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LETTER FROM LOS ANGELES

A criminal past haunts noted park
The sentiment of the '60s melted away for MacArthur Park, said to be the turf of MS-13, a continentwide gang, writes Michael Martinez

Michael Martinez, a Tribune national correspondent based in Los Angeles

January 22, 2006

LOS ANGELES -- From the shop where she has worked for three years, Ana Vasquez has enjoyed a small view of the expansive MacArthur Park, but she has never dared to enter it.

Not even the charms of her botanica, a Latin American shop selling herbs and candles touting mystical powers, can allay her fears.

Here, in the heart of a teeming barrio, one of Los Angeles' magnificent parks--with palm trees and a lake the size of a city block--is infamously cited as the origin of public enemy Mara Salvatrucha 13.

"I never cross it," Vasquez said.

The FBI even has a task force devoted to investigating the gang, known as MS-13 for short, which in two decades has spread over an entire continent.

Gang's reach is vast

Slowly, in towns large and small, Americans and their police departments are learning the vastness of this obscurely named gang with at least 8,000 members in the United States and 40,000 in Central America and Mexico, FBI spokesman Stephen Kodak said last week. U.S. members of Mara Salvatrucha 13 are primarily immigrants from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala.

"Mara," the FBI says, means "gang" in Spanish, and "salva" means save, a reference to "the Savior," or "El Salvador." "Trucha" means "look out or beware of us," Kodak added, but conceded different interpretations exist for the gang's name. The "13" refers to a number favored by Mexican prison gangs in the U.S.

As a gateway between downtown L.A. and the more elegant stretches of grand Wilshire Boulevard, MacArthur Park doesn't look like a breeding ground for a violent gang that reportedly traffics in crack cocaine and marijuana.

Remember the song?

Some may even conjure wistful memories about the park because of the tune of the same name sung by Richard Harris in the 1960s and later by disco queen Donna Summer.

But the park was something of "a hellhole" in the late 1980s and early 1990s, said the district's councilman, Ed Reyes. It was overrun by drug dealers, prostitutes, homeless people in shanties and several Hispanic street gangs, including Mara Salvatrucha 13, he said.

The park can still be scary, especially at night, because members of MS-13 and other gangs are active there--but not to the same extent they were. And the park is hardly a no-man's-land anymore because of a police crackdown two years ago that included mounted cameras in the park and beefed-up patrols, Reyes said.

In fact, television reporters used to call Reyes during sweeps months but have stopped because sensational park homicides have dropped dramatically, an aide said.

"It's good to talk about a community turning around, man," Reyes said.

On a recent sunny afternoon, Victor Akopnik, 66, and a friend were even fishing for catfish and carp in the park's lake.

Using raw shrimp and tortilla masa as bait, Akopnik and a friend had been catching 15 to 20 fish a day as of three months ago. Last week, however, they were going home empty-handed.

`We are not afraid'

Maybe, they surmised, it was because the ducks had learned of their luck.

"Some people are afraid of this park, but we are not afraid," Akopnik said in clipped English. He's Ukrainian and a former Soviet soldier who came to the United States in 1991. "We don't have no problems."

The same went for the remarkably intrepid Carolyn Hyman, 95, who walked the two or three blocks from her senior housing high-rise to go to the bank and to take a jaunt through the park.

"They're taking the place of Al Capone," Hyman said of MS-13.

But, she says, she loves the park for "the flowers, the ferns, the scenery, the lake." The park's high edge offers a commanding view of downtown. But she wouldn't dare come near it at 3 or 4 in the morning.

"This is a wild place out here with all the crime. It's a crazy town," said Hyman, a former state civil servant who retired about 30 years ago.

Despite Hyman's leap of faith, Vasquez, 32, doesn't trust the place.

Ethnic pride is victim too

She's from El Salvador, from which Mara Salvatrucha 13 takes part of its name. When "MS-13" is pronounced in Spanish--roughly emay-essay-tresay--it amounts to a rhyme, Vasquez added.

In the Central American country, the gang is dreaded, she said.

"It has a bad reputation," she said. "I don't like it because it's my people that are responsible for the gang mess here."

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mjmartinez@tribune.com