MacArthur Park

by Jesse Katz The Rent Collectors: Exploitation, Murder, and Redemption in Immigrant LA checks off a lot of boxes: undocumented immigration, out-of-control population density, acquiescent/sympathetic law enforcement, gang wars, and lots of crime. In that sense, it is a compelling anthropological search for the core of Los Angeles’s urban tinderbox. But at its core, the book is something more intimate: a heartbreakingly human and universal story about loneliness and the sometimes pathological need to belong and find community.

In this ambitious account of a 2007 murder in MacArthur Park, Katz – a collaborator on Alta Journal and a former staff writer at the Los Angeles Times And Los Angeles magazine – has written an epic and essential story about a side of Southern California that many of us have been conditioned to avert our eyes from. Katz juggles a number of storylines and finds a rhythmic groove that connects these disparate elements while stripping each to its essence, revealing the battle in many of its modes. At its center is a young man named Giovanni Macedo, who was conceived in a MacArthur Park apartment in 1988, and the extreme measures he takes to find meaning in his life.

If The rent collectors Begins, Giovanni is still around, a teenager living with two siblings and their mother, an overworked undocumented immigrant who has little energy to provide the attention her children crave. Giovanni observes the sidewalks of MacArthur Park where immigrant vendors sell goods to feed and house their families. It’s a community that has seen better days, characterized by flophouses and desperation and known for its abundance of crack cocaine and fake IDs. “No other place in Los Angeles,” Katz reports, “roared with his subversive energy or suffered under the weight of so much trauma.”

Giovanni also tracks down the Columbia Lil Cycos, the street gang that controls the neighborhood. The Cycos are members of the 18th Street Gang, a conglomerate that covered many parts of the city at the time. Katz quotes LAPD officer Edgar Hernandez on the extent of his influence: “Just like McDonald’s or Starbucks,” says Hernandez. A gangster named Oso leads the crew on the streets, while inside the prison system Puppet, a leader of the Mexican mafia, pulls the strings.

The Cycos are the tainted sun through which Giovanni’s story is illuminated, and Katz meticulously makes room for the complexity of everyone, including the gang members, who are both brutal and lovable, professional monsters with varying degrees of humanity when they’re off the clock. They chose this path, but Katz insists that gang life is a viable option because there are so few others. This is at least partly due to the systematic failure of state and local leaders to find real solutions to the problems facing immigrant populations.

One way the Cycos exercise their authority is by scaring off the mostly undocumented sellers, many of whom view the fees for their patch of sidewalk as the price of doing business. It’s easy money for the gang, often bringing in $25,000 to $50,000 a week.

Giovanni sees the gang as his gateway to a better life. As an initiation, he is ordered to kill a salesman who does not want to pay. “Because he soiled himself in the name of a company that flouted all checks on his power, he might finally earn what he longed for: respect. It was an easier word to say than love,” Katz explains.

But when Giovanni botches the job and kills a three-week-old baby, the Cycos turn on him. They have to make him disappear. A gangster named Tricky – embroiled in his own quest for acceptance by the Mexican mafia – believes making this call will impress Puppet.

Somehow Giovanni survives. But as he lives on the run for a short time, he begins to understand a different set of possibilities. Indeed, The rent collectorsThe most poignant moments come when the action ends and contemplation takes over. Giovanni is eventually captured and sentenced to prison, where Katz follows his evolution from insecure teenager to empathetic young adult who admits his transgressions, repairs his relationship with his mother, and wonders if he will ever get a second chance.

The rent collectors is a brilliant, beautiful collection of detective work, a deeply reported and rendered nonfiction epic that forces us to look closely at the consequences of decades of failed immigration policy, as well as the human loss it continues to leave in its wake. It is, in its way, also refreshing and not desperate, a heartbreaking gut punch of a book that leads inevitably to Giovanni’s redemption – which, as it turns out, is damn close to a truly happy ending.

THE RENT COLLECTORSBY JESSE KATZ

Erik Himmelsbach-Weinstein is communications director for the California Native Vote Project. He spent more than five years as senior director of video for sports and feature films for the Los Angeles Times and worked as an editor at Play, Reader from Los AngelesAnd Orange Coast. His work as a documentary writer-producer has appeared on VH1, ESPN, the Food Network and NBC.