Curious Times in Southeast L.A.

by Gary Phillips

Garnering scant attention during this past low turnout election, there are events unfolding in Southeast Los Angeles County apart, and damn near unknown to us here in the big City of Los Angeles. In last Thursday’s L.A. Times front section, Hector Becerra reported on the contentious city council races in Bell and Cudahy, incorporated cities in Southeast L.A. County.

A few weeks ago this article would have been in the California section. But the paper, in its ever-increasing downsizing to leverage its debt, has, as promised, shucked that section (except on Sundays). But the paper’s slow-motion demise is the stuff of other ruminations.

 Ali Saleh, a Lebanese American, was running for a council seat in Bell. Someone put his face on a campaign hit piece flyer of a man holding a sign that read: “Islam Will Dominate the World.” The flyer also included a picture of the World Trade Center towers burning during 9/11. The kicker was the admonition on the flyer to “Vote No Muslims for the City Bell Council 2009.” Saleh is a homeboy, he grew up in Bell, and he said in the Times piece he was surprised that his running would lead to an attack on his community. Maybe Saleh hasn’t been paying attention, but this was tame compared to other shenanigans that have gone down in his neck of the woods over the years.

Next door to Bell along its northern tip is the City of Vernon. Also just a few miles east literally along Vernon Avenue (which runs west to the Crenshaw District) of South Central, Vernon was where post-WWII black migrant labor came to for for good paying union jobs in heavy industry, at the likes of Bethlehem and U.S. Steel and Alcoa Aluminum. According to the official history you can find on the city’s website, twenty-seven slaughterhouses lined Vernon Avenue from Soto Street to Downey Road until the late 1960s. Though most of those concerns along what was once termed Meat Packers Row are gone, you can still find the Farmer John slaughterhouse adorned with the pig farm mural seen in films and TV shows. Said one longtime Boyle Heights resident, as reported on the city’s site, “We could smell Vernon in the evenings at our home.”

Another kind of stench emanates from Vernon as well. As Becerra and others have documented in several pieces over the years in the Times on the “Most Business Friendly City of five square miles—officially 91 residents with more than 40,000 daytime population due to the industries still there—the old boy network that runs the town isn’t what you’d call welcoming of reformers. Mayor Leonis C. Malburg was, again according to the city’s website, born in Vernon, and is the grandson of John B. Leonis, one of the three founders of the city. Mayor Malburg joined the Vernon City Council in 1956 and has served continuously ever since. He became mayor in 1974. Yep, he’s been in office for more than 50 years.

In 2006, eight interlopers moved into a commercial building in Vernon to overtly challenge the powers-that-be in upcoming city elections. As related in the Times article from then, “Business, but Not as Usual” by Robert J. Lopez, Rich Connell and Becerra, private eyes were hired by the city to shadow this crew and the electricity to their legally occupied building was turned off. City officials said the insurgents were really part of a vanguard sent in by the jailed Albert Robles, former treasurer of nearby colorful South Gate, another Southeast L.A. County enclave.

This, where city councilman Henry Gonzalez was shot in the head and survived, another political rival had his car firebombed, and, at his first trial in 2002, federal prosecutors argued that Robles threatened assemblymember Marco Firebaugh with bodily harm, as well as threatened to rape state Senator Martha Escutia and kill her husband. Robles’ lawyers argued this was merely the kind of tough talk that went on in South Gate politics. The jury deadlocked in that trial, but Robles was subsequently convicted in 2004 of 30 counts of bribery, money laundering, and the interesting charge of depriving the electorate. He was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison and ordered to pay the city of South Gate $639,000 in restitution.

Evoking the specter of the Robles Boogey Man was a catch-all excuse, and the Vernon City Council cancelled the elections, but still managed to re-elect themselves. A Superior Court judged ruled that the City had acted improperly, and an investigation was launched by the D.A. Yet the beaming face of Mayor Malburg still greets you on the City of Vernon’s website.

There are of course efforts by civic-minded citizens, church groups, and honest pols in these mostly Latino cites of southeast Los Angeles to clean up their towns via the ballot box and public policy actions. Grassroots organizations like Communities for a Better Environment are organizing residents in the area and have achieved several victories over the years. Recently CBE has embarked on a campaign to oppose Vernon building a 943-megawatt fossil-fuel-burning power plant less than a mile from several schools and residential neighborhoods. The plant is projected to emit 881 tons of pollution each year.

But changes won’t come easy. Not when you have cities like the one-square-mile Hawaiian Gardens down near Long Beach. According to sources such as the Progressive Jewish Alliance, Irving Moskowitz, a retired doctor and real estate magnate living in Miami, has funded the construction of housing for Jews in densely populated areas of Arab east Jerusalem. These houses, the PJA states, are literally an obstacle to peace. Much of Moskowitz's financial support for his homes for hardliners comes from his gaming operations in Hawaiian Gardens. He brought in $37 million in 2006, keeping the local economy afloat by partially drawing in low wage workers hoping for the big score. In 2008, the Irving Moskowitz Foundation opened the 24,000 square foot Hawaiian Gardens Bingo Club, seating 800, and expected to attract players from all over.

No, things won’t change overnight in Southeast L.A. for sure.

Gary Phillips set his short story “Swift Boats for Jesus” in the composite Southeast L.A. municipality of Bell Park in the anthology he edited, Politics Noir: Thirteen Dark Tales from the Corridors of Power (Verso, 2008).
Listen to him reading it at http://crimewav.com/?q=node&page=3.

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