.

Store owners say enforcement action is usually taken only after police investigate reports of violent crime at the shopping center, or when police assist Immigration and Naturalization Service investigators cracking down on the sale of forged immigration documents.

Whatever the level of enforcement has been, it has hardly slowed the illegal, full-service enterprise here.

“What can you buy here?” a visitor asks Arturo.

“What do you want, and how much do you want?” he replies. “Drugs and a mica [immigration card] can be gotten in a few minutes. If you want a car, you’ll have to wait a day or two, depending on which model you want.”

Most drug deals are for small amounts, but kilo-size purchases of marijuana and cocaine are also possible. The parking lot dealers say they buy the drugs wholesale, sometimes on credit, through a distributor and sell at the going street price.

Typically, cocaine is sold in amounts equal to a sugar packet for $50, and smaller amounts for $20 and $10. The most common sale is what the dealers call “un ocho [an eight]” for $20, enough for eight thin lines to be snorted.

The men selling contraband or pimping two young prostitutes are careful not to draw unnecessary attention. It is their ability to meld with the crowd that makes it hard for police to break up the illegal activity, Foote says.

“From the front seat of a police car driving through the parking lot, you see a hubbub of activity: shoppers, kids, adults, vehicles, picketers, noise and confusion,” Foote says. “All of this makes it extremely easy for the dealers to blend in and difficult for us to observe a criminal act.”

Some dealers speak of having already done time in prison, County Jail or Juvenile Hall. Others say they began selling drugs after becoming unemployed or when it became impossible to live on jobs that rarely pay more than $5 per hour for unskilled labor.

Arturo, who was laid off by a landscaping firm in South County in November, looks for work here and in San Diego when he’s not selling drugs at the corner. On Good Friday, he appeared for “work” at 2 p.m., after fasting at home during the morning for the religious observance.

“Believe me, if I could get a job earning even $5 per hour I’d leave here in a minute,” he said. “My sister has an idea of what I’m doing, and she’s afraid that if I get arrested, they’ll take my mica away and deport me.”

He and the others operate in a laissez faire environment, where they make their own rules but do not interfere with the mall’s legitimate customers--or each other’s enterprises.

Drug dealers sell either cocaine, marijuana, chiva (heroin), immigration and other identification cards, stolen cars or pimp, but not in combination. They must also pay protection money--extortion that they dismiss as innocuous “rent” payments--of from $20 to $50 weekly to gang members, who claim the shopping center’s parking lot as part of their turf.

Shop owners and their employees are aware of the illegal activity but are reluctant to acknowledge it publicly. Negotiations between the drug dealers and customers sometimes take place inside stores, but one owner who agreed to speak on condition he is not identified says the dealing never interferes with his customers.

“Every merchant knows what goes on here, but the business they conduct outside has nothing to do with us,” he says.

Coss Properties Co. in Los Angeles manages 20 of the 44 stores in the center for a private trust. The remaining stores are owned by four other owners, says Coss property manager Joe Del Rivo.

Del Rivo acknowledges that criminal activity has been a problem at the mall for more than six years and adds that he spoke with police “about the problems there” as recently as two weeks ago.

“We’ve talked to the police on numerous occasions,” Del Rivo says. “They are very familiar with the problems, [but] their response hasn’t been as good as I expected. But out of fairness to the police, it is a very complicated situation, and Santa Ana doesn’t have the resources to devote more police attention to the problem.”

Foote says that the seeming acceptance by merchants of the illicit trade frustrates him and his officers.

“We know all of this is going down, but nobody cares enough to report crimes,” he says. “Nobody calls us. It’s the apathy of those most affected by the problem.”

However, at least one store owner disagrees.

The woman, who also talked only on condition of not being named, says police officers could be more effective if they would just get out of their patrol cars.

“The police have absolutely no impact here,” she says. “Yes, they drive through the parking lot, but they never get out of their car.”

Del Rivo also challenges criticism that merchants turn a blind eye to criminal activity. He says that he and the other property owners have reported the merchants’ concerns in meetings with police.

“We’ve done everything that the police have asked us to do,” Del Rivo says. “We put a $60,000 security fence behind the mall and hired security guards, all at great cost to us. We’re doing what we can, but we can’t do the job of the police and immigration service.”

Meanwhile, the illegal trade continues in the mall’s vast parking lot.

Two men in a battered Camaro negotiate the purchase of bogus immigration cards from one seller. The negotiations, conducted in rapid-fire Spanish, continue despite the presence of two armed security guards nearby.

Immigration cards can be purchased for as cheap as $80 and printed in as little as 10 minutes, if a customer provides his or her own photograph. However, the counterfeiters’ work is often characterized by poor quality. A phony Social Security card printed for a woman is easily detected as a fake.

Some drug deals are consummated with all the subtlety of a pirouette, while others are done quickly and brazenly.

A man with sandy hair parks his battered Ford pickup behind the Chevron gas station, next to the water and air hoses. He pops the hood, mindlessly tugging on the fan belt and pretending to have engine trouble, while casting an occasional glance across the parking lot.

The dealers chuckle at the man’s performance. After a while, a dealer with curly, red hair tugs at the fan belt too, and takes the man’s order. Later, a bag of marijuana and money are exchanged while both men lean into the engine compartment.

Not surprisingly, rip-offs are common. Dealers are quick to size up vulnerable customers, usually young drug users without any street smarts who are unfamiliar with the nuances that accompany a drug deal.

A young man pulls into a parking space and waits for an order that will never be delivered. He wants to buy cocaine but makes the mistake of giving $50 to the dealer first.

The dealer smiles and walks away as others who witness the one-way transaction chortle. After a while, the young man in the car realizes he has been swindled.

“Hey, give me back my $50,” he pleads.

The dealer who pocketed the money ignores him.

“What’s he going to do,” comments another man, “call the cops?”