Todo Se Paga
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Riverside, California
FEBRUARY 1979
The feud between the Ahumadas and the Lozanos, everyone agrees, began late one night in January of 1964, when John Ahumada, Sr., was beaten so badly that slivers of his skull were driven into his brain. It happened in Casa Blanca. Technically, Casa Blanca is a section of Riverside, California, a county seat sixty miles east of Los Angeles; spiritually, Casa Blanca is unto itself. Before the Second World War, when Riverside was still a quiet trading center for citrus growers, Casa Blanca had been isolated from the rest of the town for half a century—a square-mile patch cut out of acre upon acre of orange groves. Mexican farmworkers who settled on the east side of Riverside, close to downtown, gradually learned to deal with Anglos and blacks and the city authorities; Casa Blanca remained something close to a rural Mexican village. In 1949, it had only two paved streets. In the years after the war, the citrus-packing sheds where many Casa Blanca men had worked closed or burned down. A double-lane deposited a strip of automobile dealerships next to one corner of Casa Blanca. Over the objections of many Casa Blanca residents, the local grade school—“the Mexican consulate,” one former resident calls it—was closed as part of a citywide integration plan. Eventually, rising real-estate prices and increased industry in Orange County, the sprawl southeast of Los Angeles, began to turn Riverside into a bedroom community for what had itself been a bedroom community—replacing the orange groves near one border of Casa Blanca with a middle-class housing development called Woodhaven. Still, Casa Blanca retained a feeling of being rural. Still, Casa Blanca remained unto itself—a place where uninvited strangers were challenged. Having never expected concern or justice from the outside, Casa Blanca remained a place that took care of its own territory and its own problems and its own feuds.
John Ahumada had been having some drinks with John Hernandez, whose wife was a Lozano. They had apparently been friendly enough in El Flamingo, where the drinking started, but some angry words were exchanged at the Casa Blanca Café, where they found themselves about one-thirty in the morning. Hernandez and Ahumada walked across the street to a parking lot next to the railroad tracks that form one boundary of Casa Blanca. They were joined eventually by two of Hernandez’s brothers-in-law who lived nearby, Marcos and Roman Lozano—carrying tire irons, according to one account, or perhaps a part from a commercial ice-cream mixer. John Ahumada ended up in the hospital, on the critical list. Roman and Marcos Lozano ended up in court, where, contrary to the Casa Blanca tradition of not cooperating with outside authorities, John Ahumada testified against them. They were sent to prison for assault with a deadly weapon. Although everyone agrees that the fight across from the Casa Blanca Café was the beginning of the feud, it is not clear which family was left with a wrong to avenge. Was it the Ahumadas, one of whom had been beaten so savagely that his arm was partly paralyzed and his speech remained slurred? Or was it the Lozanos, two of whom served time in state prison because an Ahumada had broken the code that required Casa Blanca people to settle their arguments in Casa Blanca?
—
For twelve years after Roman and Marcos Lozano were sent to state prison, there were no incidents between the Lozanos and the Ahumadas violent enough to come to the attention of the police. In Casa Blanca, the explanation normally offered for that hiatus is simple: the next generation of Lozanos and Ahumadas, children at the time of the fight across from the bar, needed a dozen years to grow old enough to kill each other. In the meantime, there were some school-yard fistfights. Apparently, Johnny Lozano Hernandez would tell Johnny Ahumada that his father was a snitch, and a fight would start. Words would pass between Richard Lozano and Danny Ahumada, Johnny’s younger brother, and another fight would start. “The seeds were there,” someone who knew both families said recently. “All they had to do was scrape the earth a little bit.”
In those years, the most ferocious battles engaged in by the young men of Casa Blanca pitted them against the young men of some other barrio rather than against each other—Casa Blanca fighting people from the east side who had dared to drive into the neighborhood in force, Casa Blanca fighting a crowd from Corona or Rubidoux because someone had stared too long at a Casa Blanca girl. When Casa Blanca was not fighting another barrio, it was often fighting the police.
There were a few years, beginning in the late sixties, when almost any Mexican barrio in Southern California was dangerous territory for Anglo police. For those years, when confrontation was part of what seemed to be a unified movement for the betterment of La Raza, gang members were transformed into Brown Berets, street toughs began thinking of themselves as Chicano militants, and juvenile offenders learned to refer to the rest of the world as “the Anglo-dominant society” instead of “paddies.” In the words of one former Casa Blanca Brown Beret, “We were rebels without a cause who became rebels with a cause.”
Even when the movement evaporated, though, hostility toward the police remained in Casa Blanca, fed by the hostility toward outsiders that had existed for decades. Riverside police cruisers were able to drive peacefully through the Mexican or black neighborhoods of the east side, but a policeman driving into Casa Blanca at night could consider himself fortunate to be met by a beer bottle instead of a rifle shot. One night in August of 1975, in a cornfield on the edge of Casa Blanca, sniping and harassment broke into what amounted to open warfare. Five people were wounded. Two young men from Casa Blanca—Danny Ahumada and Larry Romero, a member of a family close to the Ahumadas—were arrested for shooting at a police officer. “Casa Blanca had a reputation for sticking together,” a young man who grew up fighting there said not long ago. “Even if we had problems, we’d never think of killing each other.”
They started killing each other on Christmas 1976. Richard Lozano and a cousin who was visiting from Arizona, Gilbert Lozano Sanchez, were shot at from a passing car. Lozano was not hit; Sanchez was killed. By the spring of 1978, when James Richardson, a young courthouse reporter for Riverside’s Press-Enterprise, pieced together court and police records to construct a chronology of the violence that the Lozanos and the Ahumadas had visited upon each other, three people had been killed, two people had been crippled, and any number of people had been sideswiped or shot at. Richard Lozano has been killed since then. Most of the shootings have been carried out with a sudden, dramatic ferocity. Danny Ahumada was grabbed by the hair and shot twice in the head point-blank with a .22-caliber pistol—an attack he somehow survived, although he was even more seriously disabled than his father. Johnny Lozano Hernandez was shot down before a dozen witnesses after a dispute during which, according to Johnny Ahumada, “he began to tell me my brother was a snitch, my brother was a dog.” Ruben (Redeye) Romero—who, along with Johnny Ahumada, had been tried but acquitted in Johnny Hernandez’s death—was killed at a Casa Blanca filling station by three young gunmen who shot him, knelt at his body, crossed themselves, and shot him again at point-blank range. When Richard Lozano was killed, seven weeks later, his uncle Raul Lozano, who had been tried but not convicted in the shooting of Danny Ahumada, was seen smearing the blood of his fallen nephew on his hand and tasting it, presumably as a symbol of vengeance owed.
—
The feud between the Lozanos and the Ahumadas lacks symmetry. There are family members who are not involved. John Lozano, the father of the recently murdered Richard, claims that he still has a friendly hello for John Ahumada, Sr., when they meet in Casa Blanca. Even those who are involved seem to go along for weeks, or even months, without retaliation. Most of the encounters that end in death or serious injury seem mere chance—a moment when someone is caught alone or when someone makes an insulting remark. “They’re in no hurry,” a man familiar with Mexican American neighborhoods in Southern California explained not long ago. “In the barrio, people say, ‘Todo se paga.’ ” Everything is paid.
In the barrio, the brutal simplicity ordinarily associated with a blood feud—an eye for an eye—is
complicated by the element of pride. “You killed my brother, so I will kill your brother” sometimes seems to become “You killed my brother and that makes you think you are stronger than we are and can look down on us, so, to show that’s not true, I will kill your brother.” When Roman Lozano was asked recently why the feud had started again in 1976, he said, “They knew their dad was a snitch, and they had an uncle who was a homosexual. They had to prove that they were manly.” People on both sides have complained of having their houses fired on from passing cars, but they complain even more bitterly of having carloads of their enemies drive by and throw kisses as a gesture of contempt. One of Johnny Ahumada’s theories about the origin of the seventies violence is that the Lozanos were jealous because only Danny Ahumada and Larry Romero were singled out after the 1975 cornfield melee for having shot at the police. “They want to prove their heart,” Johnny says. “They don’t want to lose their pride. That’s what makes them revengeful.”
—
There are people in Riverside who believe that the violence between the Ahumadas and the Lozanos no longer has anything to do with the 1964 assault. “It’s not like the Hatfields and the McCoys,” a man who grew up in Casa Blanca said recently. “The underlying motive is drugs.” Marcos and John Lozano have both been convicted on serious heroin charges at one time or another. There are people in Riverside who say that some of the younger Ahumadas—or their allies, the Romeros—may have pushed into Lozano drug-dealing territory while the Lozanos were in prison. There are people in Riverside who say that the argument between the two families is actually an argument between the two Mexican prison gangs that have emerged in California in the past several years—the Mexican Mafia and Nuestra Familia—one of which is supposedly challenging the other over control of drugs in Casa Blanca.
In the barrio, it is common to hear drugs offered as an underlying motive for any excess in violence or wealth. Members of the vice-and-narcotics squad in Riverside tend not to be believers in the drug-war theory. Redeye Romero, who is sometimes described as a “hardcore biker,” was, like a lot of hardcore bikers, suspected of being a bagman in the heroin trade, but he was not thought to be in a position to challenge anybody for control of serious drug traffic. The only drug charge ever brought against an Ahumada was made when Danny was shot: the policemen who took charge of his clothing reported finding twelve balloons of heroin in the trousers. An investigator for the Riverside County District Attorney’s Office who serves on a state task force dealing with prison gangs says that neither gang had anything to do with the shootings in Casa Blanca or control of the drug traffic there. He says, in fact, that Nuestra Familia conducted its own investigation to make certain that the death of Johnny Lozano Hernandez, apparently a Nuestra Familia member, had been strictly a private affair. “If it’s true,” a Casa Blanca native said recently of the theory that competing gangs are involved, “it’s just one more reason for hating each other.”
—
Mary Ahumada, the wife of the original victim, sometimes speaks of the Ahumadas as respectable citizens who have somehow found themselves locked in a feud with criminals. When she was informed recently that her son Danny might be sent to state prison for having been caught with a stolen pistol while on probation for the drug charge and an old auto-theft conviction, she said, “My boys were never mixed up in that sort of thing.” It is true that the Ahumadas have not served time in state prison, although they are familiar with the Riverside County Jail. Mrs. Ahumada is a handsome, loquacious woman who, as Sister Mary, runs a small evangelical congregation that specializes in teenagers who have strayed from the Lord’s path. The Lozanos sometimes speak of her as a hypocritical Holy Roller who goads her sons to violence. “People tend to pull you down,” she says. “ ‘Why doesn’t she save her own sons? Why doesn’t she save their souls?’ Yes, I’ve had remarks from police officers in the past that have been cruel.” (Sister Mary’s ministry has not been completely without effect on her sons: Johnny wore a gold cross in his lapel throughout his trial for the murder of Johnny Hernandez.) Although the Ahumadas’ ally Redeye Romero was known as a hardcore biker, he was also known as one of the founders of the Brown Berets in Casa Blanca—someone who showed up at meetings now and then as a spokesman for barrio youths. When he was killed, he was referred to in the press as a “street leader,” although he was about to go to prison for an armed-robbery conviction. Policemen in Riverside are unimpressed by the prominence of the Ahumadas and the Romeros. In fact, to some policemen, particularly Anglo policemen who are not overly concerned about the effects of heroin on Mexicans in a remote barrio, serious drug dealers have the advantage over street leaders of trying to avoid incidents that only attract the authorities to their place of business—incidents like firing on police cruisers.
Some people in Casa Blanca believe that the Riverside police are not saddened by the sight of Ahumadas and Lozanos killing and maiming each other. The police have, in fact, made a lot of arrests in the shootings, but the closest thing to a conviction has been Raul Lozano pleading nolo contendere to a charge of having been an accessory to the shooting of Danny Ahumada. When Georgie Ahumada, the younger brother of Johnny and Danny, was released without charge after having been picked up for the murder of Richard Lozano, Mary Ahumada said she had told Georgie to trust in God, but most people charged with one of the shootings have trusted in the lack of witnesses willing to testify. After Georgie Ahumada went free, the deputy district attorney who has handled all of the feud shootings said, “This is the usual situation where twenty people see the killing and all of them say, ‘I didn’t see it.’ ” Even two of Richard Lozano’s uncles who were present when he was killed declined to cooperate with the authorities. Richard’s father, John Lozano, does not seem upset that his brothers would not help to bring his son’s killer to justice. “They’re the type that don’t like to testify,” he says.
—
Some people in Casa Blanca who are not related to either family have been unable to stay out of the feud. People who witnessed shootings have had their houses fired upon, making it necessary, in some cases, for their own young men to prove that they cannot be treated as weaklings. One of the young men who is awaiting trial for the murder of Redeye Romero seems to have got involved originally because his mother became friendly with Johnny Lozano Hernandez’s mother upon moving into the neighborhood. (“They were the only ones who treated us with respect,” he says.) A young man named William DeHaro, who was shot to death last September, may have been killed simply because he remained friendly with the Lozanos after a warning to avoid them. Some people in Casa Blanca—particularly older people—seem to be able to stay out of the feud. “You don’t dare choose sides,” one of them has said. “You talk to both. You go to the funerals for both.”
Many of the Lozanos and Ahumadas and Romeros have moved out of Casa Blanca in the last year or so, partly in an effort to sleep peacefully through the night, but they return constantly. Everyone remains well armed; when the police search the house of someone involved in the feud, they invariably come up with a small arsenal. Complaining recently about some people having shot at his house the previous evening, John Lozano mentioned that he had taken the precaution of borrowing a machine gun. The Ahumadas and the Lozanos both say they would like the feud to end, but no one is optimistic that it will. A new generation is gradually growing old enough to become lethal. “You can see it in the ten-year-olds,” Johnny Ahumada said recently. “They look at you, and you can see their hatred.” Standing in the hall of the Riverside County Court House not long ago, John Lozano, who had just entered a guilty plea to possession of heroin for sale, was equally pessimistic. “I wish it would end,” he said. “I’m facing four years, and I’ll be out of the picture—which, in a way, I’m glad.”
It’s Just Too Late
* * *
Knoxville, Tennessee
MARCH 1979
Until she was sixteen, FaNee Cooper was what her parents sometimes called an ideal ch
ild. “You’d never have to correct her,” FaNee’s mother has said. In sixth grade, FaNee won a spelling contest. She played the piano and the flute. She seemed to believe what she heard every Sunday at the Beaver Dam Baptist Church about good and evil and the hereafter. FaNee was not an outgoing child. Even as a baby, she was uncomfortable when she was held and cuddled. She found it easy to tell her parents that she loved them but difficult to confide in them. Particularly compared to her sister, Kristy, a cheerful, open little girl two and a half years younger, she was reserved and introspective. The thoughts she kept to herself, though, were apparently happy thoughts. Her eighth-grade essay on Christmas—written in a remarkably neat hand—talked of the joys of helping put together toys for her little brother, Leo, Jr., and the importance of her parents’ reminder that Christmas is the birthday of Jesus.
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