Chaos in the Casitas

Certain L.A. residents might get an uneasy feeling from Chalino’s, even though it is near the 77th Street police station and is licensed by the state Department of Alcohol Beverage Control. Displayed proudly on a shelf next to Jesus candles, rosary beads and a poster of a big-breasted Budweiser girl is a bust of Jesus Malverde, the Mexican “patron saint” of narcotics traffickers. Remarks one undercover federal agent who spots it, “It’s amazing that it’s so brazenly sitting at the front of the bar.”

By evening’s end, police have visited several legitimate bars and snared bar crawlers, including a wanted burglary suspect, and even a bar employee posing as a security guard.

Orly Olivier

At cruddy “nuisance” bar El Felix, a security guard peddled meth and guns.

Orly Olivier

A block from the 77th Division LAPD station, an illegal casita is hidden by a tattoo parlor.

Orly Olivier

LAPD poster of victim Rosa Garcia

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More About

• Victoria Cortes
• Rosa Garcia
• Los Angeles Police Department
• Crime and Law
• New York Crime

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Although the City Attorney’s Office has tried to stop these rough licensed bars from acting as feeders for illegal speakeasies — the city recently filed two abatement procedures against El Tiburon and El Felix Bar — casitas pop up like pimples on a teenager. Since the big June raid, Burke believes that Mexican and Guatemalan nationals, as well as the 18th Street and Florencia 13 gangs, run by the Mexican Mafia, have opened at least eight more casitas.

Jose lives with his young family on the trashed-and-neglected Hoover Street, not far from a casita that moved there from Vermont Avenue. The casita was shut down on June 25, but its owners simply reopened another one, next to a Hoover Street alternator shop. Jose says, “I never complained, because I know how [casita owners] would react.” But, “Every weekend, we would see something happening.”

So, taking an action police say is far too rare, Jose’s neighbor finally complained to LAPD.

“My friend has a van,” he explains. “It got damaged on the side. I know how they work. The bars close at 2, then they open the casitas. They would pass by my house, drunk, talking loudly, smoking and drinking around the corner. Someone started a fire in a trash can. They gave everybody a hard time for two or three months. We reported it to the police.”

Authorities responded by ordering the owner to close the new Hoover Street casita, but it will most likely reappear somewhere else, supplied with new customers by the gritty licensed bars that work in symbiosis with them. On September 11, the day after the L.A. city attorney filed nuisance-abatement procedures against the El Tiburon and El Felix bars, Sgt. Burke was parked outside El Felix with undercover officers who’d gotten a tip that nonpermitted strippers were already back, performing illegal table dances for customers for $1 a song.

In a city as big and troubled as L.A., the police and politicians are largely reliant on residents themselves to stand up and refuse to accept what is unfolding around them. In the lobby of the 77th Street police station is a poster offering a $50,000 reward for information leading to the conviction of the person who killed Rosa Garcia. In the poster, Garcia’s sunken eyes contrast starkly with her lovely face.

Leads on that case have all but dried up, except for a surveillance tape made the night she died, retrieved by police from a security camera installed years ago by Vicki’s Tacos. The video shows a nameless Latino with a measuring tape, flirting with Rosa Garcia.

Reach the writer at cpelisek@laweekly.com.