The Rent Collectors: Exploitation, Murder, and Redemption in Immigrant LA
The Rent Collectors elevates the mundane small tragedies of life on the undocumented margins of Los Angeles into something grand and operatic. MacArthur Park is a tough neighborhood, surrounded by immigrant tenements out of the 19th century, epicenter of the crack trade, populated by Mexican vendors hustling a living selling everything from baby socks to counterfeit iPhone cases, legally in the jurisdiction of the notorious LAPD Rampart division, and practically divided up between several gangs engaged in an un-ending turf struggle.
Giovanni Macedo was a more or less ordinary kid growing up in this pressure cooker. Raised by a young single mom with her own demons and an alcoholic step-father, he was drawn, like gravity, to the comradery of the Columbia Lil Cycos, a part of the 18th Street gang affiliation. The Cycos offered the love and respect Macedo couldn’t get from his family or conventional society. All they asked was a willingness to accept brutal violence and dole it out in turn.
One of the Lil Cycos hustles was collecting protection money from vendors. One vendor, Francisco Clemente, refused to pay, and Macedo was chosen to be the triggerman to demonstrate to the neighborhood the cost of crossing the Lil Cycos. In an unlikely turn, Giovanni fucked up the hit. Clemente lived and one bullet went awry, killing a baby. The Cycos had to get rid of Giovanni, and even more incredibly, they botched the execution. Giovanni was garroted and tossed over a cliff, but he survived and with the grace of a second life, went to leave crime behind for good.
Crime, however, was not done with Giovanni. Killing a baby isn’t exactly something you can walk away from, and the Lil Cycos were already under heavy surveillance as part of an FBI RICO investigation. Giovanni’s girlfriend’s family provided a link to his new life working at a meatpacking plant in Utah. Giovanni turned state’s evidence, along with a number of Lil Cycos figures.
Like The Wire, this book turns on systems, violence, fate. Giovanni is not a bad guy, just a kid desperate for approval who did the worst thing imaginable. As of publication in 2023, he was still in jail, but he might have made parole by now. If so, I hope he’s doing okay. The array of Mexican Mafia and Lil Cycos shotcallers who siphon money out of MacArthur Park, using people like Giovanni, made off pretty okay. Mexican Mafia godfather Puppet was already in ADX Florence for the rest of his life: it’s not exactly like the police can punish him further. The guy who got hit worst, last captured and with nobody else to turn over, was rent collector Atlas. Not even a proper Lil Cyco, Atlas managed payments between vendors and the gang, pointed out Clemente for the hit, fled to Mexico, and was picked up years later. He got something like 150 years total. Another fascinating liminal character is Shorty, a teenage girl who worked as a vendor with her parents and balanced friendships with gangsters, cops, and leading a normal life.
The thing that strikes me is that unlike, say, dealing crack, street vending is barely illegal. But it is, and vendors are almost entirely undocumented immigrants, so they can’t go to the police. The blind weight of bureaucracy, with its fines and licenses and slow objectivity, becomes a live and malevolent force that can’t punish these people enough to make them go legit (also there’s no way to go legit), and also ensures they’re perfect victims.
These days, with ICE trying to create a state of siege in LA, the humanity of people like Giovanni and Clemente is even more important, even if their stories are not as orderly as we’d like.