“It might as well be the AT&T of criminal enterprises”
This is what a federal prosecutor told a Los Angeles jury about the structure and resilience of the Columbia Lil Cycos, who for decades have controlled a thicket of twenty-eight fraying blocks a mile or so from LA’s skyline.
The Columbia Lil Cycos (the name comes from a side street, not the country) belong to the vast 18th Street gang, which emerged in the 1960s as Mexican and then Central American immigrants fleeing war and poverty found a toehold in LA. With as many as twenty thousand members in Southern California—and thousands more spread across at least a hundred and twenty US cities and half a dozen Latin American countries—18th Street is likely the largest gang in the United States, if not beyond.
In business terms, the Columbia Lil Cycos’ unfair advantage is density and desperation: an overcrowded, under-resourced postage stamp of turf that offered a captive consumer base for whatever they wanted to sell and a largely undocumented labor force for whichever activities they chose to extort. By the start of the twenty-first century, the Columbia Lil Cycos had turned their corner of MacArthur Park into 18th Street’s most profitable hood, maybe the most prosperous crime turf by square footage in all of Los Angeles.
La Renta
The Columbia Lil Cycos taxed everything and everyone: the drug dealers, the gamblers, the cellphone pirates, the sex workers, the false document peddlers, and, on the block of Sixth Street (between Bonnie Brae and Burlington) pictured below, the hundreds of vendedores ambulantes who set out every day to hawk whatever they could make or salvage or buy in bulk and sell at a discount. By exploiting that shadow economy, the gang collected tens of thousands of dollars a week—which is to say, millions every year in “rent.”
RICO
In 2000, federal prosecutors unsealed an indictment accusing twenty-six members of the Columbia Lil Cycos of leading a violent narcotics conspiracy, one that netted the gang about $85,000 a week in drug taxes. It was the first time that the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations laws, originally conceived to combat Mafia-related crime in the 1970s, had been used against a Los Angeles street gang. “We think it will be very difficult for them to bounce back,” the US attorney in LA said at the time.
The Columbia Lil Cycos bounced back.
While that case, USA v. Francisco Ruiz Martinez et al., was still making its way through the courts, the FBI launched a second RICO case against the Columbia Lil Cycos, USA v. Sergio Pantoja, et al., which ultimately encompassed forty-nine members and associates. It was during that second investigation, in 2007, that the gang’s extortion of a proud and defiant Sixth Street vendor turned violent, triggering the catastrophic events that form the narrative of The Rent Collectors.