Gang Turns Hope to Fear, Lives to Ashes

Demanding respect, they give none.

None for the school children they bully. Or the working-class families they chase from parks. Or the hopeful immigrant entrepreneurs they drive into insolvency. None for those who have lost loved ones to bullets.

In ways subtle and extreme, members of the 18th Street gang--the West’s largest--have brought unprecedented misery to the blue-collar neighborhoods they claim to own.

“What you get from gangs like 18th Street, on a large scale basis, is fear . . . an army in the community,” says Michael Genelin, head of the Los Angeles County district attorney’s Hardcore gang unit.

As 18th Street’s growth has climbed to as many as 20,000 members in Southern California, the casualties have mounted.The communities of 18th Street’s rise have fallen victim to drug dealing, assaults, robberies and scores of homicides, police say.

The killings dot 18th Street turf like paint drops splattered across a canvas. Often the victims are rival gang members. Sometimes they are not.

Istvan Udvarhelyi was not.

He was shot seven times--from his head to his torso--while walking to his Hollywood home from a bus stop. Authorities say the alleged killers, two 18th Street juveniles now awaiting trial, were cruising, looking for enemies. Instead, they gunned down Istvan, who had celebrated his 40th birthday days earlier. He died steps from his front door.

“He was totally innocent,” says Det. Mike McDonagh of the Los Angeles Police Department. “Completely, 100% innocent.”

Istvan had helped his parents realize their dream, leading them from Communist Hungary to Los Angeles. For 11 years, he worked as a banquet waiter at the Biltmore Hotel. He was the breadwinner of a family that today is struggling to make ends meet.

“He was a good son,” says his 78-year-old mother, Elizabeth Udvarhelyi. “A very, very good man.”

Behind the security gates of the modest home Istvan shared with his parents, reminders of him are everywhere: the television he bought, his unfinished construction work on the house, his detailed sketch of the Statue of Liberty.

And his ashes.

“Here is my son,” whispers the frail mother as she cradles a white plastic bag. Each night, she places it beside her pillow.

The parents of Amy Wong know this pain too.

The 25-year-old woman was killed by an 18th Street gunman after she and her elderly parents left their Lincoln Heights home for a Chinese New Year celebration. They were driving to their temple when some 18th Streeters pulled alongside.

Apparently mistaking the family’s car for a rival’s, the killer fired one round from an assault rifle, striking Wong in the head.

Police say the gunman stared straight at the father and laughed.

During the trial that led to the assailant’s conviction, Wong’s parents were so fearful that they wore disguises. Later, after becoming U.S. citizens, they changed their names, a relative says.

Veteran homicide Det. Ben Lovato says he is still haunted by the depth of the family’s sorrow. They will “suffer every day for the rest of their lives,” he says.

Sheer Intimidation

Although murder is the gravest of its crimes, 18th Street’s lower-level lawlessness has damaged entire communities.

Law enforcement does not compile comprehensive statistics on 18th Street’s crimes. But interviews with dozens of members and key criminal justice officials suggest that the gang is continuously involved in auto thefts, burglaries, street robberies, vandalism and intimidation.

“Those are things that degrade a neighborhood,” says Genelin, the county’s top gang prosecutor. “It results in flight from the neighborhood [and] people not taking care of the neighborhood because they feel it’s futile.”

The mere presence of the gang’s members can trigger caution in children and adults alike.

At Cudahy Park in southeast Los Angeles County a small boy cries out “Eighteen Streeters!” and then makes a dash to his parents under a nearby tree.

It’s a warm afternoon, and the gang members are beginning to assemble in this shady retreat by the Los Angeles River. Cudahy Park is a popular destination for many families--and a haunt for 18th Streeters from various cities. They come to socialize, help initiate recruits and hold meetings.

A short distance away, “Chubs,” a heavy-set teenager, loiters in the long afternoon shadows. The 15-year-old with a bullet-scarred stomach peers at each car passing the park’s entrance.

“Dieciocho!” he shouts, using the gang’s Spanish name, as two Latino men drive off. Moments later, Chubs challenges two teenagers across the street. They walk briskly away, keeping silent.

For the most part, the homeboys congregate near the center of the park, just outside the recreation workers’ office, which is fortified with steel mesh over its windows.

Working at the park can be tricky, requiring a balancing act between watching out for the welfare of visitors and aggravating gang members.

One employee says he dreads closing the park on nights when 18th Streeters are around. To avoid trouble, sometimes he just leaves, returning on his own time to turn off the lights.

“You never tell them do anything,” he cautions. “You always ask.”

City officials have tried diligently to keep the park hospitable. But having been threatened himself, Rob Gaylord, director of Cudahy’s Parks and Recreation Department, says he feels for his workers. “It’s hard for my staff. These guys live in the community and fear reprisals.”

Living with the 18th Street gang indeed forces adjustments to daily routines: Do nothing to draw attention. Choose your routes carefully. Show respect.

“You don’t want to provoke them,” says one 15-year-old,, roller-blading in an 18th Street stronghold in Inglewood.

Normally, her mother won’t let her go outside. But today, she’s taking a chance. There are no gang members in sight.

Still, the girl is especially alert, instinctively keeping her eyes moving. The reason: On this hot afternoon, she’s wearing shorts. For most high school sophomores, this wouldn’t provoke a second thought. But here. . . .

“They might think you’re asking for it. They have dirty minds,” she says of the gangsters who loiter by her home. “I hate it here.”

A short distance away, on another afternoon, the gang is out in force. Some have polished off a few beers. Others are smoking yesca, marijuana. As usual, they are bragging about their criminal exploits.

Down the sidewalk, past the half dozen homeboys, a young teenager walks alone. “Who is that?” someone asks.

The teenager is suddenly surrounded.

“Where you from?” demands “Grizzly,” 18, towering over the frozen boy. Nearly speechless, he mutters that he claims no gang as his own. He says he just hangs with some kids who like to party.

Grizzly issues a warning: “That party crew is gonna get you killed. Be from the 1-8.”

Blight and Fright

One of the sad truths of 18th Street’s ascendance is that the gang’s deepest roots--and its broadest impact--are in neighborhoods struggling to achieve economic renewal. Along blocks lined with small shops, proprietors have seen their life savings evaporate in a swirl of narcotics hustling and thuggery.

Clothing store owners, too intimidated to protest, watch as gang members swagger in and steal shirts and pants off racks. At businesses of all kinds, customers are disappearing, unwilling to pass before the menacing stares of the gangbangers.

Especially hard hit has been the area surrounding 3rd Street and Kenmore Avenue north of Koreatown, where immigrant business owners have achieved a tenuous foothold in their new land. There are ethnic bread shops and eateries, a travel agency, a beauty shop. Each day, the owners must endure the constant presence of armed gang members patrolling the sidewalks on foot and skateboards, protecting 18th Street’s curbside drug bazaar.

“They’re just easy targets,” an LAPD undercover detective says of the businesses. “ Third and Kenmore is going down fast.”

Ignacio Rentana sunk all he had--$30,000 and his hopes--into a tiny Salvadoran eatery on 3rd Street last spring. At first, the family-run business prospered, selling hand-made pupusas, a griddled cornmeal cake stuffed with meat and cheese. Then 18th Street showed up.

Gangsters pushed drugs in his parking lot and fired handguns at passing rivals. They stormed into the tiny restaurant at will--often to hide from police.

Refusing to buy more than a soda, as many as 15 gang members at a time would occupy his tables, tossing out obnoxious comments and scaring off what few customers would venture inside.

The front of the restaurant was repeatedly spray-painted with the gang’s moniker, “XV3.” Everyday, Rentana painted over the graffiti. The next morning, it was back.

“I’m just trying to survive,” he once pleaded with the 18th streeters. “Please don’t write on my place. We’re the same people.”

They laughed at him.

Calling the police only seemed to heighten the tensions.

“Why are the police here?” the gangsters shouted at Rentana and his wife minutes after officers had left. “Did you call them?”

In August, Rentana surrendered. He broke his lease and moved his business to the San Fernando Valley.

“We didn’t have any choice,” he says. “It’s useless to fight with those guys.”

Mark of Mayhem

Residential property owners say they too have been fighting a lopsided war against the growth of 18th Street. Most say they can only watch helplessly as their buildings are vandalized, their tenants chased to safer ground and their investments eroded.

It’s evening in South-Central Los Angeles and half a dozen homeboys gather in front of an apartment building along a block of 82nd Street blanketed with garish graffiti.

While other 18th Streeters sell crack at a nearby corner, the gangbangers hover in the building’s driveway.

They keep a large iron gate open just a few feet--for a quick exit should police arrive. Tenants come and go, eyes straight ahead, without uttering a word.

From a first-floor unit emerges a newly hired manager, whom the homeboys blame for a fresh coat of paint covering their 18th Street markings.

The graying Latino manager calls aside a shot-caller named “Risky” and complains in Spanish about the gang’s vandalism.

Just a few feet away, a tattooed teenager casually scratches a 5-inch-high “XV3” in the still-drying latex on the building’s outer wall.

Risky, growing impatient with the apartment manager, bluntly informs him: “All of this is ours. This is our neighborhood!”

Afterward, Risky says he will consider the manager’s complaints. “If he shows me respect,” Risky says, “I show him respect.”

Weeks later, the front wall was covered with 18th Street graffiti.

The gang’s markings and mayhem also plague chunks of Hollywood, where 18th Streeters from throughout Southern California come to strut their solidarity.

They claim as their turf a prime piece of the Hollywood Walk of Fame between Mann’s Chinese Theatre and Vine Street. There--amid the sidewalk stars of Sharon Stone, Robin Williams and Zsa Zsa Gabor--they mingle with tourists and tensely co-exist with private security guards hired by the city. To the initiated eye, the gang members are obvious with their hugely oversized football jerseys--”18” on both sides.

A supervisor with the city-funded security program chooses his words cautiously when asked about the gang. He stresses that he wants to sound “neutral.”

“It would be grossly disadvantageous for our officers to be disrespectful and challenging or abusive to the . . . ‘18th Street citizens,’ ” supervisor Phil Lankford explains. “Eighteenth Street has been in the area for years. It is anticipated . . . that they will continue to be in the area.”

For 18th Street, the brightly lighted Hollywood Boulevard is mostly a place to be seen. Gang business is conducted in the darkness of residential side streets.

Crack dealing became so unbearable and entrenched along the so-called Yucca Street corridor that landlords installed 24-hour video surveillance cameras atop apartment buildings to scare off buyers and destroy 18th Street’s drug market.

The residents--who also threatened to hire mercenaries--strung banners across the street saying, “Buy Drugs, Go to Jail” and “Entering Videotape Surveillance Zone.”

Although these actions have achieved some success, they also have worked to push the gangsters from one area to another.

One angry homeowner, who has witnessed the rise of 18th Street-controlled drug dealing outside her window near Sunset Boulevard, complains: “You just have these scumbags in your neighborhood.”

‘Like a War Zone’

Eighteenth Streeters also have begun to appear in neighborhoods previously spared from this kind of gang activity.

Near the intersection of Olympic and Westwood boulevards in Los Angeles’ Westside, gang members are accused of one the area’s bloodiest shootings.

Two carloads of 18th Streeters armed with automatic pistols and shotguns opened fire last year on a birthday gathering outside a rented Masonic Lodge.

“It was all of a sudden like a war zone,” recalls Antonio Santiago, 43, a maintenance supervisor who was hit in the foot and waist. “They just got out of the car and started shooting.”

When it ended, a 24-year-old was dead and five others were injured.

Most were wounded in the back as they tried to run, police say. Members of a rival gang apparently were among the guests, police say, but the 18th Streeters fired indiscriminately.

“They were shooting anybody standing there,” says Los Angeles Police Det. Brad Roberts, who investigated the case.

Five 18th Streeters--two of them juveniles--were charged with the shootings. Two other members of the gang are being sought on murder counts.

The attack unnerved area residents.

“I think we’re sort of complacent that way,” says Marie Wallace of the Westwood Village Homeowners Assn. “We think all the bad things happens somewhere else.”

By the time the shooting occurred, however, homeowners in a nearby neighborhood already were on alert.

Noticing a rise in graffiti on the edges of Castle Heights, they helped organize property owners. They took pictures of the scrawls, pressed for police action and held graffiti clean-ups.

“We, as neighborhood, were concerned,” says Jim West of of the Castle Heights Neighborhood Assn.

For now, they believe that 18th Street is being kept at bay.

Campus Recruiting

Because young teenagers represent the present and future of 18th Street, schools have become an important component of its spread--especially in immigrant communities.

“I see a very serious problem. The numbers are incredible,” says a school law enforcement official familiar with the gang’s growth. “This is a land of opportunity for them.”

A junior high school counselor, who has spoken with youngsters targeted for gang membership, agrees: “This particular gang is really hard-core. If you’re friends of people who are in, they pressure you to join.”

Although most students stay clear of gangs, the small number who do belong can create substantial problems. With 18th Street, school officials say, those problems tend to worsen.

Each day at Hollywood High School, the dismissal bell sends hundreds of homeward-bound students past 18th Streeters and other gang members who assume positions at businesses across the street.

“We’ve had helicopters out and LAPD numerous times [because of] fights and skirmishes,” says Assistant Principal Dick Rippey. “Eighteenth Street is usually involved.”

One of the campus’ most shocking outbursts came in 1994, when an 18th Streeter was gunned down by rival gang members on the front lawn as classes ended.

Now faculty members and armed school police escort hundreds of students to waiting buses, Rippey says, “so they don’t get jumped or intimidated.”

The gang’s impact has been felt in the lower grades as well.

“Kids used to play around . . . playing like they were in a gang,” says a faculty member at Chester Nimitz Middle School in Huntington Park. “Eighteenth Street is not [for] playing.”

Just a few years ago, Nimitz had a typical hodgepodge of local gangs, tagging crews and party groups. After 18th Street became a power, school staffers say they noticed a greater sense of fear on campus.

“They just . . . overpowered with sheer numbers,” says Los Angeles Unified School District Police Officer Vetser Pittman, making himself conspicuous outside the school. “Now you have to get along with 18th Street.”

On a recent day, like on so many others, Pittman and several local police officers have broken up an off-campus confrontation involving 18th Streeters, who were harassing a group of transfer students belonging to other gangs.

They, like others before them, were promptly sent to another school for their protection.

Says one girl who has seen the rise of 18th Street at Nimitz: “They just want to control everything.”

Times librarian Janet Lundblad contributed research to this story.

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18th Street Scenes: ‘Spanky’

Outside a small market in the heart of 18th Street turf in Inglewood, homeboys come and go. Some linger, sharing a joint. Customers, some with children in tow, nervously eye the group.

One man, as if to protest the gang’s presence the only way he safely can, revs the motor of his pickup and makes the wheels squeal as he pulls away.

“Spanky,” 20, is holding court, spewing contempt for everything not 18th Street.

He grows visibly agitated as a pickup with two male occupants slowly cruises by.

Although the passenger is tight with a rival gang, Spanky says, he lives in 18th Street domain.

Spanky says the rival sticks close to his father for protection but that it won’t save him from 18th Street’s stern hand.

“We’ll smoke him. We’ll smoke his ol’ man, too.”

Spanky saunters into the market, handling various items.

He quickly becomes involved in a tense exchange with the security guard, who objects to his lingering near the merchandise.

“This is not your house,” the guard declares.

Spanky shoots back: “This is my neighborhood.”

Moments later, two young Latino men confront Spanky with an accusatory inquiry.

One of the men’s uncle was just robbed nearby. They ask whether 18th Street was involved.

Spanky steps toe to toe with the man, and says: “I don’t give a f--- about your uncle.”

As the man backs down, Spanky laughs, conceding that his homeboys “jack” immigrants all the time for quick cash.

“You’re walking down the street. You see the [immigrant] coming. You’re broke. You want to get drunk or smoke a little. . . . You clothesline his ass.”

18th Street Scenes: ‘Lil’ Goofy’

For Alex “Lil’ Goofy” Ramirez, 18th Street glory ended at the graveyard gate.

The 15-year-old died from a drive-by shooting gone awry. He and two 18th Street homeboys--including a 28-year-old gang veteran--had gone on a “mission” against rival gangsters.

When the veteran opened fire, detectives say, their enemies shot back, hitting Ramirez, who was a passenger, once in the chest.

For nearly an hour, the 18th Street veteran drove around with his critically wounded comrade while deciding what to do.

Finally, he left the teenager on a sidewalk near a hospital. Soon after, Lil’ Goofy died in the emergency room.

Angered that his son had been abandoned on the sidewalk, Alejandro Medrano became even more upset at a rosary service the night before the burial.

While friends and loved ones viewed Lil’ Goofy’s open casket, the father said, 18th Streeters stood in the dark parking lot, making obnoxious comments and “stinking of alcohol.”

Medrano said the gangbangers didn’t even offer condolences to the family.

But the final insult, the father said, came the next morning.

Despite all the talk of “homey love” and the “In loving memory of Alex” fliers circulating through the gang’s neighborhoods, only a handful of 18th Streeters bothered to show up for the graveside service at a City of Commerce cemetery.

It was nothing like the 18th Street glamorization in the fliers, with their drawing of gang veterans, sporting stylish Zoot suits, hats and dark glasses, carrying the casket of a fallen warrior.

“Where are they now?” Medrano says, minutes after a beaten-down backhoe lowered the gray casket into the ground.

“Nothing good comes of [18th Street].”

Troubled Corner

The Pico Fiesta strip mall at the corner of Pico Boulevard and Alvarado Street burned to the ground during the 1992 riots. Rebuilt, it now faces a more insidious danger: dope dealing orchestrated by the 18th Street gang. Eighteenth Streeters “tax” pushers and provide muscle when problems arise. The location is one of the area’s hardest hit, and officers made numerous arrests but have been unable to end the assault, police say. Store owners in the strip mall are suffering because the gang has scared off customers--a phenomenom plaguing many businesses in the gang’s territory. As 18th Streeters warned a security guard at Pico Fiesta: “You can’t do anything about it because we’re stronger. We’re 18th Street. . . . If you mess with us, you’re going to disappear.”

1) Gang members patrol Pico Boulevard to protect their drug dealing partners or intimidate workers who threaten to all police. If problems arise, gang members can quickly summon other 18th Streeters, who often gather at a nearby park and store.

2) An armed guard hired by King Taco eyes illicit activity, keeping it away from the store. Several guards are veterans of the Nicaraguan National Guard that fought the Sandinistas in the 1970s.

3) Gang members and dealers drink beer inside La Casita de Don Carlos restaurant, watching the activity and coming outside to make sales. The owner says he is helpless and fears for his family’s safety. “Think about what you would do in my case,” he says. “The same thing: just keep your mouth closed.”

4) Dealers line up in front of El Pavo bakery, selling to walk-up traffic. Gang members confronted one worker with a gun when she threatened to call police. “It used to be one of our best locations,” the owner says. “Now it’s one of our worst.”

5) As a lookout watches for police, dealers loiter on sidewalk and sell to customers who drive through the strip mall.

Researched by Times staff writers ROBERT J. LOPEZ and RICH CONNELL

About This Series

Times staff writers Rich Connell, Robert J. Lopez and photographer Aurelio Jose Barrera spent eight months exploring the culture and violence of the sprawling 18th Street gang. They spoke with hundreds of members, victims and law enforcement officials for this three-part report.

* Sunday: Inside the gang, and the factors fueling its unparalleled growth.

* Today: The devastation the gang has wrought on families and neighborhoods.

* Tuesday: Law enforcement stumbles in its campaign to stop the gang’s advance.