Vandalism Mars L.A.’s Euphoria

A whoop of joy erupted throughout Los Angeles Monday night as the Lakers secured the NBA championship, but the elation was soon marred by violence.

Outside Staples Center, crowds torched or destroyed a more than a half dozen cars, including at least two police cars, ignited bonfires and burned T-shirts and posters moments after the Lakers’ 116-111 victory over the Indiana Pacers in Game 6 of the NBA finals, their first championship in 12 years.

While millions throughout the Los Angeles area celebrated peacefully, chaos erupted outside the arena.

Within an hour after the victory, a line of police in riot gear began advancing on a crowd that had swelled to 6,000. Many were throwing bottles and other objects. A line of about 60 police officers, 30 on horseback, began pushing the crowd away from the center.

One group tore branches from trees and stuffed them into a car before setting it on fire. Others pounced on and kicked a limousine stuck in a throng. Hundreds attacked an unoccupied TV news van parked on 11th Street, shattering windows and trying to turn it over.

Another mob set an unoccupied MTA bus on fire after smashing the windows. A fire crew arrived moments later and doused the blaze before it could engulf the bus.

At some point during the melee, police fired rubber bullets in an attempt to disperse the crowd, according to an LAPD spokesman, Officer Jason Lee.

Near midnight, two fires blazed at 8th and Figueroa streets, one in the intersection, the other in a trash bin. A group of 50 young men wearing Laker jerseys smashed newspaper boxes and tried to destroy a transformer utility box. At other street corners, people hurled garbage cans as fans driving by waved banners and cheered on the destruction. No police were in sight.

Police Sgt. Dennis Kato defended the police strategy. “All we’re trying to do is maintain the peace in as low-key a manner as we can,” he said. Police don’t move into a large crowd until they have sufficient resources to handle it, he said. They also are less aggressive when the violence is directed at property.

Several Injuries

Although no arrests had been reported, at least a dozen people were injured, said Brian Humphrey, Los Angeles City Fire Department spokesman.

A woman who fell inside Staples Center and hit her head was in fair condition at a hospital. Another man suffered a minor shoulder injury as he left the game. Two men suffered burns in a street fire. Their conditions were not known.

“We had a plan and we’ve got it under control,” LAPD spokesman Lee said more than two hours after the Laker victory, as the crowd began to subside and police appeared to gain the upper hand.

Still, at midnight at Pico Boulevard and Hill Street, where the windows of several businesses had been smashed, men were climbing into a furniture store and dragging out window display furniture and a vacuum cleaner.

Elsewhere throughout the city, people wallowed noisily but peacefully in their victory--the seventh NBA title for the Los Angeles team, but the first in 12 years. In fact, the last national title won by a Los Angeles team in any major sport was in 1988, when the Dodgers won the World Series and the Lakers won the NBA championship.

In a usually Balkanized city, the same euphoria erupted from Westside to Eastside, in house parties and bar throngs, from busboys and patrons, cabbies and fares.

In Westwood seconds after the game-ending buzzer announcing the Lakers’ championship victory over Indiana, bar doors were flung open, people burst into the streets, car horns began honking and shouts of “Whoa, yeah!” and “Kobe rules!” echoed off the storefronts. “Boy, this town is going to party tonight!” said Ivan Arnold, a 26-year-old dot-commer among a pack of howling, dancing fans streaming out of the Westwood Brewing Company. “It’s electric--can’t you feel it?”

You could hear it. From a parking garage at Los Angeles International Airport, cheers and honking echoed through the cavernous levels at the moment of the win.

In a Hollywood home, a group of emigres from Bangladesh--longtime friends--cheered in front of their TV. “I feel like I win the jackpot! I love Lakers!” said Yasin Hoque, 34, who had never even seen basketball until he arrived here 10 years ago from Bangladesh. Now, pictures of Shaq adorn one of the Mobil stations he manages.

“He always comes to my station at Westwood and Olympic. He’s a great guy, Shaq.”

For a moment, Los Angeles stood still. The West Hollywood City Council stopped all business for the last five minutes of the game--then scrambled to pass an emergency resolution congratulating the Lakers, hoping to be the first U.S. city to do so.

A 12-Year Wait

Outside Staples Center, people climbed light poles and tore down street signs and stop signs and waved them in jubilation.

“We waited 12 years for this. It was one of the best games in the NBA! I love this game!” said Daniel Huerta, 20, of San Fernando.

Around him a surging crowd estimated by police at 3,000 held an impromptu party after seeing the game on a giant screen outside the arena. They came with babies, lawn chairs, bullhorns and beer. Victory sent them into screams of happiness. Fireworks exploded and helicopters swarmed overhead.

Dale Gardener, 37, from South-Central, turned to look at a screen with Shaq’s huge mug on it. “Big man finally got a ring!” Gardener said.

At the Townhouse, a restaurant and bar in Inglewood with 10 television sets tuned to the Laker game, the crowd brought Laker flags, banners, and towels to wave as they hooted and hollered through the game.

On the Westside, at the Sports Club/LA, a bank of television screens suspended from the ceiling let exercisers cum Laker fans exhort the team onward.

“C’mon, Kobe! Get it! Get it!” yelled Kimberly King, a personal shopper at Neiman-Marcus, as Kobe Bryant struggled to grab a rebound and King struggled to keep her Reeboks on the Stairmaster pedals.

“Wherever you go, you can smell the excitement, you can see the banners--it’s nothing but Lakers. Everywhere you go, you can see that yellow jersey,” said her friend, Mohammad Shamim Hossain, 35.

It’s been that way all week.

For the duration of the series, Staples Center’s marquee had blinked like a lighthouse beacon in a foggy port: GO LAKERS! Above the traffic of the Santa Monica and Harbor freeways, it proclaimed the sentiment surging through every neighborhood, as the Los Angeles Lakers powered through the NBA finals against the Indiana Pacers.

“There’s a kind of irony that a winning team still does give a sense of community, when people know the owners would just as soon take the team elsewhere if they could make more money,” said USC sociologist Michael Messner. “There’s still some sense of ‘us’ there.”

In the past week, you could drive down any block and glimpse through windows the flickering TV images of arms and legs and fast breaks. Between sets of biceps curls, gym rats watched in exercise clubs. Between parking cars, garage attendants huddled around tiny black-and-white screens. In a doctors lounge at Torrance Memorial Hospital, surgeons in scrubs high-fived each other after a great shot by Bryant.

When the Lakers played in Indianapolis Friday, Staples Center showed the games on a colossal TV screen, turning itself into a giant rec room with beer for sale. The 20,000 free tickets were gobbled up in eight minutes.

Whether you measure your city by morals or infrastructure, there hasn’t been much in Los Angeles to cheer lately. With an ugly police scandal still unfolding and downtown streets ripped up to install brick walkways and fiber optic cables, Los Angeles has been a grim place.

Suddenly, the Lakers have injected an old-fashioned shot of civic pride into the city and provided a cross-cultural, multiethnic, economically varied point of reference--drama in fact--for all to share. Laker chat drifts through banks and restaurants, the Westside and the Eastside. In a Huntington Park carry-out, a conversation in Spanish is peppered with the universally understood words “Kobe” and “Shaq.”

It’s a city starved for a team it can wrap itself around. The football team is gone. The Dodgers were sold to out-of-towners. The Lakers’ championship--something they haven’t achieved since 1988--may inspire people to do more than paint their faces in the team’s colors. They may paint their houses purple and gold.

Once the NBA finals began, people started rushing to their TV sets. Supermarkets suddenly emptied, except for the rushed straggler buying beer. Generally, in Los Angeles, this kind of attention is saved for natural disasters and bizarre crime stories. Angelenos have not stopped everything to watch TV so raptly since the slow-speed pursuit of O.J. Simpson’s Ford Bronco, six years ago last weekend.

The Lakers’ championship bid even had a calming effect in at least one instance. At the Pitchess Detention Center in Castaic, where factions of Latinos and blacks have sparred numerous times over the past several months, the Lakers run eased tensions. Inmates who start trouble could lose their TV privileges.

“They seem to put aside their differences when there is a Lakers game,” said Sheriff’s Cmdr. Steve Day. “When they have a mutual interest, things are fine. We haven’t had any problems when the games are on.”

Good for Business

Fans were undaunted by the Lakers’ 33-point loss in Indianapolis in Game 5. Some even guiltily wished for that loss so the Lakers could come home to win.

“I want them to bring it back to Staples Center so they can blow it out on the home court,” Henry Cortez, 20, of El Sereno, had said Friday night after watching the Lakers lose.

He got his wish. Alas, Leon Lewis, the manager of the Townhouse in Inglewood did not. He wanted the Lakers to lose Monday night. “I want them to win eventually,” he said just hours before the final game. “But it’s good for business if they lose tonight. Then I get everyone again on Wednesday night.”

And sweet as this sense of city unity is, it’s fleeting, most observers say. Darnell Hunt, a USC sociologist who studies race and the media, said, “These events distract us and do allow us to return to things we have in common--momentarily. But they don’t solve the underlying problems.”

No doubt thousands of fans will put off thinking about that until after the parade.

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Times staff writers Mitchell Landsberg, Jeffrey Gettleman, Jaimee Rose, Sue Fox, Soraya Nelson, Greg Risling, Kristina Sauerwein, Jeffrey Rabin, Bobby Cuza and David Haldane contributed to this story.