Evictions Cast a Pall on Holidays

Christmas cheer was in short supply at the apartment complex at 69th and Main streets known by local gang members as “The Nine.”

Impending evictions ordered by a judge as part of the city’s gang crackdown put a damper on tenants’ holiday spirit and their budgets as they scrambled to find new homes.

On Christmas Eve, the complex was mostly quiet with a few families and friends gathering inside the apartments to watch television and have dinner. Several gang members milled about in front of the complex along Main Street. Most of them wore East Coast Crips colors -- bluejeans and white T-shirts -- sat on the steps and drank beer out of paper bags. A couple of others smoked marijuana and talked sports. From time to time cars would roll past, rims shining and stereo speakers pulsing.

Earlier this month, city officials obtained a court order to close the apartment complex because of allegations that all 24 units had been connected with some gang-related activity or other crimes. Prosecutors cited dozens of sworn declarations from police officers, school officials from Mary McLeod Bethune Middle School across the street and neighbors, whose testimony is under seal for their safety.

The accounts detail shootings, assaults, thefts and drug sales occurring around the property. Gang members and law enforcement officials say the apartment complex has been an East Coast Crips hangout for 30 years. City officials will close the complex Feb. 7.

On Friday, as tenants prepared for their last Christmas at the complex, they spoke of their frustration at not being able to find other places to live. Some expressed hope that they will be leaving behind drive-by shootings and violent gang rivalries.

Gerome McCants, 54, a city custodian, said he has been looking for a new home for his family of six with no success so far.

“We pay $550 a month,” he said, sitting in his cramped living room. “It’s hard to find that kind of rent anymore.”

The McCants have lived at 69th and Main for three years. Before that they lived in a hotel for a year. And before that they rented a house until it was sold.

“We moved here out of desperation, and we’re leaving in a desperate situation,” he said. “We’re staying in a desperate situation.”

Though he doesn’t know where they will live, McCants said he will not be sorry to be leaving the apartment complex behind. He and his wife have three young children and an adult daughter, and the apartments are dangerous, he said.

Last year their teenage daughter’s boyfriend -- a member of the Crips -- became angry and shot into their house, McCants said as he showed a visitor the bullet holes in the ceiling and wall.

The boyfriend went to prison for violating a restraining order and his parole, McCants said.

This year, McCants said he had to cut back on holiday spending because the family needed money to find a new home. They lost $100 earlier this week, he said, when a rental listing service cheated him out of the payment.

“They were gone the next day,” he said.

City officials said they will offer as much as $5,000 in relocation funds to each family that has not been involved in illegal activities, but tenants said Friday they didn’t know how to find out whether they qualified.

City officials met Tuesday but have not yet decided how they will determine who is eligible for relocation assistance.

Councilwoman Jan Perry said that among the tasks for city officials will be to determine who is on the leases.

Another tenant, Andrew McFarlane, 20, said a city attorney’s office employee had already told him that he won’t qualify for assistance because police said that they chased a gang member with a marijuana joint into his apartment.

McFarlane denied that any such event had ever occurred and said he was not a gang member.

“I don’t know who to blame,” McFarlane said. “Sometimes I think I could have said something to the gang members who live in the building. Sometimes I even blame myself for being here.”

McFarlane’s live-in girlfriend, Irene Cantor, said they would have to sacrifice to be able to afford another place to stay. Cantor, 22, put off buying a Christmas tree this year, she said, until her young son began crying.

“I had to skip two of my bills to buy Christmas presents,” she said. “My phone bill and my light bill -- and that was already red.”

But if they can find another home, she said, it will be worth the trouble.

Cantor said she and her son were sitting in her living room last spring when an officer shot at a gang member standing next to her front door. The bullet pierced the steel security gate and lodged in the wooden door.

Bullet holes can be seen in the black metal gate around the property, the stairs leading to the second floor and the walls facing Main Street. Graffiti on utility boxes and stucco walls reads “ECC” and “66” and marks the territory.

A Crips gang member who identified himself as Christopher said the city was being shortsighted in closing the apartments.

“How you going to stop something that’s been going on for more than 25 years?” asked Christopher, whose arm had been bandaged for a bullet wound he suffered last week.

Christopher, just released from a four-year prison term in April on a weapons conviction, said closing the apartments would drive the gangsters to other neighborhoods.

Another Crips gang member, Emerson “Solo” Washington, 20, said he was used to the shootings in the neighborhood. He said there had been a long-running feud between the Crips, an African American gang, and Florence 13, a Latino gang. He said that black and Latino gang battles had spread throughout the region.

“Everywhere you go, there’s a race war,” he said. “Around here you got the Crips and F-13. Down in Long Beach you got the Longos and 20 Crips. In Compton you got the T-Flats and the All Blacks. They all killing each other.”