The Gangsters of Drew Street, Glassell Park

Twice, when the Los Angeles City Council tried to install surveillance cameras on Drew Street, they quickly were shot out and stolen — both times — so the city gave up. Yet normal, law-abiding families are trying to make a stand here. On nearby Weldon Street, you can see nice houses with Nissan Pathfinders or better parked in their driveways. These families create a thin layer of civil society in an area run by the Avenues gang, which takes its name from the numbered corridors that slice across Figueroa Street several miles away in Highland Park's bustling yet economically poor shopping district.

The Avenues operates in cliques, each of which claims a gang territory based on where the members live. Gang experts say that in recent years, longtime Avenues gangsters have begun to allow tough, illegal Mexican immigrants to join their ranks, with Drew Street drawing immigrants from a rough village in Mexico's Guerrero State — an area that has a reputation for extreme lawlessness. This new mix spells disaster, says one law-enforcement official, because, "Here is one group of people who already had a tremendously lawless culture, on top of another, existing violent gang. And the synergy of the two produced what we saw the other day."

Danny Leon

Rena Kosnett

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More About

• Danny Leon
• Rocky Delgadillo
• Maria Leon
• Shootings
• New York Crime

It wasn't always this way. Developer Andrew Glassell bought a large chunk of property in northeast Los Angeles in the 1880s, building his ranch house on land that is now home to troubled Washington Irving Middle School. In the early 1900s, Glassell sold part of his property to Forest Lawn cemetery and to developers of single-family homes.

After World War II, newly arrived European, Russian and Hispanic immigrants moved into what was then a nice, quiet spot to live. But in later decades, the city allowed developers to buy up the properties and turn them into 12-to-20-unit apartment complexes. Downtown planners never dreamed what was to come.

"There was a large influx of immigrants coming into the area in the '70s," says Bradley, who owns land in the area and goes by a single name. Immigrants weren't always welcome on the hilltops of Mount Washington and nearby areas, but Drew Street was more welcoming. Unfortunately, the laid-back neighborhood had, by the 1980s, attracted drug dealers and the Mexican mafia.

MARIA LEON MOVED FROM GUERRERO State to Drew Street around 1985. The once-petite 5-foot-2-inch toughie immediately got into a brush with cops, arrested in October of 1985 for assault with a deadly weapon. As her arrests piled up, so did her births — 13 kids by four or five men. Her sons — including Jose Leon, Danny Leon, Nicolas Real, Randy Martinez, Francisco Real and Jesus Martinez — all grew up on Drew Street, and most attended Fletcher Drive Elementary and Washington Irving Middle schools.

A law-enforcement official tells the Weekly that Leon's arrests included theft in 1986; burglary in Riverside County in 1986; selling PCP and marijuana in 1992; and extortion and drug dealing in 1994.

She was finally convicted of drug felonies, in 1995 and again in 1997, and by 1998 she was one of the first Avenues gangsters supervised by the probation department under the CLEAR gang task force, which was inspired by the horrific September 1995 murder of 3-year-old Stephanie Kuhen after her parents made a wrong turn in their car and ended up in no-man's land — an alley near Division Street in Glassell Park. That same year, Leon was convicted of petty theft.

Her longest stint in prison came after a Halloween bust in 2002, when the Glendale Police Department used a search warrant to enter the longtime Leon home on Drew Street. She was arrested for narcotics sales and child endangerment after officers found automatic weapons and explosives throughout the home — where she was also raising young children.

In 2003, while she was in prison, a local man was shot to death in her front yard — an apparent drug deal gone bad. Inside the house, the cops discovered a shrine to the patron saint of narco trafficking, Jesus Malverde, a folklore hero in crime-ridden Sinaloa. Danny Leon and his half-brother, Francisco Real, were convicted of accessory to murder in the killing.

Then Maria Leon was released from state prison in 2006. One resident says the Leons and the Avenues gang are constantly outsmarting the justice system. "It is so weird — they go to jail and after a day they're out," says a resident who grew up with the Leon boys. "How can it be so soon? How can they get out of jail so fast? People who work and have a good life — they get deported."

Apartment owner Garcia echoes the sentiment, saying, "They can't own the whole neighborhood like that. It shouldn't be happening in this day and age."

Garcia has largely given up on city police and City Hall, saying a federal task force "is what is needed. Basically, it's a war zone there to a certain extent — the intelligence and the lookouts on the corners. There are federal crimes taking place in the area."

JUST OVER A YEAR AGO, police closed off a block of Drew Street with yellow crime tape, and black-and-white cruisers stood guard at the street's entrance. Locals peered out of windows from buildings scrawled with gang graffiti: Aves, Sicko, Hefty and Chuko. Avenues gang members stood in groups nearby, almost amused as City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo announced that his office had boarded up the Leon family home.