When I first moved to Long Beach in early '76, the Carter recession was well under way and jobs were scarce. After several simultaneous part-time gigs, I finally went full time as a minimum wage security guard for Fox Security. It was not a bad job, if you didn't consider the pay, anyway. I like to read and my stack of to-be-read books was large then, altho nowhere near where it is now, and most of the Fox locations only required a fraction of an hour for rounds, after which I could kick back and read all night.
One of my early gigs was at the Queen Mary, guarding an entrance ramp for the "Specialties Restaurants," one of eight on-ramps onto the Queen. I had a comfortable office and desk from which to observe the traffic. I was advised that the previous guard had been canned for demanding that the restaurant employees - mostly illegal Mexicans not about to stand up to a jefe - feed him from the high priced menu for free. Ironically, Specialties typically threw into the trash each night tray after tray of food that retailed for hundreds of dollars. However, I was a scout and absolutely refused all offers of food.
My reason for being there was to check bags of exiting employees. By then, most of the QM silver had already disappeared, but the cookware and embossed dishes were also leaving at an alarming pace, along with pretty much everything else not permanently welded in place, including several baby grand pianos and several pool tables. Pool tables are both big and enormously heavy, so how they could have walked off the ship with people constantly on watch is a good question, for which I eventually found that answer.
Meanwhile, however, I quickly learned that there was a snag to my job. The women did not want their bags checked by anyone. Nobody objected to my checking the Mexican women's bags, but when I insisted on checking the bags of the white women from the office, I was called in for a discussion by the lady who managed Specialties. She told me to just do "spot checks" of women's bags, and the cookware continued to depart.
Meanwhile, the ship in general continued to be systematically looted. Even the huge Christmas tree from the grand ballroom was stolen. My first clue as to what was going down came when I found a silver and turqouise ring in the men's room. I called the Long Beach City Guards who maintained their own presence on the ship - which was, after all, owned by the city - to turn the ring in, and requested a receipt from the guard who picked it up. I was assured that it would go to me if no one claimed it within a month.
Instead, however, a few weeks later I got a belligerent call from the Guard's office, insisting that I turn over the ring to them, and all but accusing me of stealing it. I informed them that I did not have the ring, as I had turned it over to them, but I said nothing about the receipt. The guard then began threatening me with possible jail for my alleged theft. I let this go on until he said that he would be sending someone down to meet me. When the guard arrived, I shoved the receipt in his face. He immediately called his superior, and suddenly the whole story changed. I then asked the superior when I could claim the ring. He informed me that the owner had already picked it up. Right...
Shortly thereafter, during some high-profile event at the QM, I had a long discussion with a real professional private investigator who had worked the area for many years. He filled me in on his version of the QM history. The following is my recollection of his account.
"First off," he said, "did you ever see the footage of the QM arriving in Long Beach on its final voyage? No, well, if you had, you would have seen all these little boats clustered around the QM, with fire hoses spraying all over the place. What you didn't see, because of all that spray, was the City Guards, who had travelled with the QM, throwing all kinds of valuables over the side to those boats, which belonged to City Councilmen."
"Then, there was all that expensive brass down in the engine area, worth conservatively 6 or 7 million bucks. But it got sold to a buddy of the City Council for a few hundred thousand...."
"And all those missing pool tables. They're sitting in various City Councilmen's rec rooms, along with the baby grands."
"The QM is just the latest boondoggle of the Petroleum Club that owns Long Beach and picks the City Counsel. They're always on the lookout for some way to spend money so that it ends up in their pockets, as they've got all that oil revenue..."
And, my years of future experiences did nothing whatever to dispel my impression that this is one of the most corrupt cities in the U.S.
But, getting back to the theme... After the lady in charge of Specialties pretty much undercut any authority for me to do my job, I finally asked for a different post.
I had virtually forgotten her when years later, however, I read a little news item from Puerto Rico. It seems that someone from the Puerto Rican liberation/independence radicals had bombed a major hotel in Puerto Rico, causing several deaths, I believe. Guess who the lady manager of that hotel was? People rarely change - or learn, it seems. I wonder sometimes what security disaster she presided over next?
But my tale today is more current.
At the moment, I am in the process of being evicted by a criminal gang. The property management company knows perfectly well that this gang is using their property for all kinds of nefarious activity with a blithe and total disregard for the rights of the other tenants, or the terms of their rental contract, for that matter, but they are not under threat of eviction, while I am, because I blew the whistle, after the gang began a systematic series of intimidations toward me, obviously aimed at forcing me out, as they want my units.
My guess is that this will end badly for virtually everyone. In the past, this property management company has always done whatever was cheapest in the short term. They used a nylon nut - instead of brass - on the commode high-pressure intake line in the first unit that I rented, and it cracked, and the day after the quake in '92, it disintegrated in the middle of the night, and I awoke to the entire unit flooded with about an inch of water, and all my stacked boxes of books starting to lean.
What a nightmare that was! And it was typical. The plumbing, the lights and other electrical, everything was set up to work for a few weeks, until the period during which they were responsible to fix it had ended.
However, the rent was low, and, while the management rarely lifted a finger beyond minimal maintenance, at least they also pretty much left the tenants alone, which was convenient for a lot of tenants. I had been renting unit "B," 500 square feet, carpetted industrial office, and pretty much living there, for about 40% of the cost of a small apartment in the OC, where residential rents are astronomical, which meant that I had money for books and video and computer stuff I never could have afforded otherwise.
For a while, a gay/lesbian publication (mostly lesbian) rented unit "C," and I had no trouble with them. I would hear them in the Spring dancing and singing in chorus in some kind of Wiccan rites. Once, some man-hating radical helped them move a bunch of stuff and then deliberately blocked the sidewalk as I attempted to leave on my motorcycle, obviously hoping to start a fight, but such incidents were rare.
The guy in unit "A", an illegal alien from Brazil who ground dentures for a living and liked to work in the middle of the night, who moved in a few months after me, was a problem from the start, however. He decided right away that he wanted more space, and so he began harrassing me, banging on the walls all hours of the night, installing heavy grinding equipment right against our mutual wall that you could feel all through your body, and, for a short while, a huge stereo, until I threatened a suit against both him and the management company, at which point they broke with custom and intervened - but only to the extent of forcing him to forgoe the stereo. The other noise continued.
In addition, he would cut out pictures from gay men's magazines, typically of guys lying spread-eagled with huge erections. He would tear the head off of the photo and then, in the wee hours of the night, tape it to the rear of my motorcycle out on the concrete landing, for all the kids on their way to school to ponder. Nice guy... So, I lost about six months of my life, during which I was getting 4 or 5 hours of sleep per night.
However, he was one guy. He tried several times to bring in someone else as employee or partner, but no one could stand to be around him. For the next several years, each month would bring some little token of his meaness, such as my motorcycle being vandalized, or my van's tires slashed, or pounding on the front door at 5 AM, but I was so busy that I could never afford the energy to do anything about it.
After the lesbians finally left, a father/son team moved into units "C" and "D." They were really weird. Every single time I would see one of them would arrive, he would stand at the door and look all around to make sure that no one was watching before finally opening the door. Similarly on exit. I finally asked the son what their business was. He told me that they ran a "micro-brewery" in Huntington Beach and were using these units for storage.
When, after a couple years, they left, I needed more space and offered to rent units "C" and "D," which had a connnecting door between them. When I moved in and inspected the place, I found a book on hydroponics on top of the bathroom enclosure... Microbrewery... Right...
One reason for the low rents - which recently jumped by 30%, however - has been the high level of crime. On the one side of the main street is an industrial area, full of similar buildings broken up into industrial garages or offices. Auto repair and other small businesses abound. On the other side is a Mexican barrio, complete with local gang. The gang-bangers cruise through at all hours with the cars with a boom, advertising their presence and making sure that any car alarm will be turned off or ignored as their sub-woofers will invariably trigger it, and the wannabees swing through on their low-rider bicycles, ready to grab anything not nailed down. I have found stripped stolen cars in the parking lot on several occasions, and the whole area is known to be a hotbed of chop shops and meth labs, and the like. However, so far no one has reported any breakins of the rental units.
Now, however, I'm dealing with about a dozen criminals, and the management has changed. Same company, but the lady with whom I used to deal is gone since the late '90's. She at least had some degree of responsibility. The new manager lady does not.
To illustrate, right after I moved into units "C" and "D," she sent out a letter to all tenants informing us that the roof was being completely replaced, but that the work would all be done within a week and the roof would never be left uncovered. Instead, it took a solid month, and they always left the roof uncovered. One Saturday it rained and the roofers arrived in a panic. Too late, my ceiling acoustics were now stained brown. Months later, I discovered that one of my computers was missing, as well. I kept assuming that it was still packed away somewhere that I had forgotten while moving from unit "B."
I went up on the roof at one point, wondering what was taking so long. I have a background in construction, and have done some roofing decades ago. What I discovered was that most of the roof's plywood was not being replaced at all, but merely covered with new asphalt tile. However, I'm guessing from the letter as well as from asking around that someone - likely the actual owners - had been charged for a whole new roof, which is about up to par for the current management. I discovered when I left unit "B" that the whole front facade was eaten up with termites, as I found the management's carpenter plastering over a damaged area. I asked him how long he expected the facade to last with the ternmites, and he told me, "until the next earthquake maybe."
About a year ago, a new tenant took over my old unit "B." At first, he seemed like the nicest old man you could imagine. I went out of my way to be nice to him in response. Then, he began making noise, a LOT of noise, all night long. He also began parking all day long directly in front of his unit on the street, in the "No Parking Any Time" area. I certainly had no problem with this, as I considered the "No Parking" to be ridiculous. The city keeps adding more "No Parking" areas to the streets as individual businesses complain about people parking in front of them, which invariably snowballs as those people search for other parking. There was plenty of room for a parking lane there, and I had seen many people - myself included - use it for loading or unloading without any hassles. But I warned him that eventually he would get a ticket, as there was one local cop who just loved to give them out.
A couple of little things had begun to nag at my worrry spot, meanwhile. One of my neighbors was a nice enough guy who had some kind of problem. Talk with him for more than five minutes, and he would start in on some subject like "the shadow people." These are these "people" who some people, such as him, see lurking around in shadows when they're not looking that direction. They disappear whenever you look directly at them... Right... He totally believed that they were real. He also was convinced that all kinds of people - a different conspiracy every week - were using RF transmitters to control people's thoughts - locally. It was fun talking with him, however, if I was in the right mood, late at night, back from the gym or a coffeeshop. We got along fine.
His family owned a printing business and had set him up in another 500 ft. unit with a bunch of printing equipment and Macs, and so he was snug as a bug there and kept out of trouble. I knew that he could do good printing, so I asked the "nice old man" when he first moved in if he needed some new business cards, and sent him that way. I did warn him that the printer guy might come off as a little strange, but not to worry, I had known him for a couple years and he was solid, just a little strange.
So, the next time I see my friend, he's giving me these very guarded looks, and, from what he was willing to say, it was clear that the "nice old man" had implied to him that I had said he was seriously crazy.
Then there was the motorcycle that was stolen, a nearly worthless piece of junk that I paid $100 for via EBay, and that was about $50 too much. I parked it in the parking lot and put a tarp over it for a few days, and was right at the point of stripping what I wanted off it when it disappeared. I mentioned it to the "nice old man" and he alluded to his son, who collected motorcycles, he said, and had just gotten out of prison...
So, then, sure enough, he got ticketed for continuously parking in the "No Parking" zone all day long. And he confronted me about it, obviously certain that I had called the cops on him - all because I tried to warn him. Shortly after that, I picked up a second Nighthawk 650 for parts and had it parked temporarily on the dirt area between sidewalk and street (where I typically parked my running bike until I was ready to retire for the night, at which point it went up on the concrete landing in front of my door). One day, as luck would have it, I looked outside and spotted a flat-bed tow truck sitting directly opposite my unit in the middle of the street. I looked around for a towable vehicle. The only vehicles were my two bikes. When I asked the driver who he was supposed to be towing, he got very evasive and finally said that he was just waiting for the cops.
I rushed to put both bikes on my two landings at that point, and the tow driver left. Immediately, the "nice old man" strode out of unit "B," to his car, his face purple with rage, with no sign of a limp at all.
Then his gang began showing up. He had told the property management that he was leaving for an extended visit with his daughter on the East Coast, I discovered later. Instead, some truly wierd people began appearing.
The first one that I noticed was this skinny, rangy, blond woman. I noticed her old beat-up van first, because it was parked permanently at the entrance to the rear parking lot. It clearly looked as though someone was living in it. A couple of times I glanced at it just in time to see the rear window curtain hastily drawn closed from the inside. Then, late one night I went back into the parking lot for some reason and spotted her. She was down on all fours, hiding behind another vehicle, obviously spying on the various late night businesses with their parking lot roll-up entrances open. As I watched, she scuttled like a crab, on hands and feet, from spy position to spy position.
I still have not a clue as to what she was trying to spot. However, soon she became much more open in her forays, and I began to see her talking to various workers or businesspeople in the parking lot at all hours of day or night. She moved in quick energetic jerks and lunges and twitches, of a kind that I tend to associate with long-term methamphetamine users, and she had the loose knees and hollow cheeks - the drawn look of face and sinew - that long use of speed will get you, as it literally burns up your body, crisping the joints first and then the brain.
I still had associated her with the old man, but that came soon. One night, around midnight, he started up some kind of heavy grinding equipment that I could feel all the way through my teeth. There was no way that I would be able to get any work done, much less sleep, with that growling, subterranean din vibrating the floor and every metal shelf resting upon it. I could not even hear NPR on my own radio. He, of course, knew that I was in, as my bike was out front and my lights were on. And there was no possible way that he could not appreciate what the vibration he was generating must be doing on my side of the wall. The lease agreement also clearly stipulated that tenants were not allowed to generate loud or disturbing noises in their units. And, I had already informed him of my objections to loud noise from his unit, when it was many decibels below this horror.
So, I banged on his door - LOUD! - and threatened him with a lawsuit when he timorously stuck his head out.
I noticed two things as this went down. First, within seconds of my banging on the door, the blond woman was loping around the corner of the parking lot entrance where she always parked her van, a good 200 feet distant, carrying what appeared to be a cell phone. The old man was also holding a cell phone. So, she was his lookout/bodyguard.
But not the only one. Soon, I began noticing other new people lurking about the area. A tall rangy blond guy with "prison" written large on his dour, rigid, burned-out expression began appearing regularly, usually in conjunction with the blond woman, who never seemed to leave the premises. Other guys began arriving, some apparently on foot or bicycle, others in pickup trucks. Often they would be loaded with computer monitors or other office equipment, but almost anything could be delivered to unit B, and at any hour of day or night, at least until about 7AM, when the gang usually crashed.
Most of the men were caucasian, but a couple were Hispanic and two others were black. I would spot them at all hours, simply sitting in their vehicles in the parking lot, watching. The younger Hispanic, however, I started seeing regularly on the landing of unit B, where he would wait, cellphone in hand, for cars to pull up, pick him up, drive around the parking lot and back out onto the street, and then, 90 seconds or so later, drop him off again at the same location.
Meanwhile, on occasion I would see blondie actually driving her wreck of a van. Once I happened to be in the lot when she drove in and began unloading a whole van-full of large computer monitors. She lined them up on the curb. But then it started to rain, just a little sprinkle. So, she grabbed a piece of scrap cardboard from the trash and laid it on top of three of the monitors. Then she loaded two onto a hand truck and headed for unit B. I was talking with a friend at the time, and our talk lasted for the next thirty minutes or so, during which she never came back for the other monitors, most of which were unprotected from the now drizzle.
In fact, in a style that remained consistent for the next year, she simply abandoned the other monitors and left them in a row, six or eight of them, only three of which had any protection from the rain. I figured she must have some recycling thing going on, but no, the management ended up picking up the monitors a month or so later, and they somehow decided that I must have left them there. Right... on my motorcycle...
However, it was easier to blame me than the gang. After witnessing numerous similar incidents, having my own sleep and peace of mind destroyed on a daily basis, and becoming increasingly aware that these people were seriously strange, I finally complained to the property management. Their response was to inform me that I could no longer keep my two motorcycles on my two respective concrete landings. They did nothing about the gang in unit B, except to allegedly call the cops about my reports of apparent drug dealing out of the unit. I personally did not care what they bought or sold, so long as they were quiet and peaceful about it and didn't disrupt my life, but I doubt that this utopian vision was within the realm of the possible for these people.
Around that time, I concluded that it was time to take a stand. The daily intimidations, the loud noise at all hours of the night, the trash everywhere, etc. were seriously wearing me down.
To be continued....