South-Central L.A. Pushers Set Sights on Valley

The fatal shooting of a Los Angeles police officer in Sylmar last week illustrated how drug dealers and other criminals have moved increasingly from South-Central Los Angeles into the more profitable and less competitive San Fernando Valley, law-enforcement officials say.

“We definitely are seeing a trend in that area,” said Lt. Gary Rogness, head of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Valley Bureau Narcotics Division. “I wouldn’t want to give the picture that the drug problem is totally dominated by South-Central L.A. gangs, but it’s there and it’s consistent.”

Police officials and prosecutors in the Valley have not conducted a scientific study of the pattern, but investigators say they see evidence of the trend on the streets--mostly in gang-related drug sales but also in robberies and car thefts. Detectives in a specialized Valley undercover drug-buy unit say about 10% of the people they have arrested in the last 15 months gave South-Central home addresses.

Constant Demand

Yet they are not alarmed that the drug dealers are following market demand to the Valley and elsewhere. They say the problem is not where the sellers are coming from, but that the customers keep buying drugs.

“As long as the money is here, and the kids are buying dope, you’re going to have people from the south, the east, the west. No matter where, they’re going to come,” said Detective Tony Alvarez, commander of the Valley “buy team” that makes undercover drug arrests.

Thomas Lee Mixon, one of the two South-Central Los Angeles teen-agers charged with gunning down and killing Officer James H. Pagliotti, told police that the two came to the Valley because they believed selling “rock” cocaine here would be easier and more lucrative than selling it in South-Central Los Angeles, said Lt. William Hall.

“He said it was because there’s more money in the Valley,” said Hall, who is investigating the shooting. Pagliotti, 28, was slain last Monday night in Sylmar, allegedly during a gunfight with Mixon, 19, and a 17-year-old whose name was not disclosed because he is a juvenile.

“It’s a marketplace,” said Rogness, the Valley narcotics commander. “Whether you’re selling produce or tires or neckties, you go where the market is.”

Of about 1,800 people arrested by the Valley “buy team” since March, 1986, 184 have given police South-Central addresses, Alvarez said.

Suspects on the Move

Specialized police gang units in the Foothill and Van Nuys divisions report that about 14% of 2,500 known gang members in those areas claim to be members of gangs based in South-Central Los Angeles. They add, however, that many are transients whose residences are difficult to pinpoint.

In Foothill, 192 of the 1,518 gang members identified by arrest and informal street contact by the division’s Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums unit belong to South-Central gangs, Sgt. Tom Wilkinson said. Police say the number has increased from two years ago, when 43 were known to be members of South-Central gangs.

The Van Nuys CRASH unit has identified 990 gang members in that area. Of those, 157 claim to be members of South-Central gangs, contrasted to 27 identified by police two years ago, said Officer Chris Rowles.

Less competition from other drug dealers is one reason why South-Central dealers have moved street sales to the Valley, Rowles said. The middle-class Valley market also supports a higher price for drugs than downtown, he said.

Larry Diamond, a Los Angeles County deputy district attorney in Van Nuys, said, “Within the past couple of years, we’ve frequently seen street sales narcotics cases in which the defendants live in South-Central Los Angeles.

“Heavy dealing on the streets is a countywide problem. For all I know, there may be Valley people going to South L.A. to deal drugs.”

The influx of South-Central gang members into the Valley has roughly paralleled the nationwide rise in popularity of rock cocaine, a crystalline form of the narcotic.

Rise of Rock Cocaine

Rock, known also as “crack,” is made by heating cocaine hydrochloride with baking soda and water. It is sold at a lower unit price than its powder form and has a faster, more powerful effect.

South-Central gangs, and their affiliates and associates in the Valley, sell rock almost exclusively, whereas more established, local Valley gangs more often deal in marijuana and PCP, Wilkinson said.

Last year, South-Central gangs fixed their attention on an apartment neighborhood in Sepulveda, said Alvarez, the “buy team” commander. The gangs regularly dealt drugs in the Columbus Avenue area until pressure from police and community activists reduced the problem. “It’s getting to the point now where we think we have a handle on that thing,” Alvarez said.

Yet the demand for drugs seems unyielding. “As the Columbus area has died down, Sylmar is becoming more active,” Diamond said. “It’s sort of like a balloon--when you squeeze it in one place, it bulges out somewhere else.”

Detectives say Sylmar has qualities that make it attractive for drug sellers. Officer Jay St. John of Foothill CRASH calls it “wide open,” with lightly traveled residential streets that offer easy opportunities for drive-up sales. Nearby are three freeways, the Foothill, the Golden State and the Simi Valley, which provide quick access.

Residents of the Sylmar neighborhood at Bromont Avenue and Astoria Street had complained for the past year that drug dealers routinely entered nearby apartment and condominium complexes to peddle drugs.

Pagliotti was shot shortly after one of his partners saw the two teen-agers near that intersection and suspected they were transacting a drug deal, police said. Mixon is on parole from the California Youth Authority on a narcotics charge, and both he and the 17-year-old have been identified as gang members, authorities said.

But drug dealing is not the only crime attributed to criminals who find the Valley more lucrative than South-Central Los Angeles. For example, two teen-age South-Central residents were arrested Tuesday after they allegedly stole a Porsche at gunpoint from a couple in Woodland Hills, Detective Richard Salazar said.

$500 for Porsche

A week earlier, four other South-Central residents were stopped by officers who saw them opening garage doors in Tarzana, and one told detectives that the group came in search of a Porsche 914, for which they had been offered $500, Detective Kenneth Belt said.

Deputy Police Chief Ron Frankle, who commands two police bureaus covering the Valley and the Westside, said he would not be surprised if criminals venture beyond their own neighborhoods.

“We are a very mobile community,” Frankle said. “Suspects throughout Southern California are in cars, and the freeway system takes you in a minute from one community to the other . . . they will take the opportunities to go where the crimes can be most easily and profitably committed.”