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Babyfaced teen Giovanni Mercedo is desperate to find belonging in one of ELA's most predatory gangs, the Colombia Little Psychos, so desperate that he agrees to kill an undocumented Mexican street vendor. The vendor, Francisco Clemente, had been refusing to give into the gang's shakedown demands, but Giovanni botches the hit,
accidentally killing a newborn instead. The overlords who rule the Little Psychos from a supermax prison one thousand miles away must be placated, and Giovanni is lured across the border, where in turn the gang botches his killing, and so incredibly, Giovanni rises from the dead, determined to both seek redemption for his unforgivable crime and take down the gang who
drove him to do it. With the rent collectors Jesse Katz has built a teeth clenching and breathless narrative that explicates the difficult and proud lives of undocumented black market workers who are being extorted by the gangs and fined by the City of LA in other words, exploited by two sets of rent collectors. The book that we're featuring this evening is The Rent Collectors, Exploitation, Murder and Redemption in Immigrant LA with my special guest, journalist and author
Jesse Katz. Welcome to the program, Man, Thank you very much for this interview, Jesse Katz.
I'm excited to talk about The Rent Collectors with you. Dan.
Thank you so much, and congratulations on this extraordinary book, The Rent Collectors. Tell us just briefly the origins of this book project, How you came to be and wanted to be the author of The Rent Collectors.
Well, there's probably two answers to that. One begins maybe forty years ago, when I first came to LA as a young reporter working for the La Times and Leader LA magazine and finding that I was really drawn to stories about overlooked, misperceived, stigmatized parts of Los Angeles and finding stories that allowed me to explore those communities and illuminate their experiences and their struggles, and try to find
language that humanized people facing great adversity. In the early nineties, I was the gang reporter for the La Times, which was a particularly crazy time to be a gang reporter, but I practiced kind of those same principles then. And to fast forward in twenty and eleven, I moved into the MacArthur Park community, which is where this book is centered,
pretty much in the heart of Los Angeles. And although the crime that's at the center of this book had already occurred a couple of years earlier, the aftermath was still playing out in the courts, and the conditions that led to the crime. This whole ecosystem of gangs and drugs and street vendors and police and politics was right outside my window, and so it was almost impossible to ignore.
And I just became very curious, obsessed even with the story of MacArthur Park as a community and how this horrendous crime grew out of those conditions.
You write initially about the Columbia Little Psychos twenty twelve Rico trial that had alerted you to the story of Giovanni Mesito, if that's the pronunciation. But you did not make contact. You said you dithered over making contact with Giovanni, but a colleague urged you.
To do so.
Just tell us about this Rico trial before we get into this extraordinary story Giovanni Mesito's personal story as well.
Yeah, so the gang at the heart of this tale is an unusually well organized, highly sophisticated, hierarchical predatory gang. It's a click of the Eighteenth Street Gang, which has tens of thousands of members in southern California and many beyond.
And even though I tend to think of most gangs as participating in disorganized crime, kind of random opportunistic things, the Columbia little psychos where they were just they extracted everything they could from the community, and so they're they're great kind of innovation. I mean, it's an old it's an old technique, but it was applied in somewhat new ways.
Was to extort everybody in this dense immigrant, largely undocumented community in charge them, you know, quote unquote rent for the right to be out on the streets or the sidewalks. And so they would the gang wouldn't actually sell drugs itself. They would recruit drug dealers to be out on the corner, and they would charge those people rent to be out there. Every day. It could be one hundred, one hundred and fifty dollars a day for the right to sell drugs
on that street corner. There were, you know, anyone else involved in that sort of underground or illicit or gray economy, whether it was you know, people selling fake id's or people involved in you know, gypsy cabs or bootleg telephones, or gamblers or sex workers or whatever it may have been.
Everyone was paying this fee to be out and about, and at a certain point that extended to street vendors, the mom and pop entrepreneurs who were out on our sidewalks selling you know, tostadas or papoosas, or they're buying you know, batteries or diapers in bulk from a discount store and selling the piecemeal, and those people were also
being charged rent. And this this was a kind of a nefarious conspiracy that went on for years and years, and they had been targeted once by the FBI in the early two thousands, and that led to a lot of arrests and takedown of a lot of you know, bad characters. But this gang is super resilient, and those openings in the hierarchy were quickly refilled, and the FBI
went after them again. And so the particular crime that we'll talk about here in a second actually occurred against the backdrop of a two and a half year FBI investigation into the Columbia Little Psychos that was designed to dismantle the gang. That was what twelve thirteen years ago. I can assure you that the Columbia Psychos are still around, still charging rent, still doing what they've always done.
Tell us about Giovanni Mescito and his mother, Rena, and what happened to his original father and his stepfather, Juan. Just tell us about their life and their journey to Los Angeles.
Yeah, like a lot of kids drawn to gangs, you know, Giovanni lived in a very tumultuous household. In a lot of ways, the gang represented a more stable social institution, a more purposeful social institution than he had under his own roof. I do think that there's a much larger context for understanding Giovanni and his crime. I think you have to look at us foreign policy. I think you
have to look at a broken immigrant system. You have to look at schools, you have to look at municipal codes and all these other things that combine with I think an inherited trauma from his parents' lives that Giovanni grew up with. His mom was from El Salvador. She escaped the Civil War when she was eight or nine years old. She was smuggled into the US in the trunk of a car. And I just think of that moment,
you know, being a little girl. Separate the politics of it, Separate, you know, whatever your views might be on immigration, And think about a little girl who is fleeing a war torn country and has to get into the back of a stranger's car to enter her new life. That gives me anxiety just talking about it. His dad was his biological father was from Mexico, and he contracted AIDS very early on in the epidelm and died when Giovanni was
a year and a half old. His stepfather, who came into his life very early, really tried to be a father figure, but he was a bad drinker, and there was domestic violence in the home. There were mental health issues, There was extreme poverty, There was all the stuff that you know, anyone who's ever worked with gangs, whether you're in the criminal justice system or the school system or a counselor, you understand that these are the kids that are absolutely at risk for being drawn to the streets.
And I think Giovanni, you know, at a young age, you know, by age fifteen or so, just felt that his home was chaos. He was angry about things that he didn't really understand why he was angry about. And in this gang, he saw identity, he saw a purpose, he saw belonging, and ultimately, I mean this is going to sound you know, a little trite, maybe, but he
saw love. He wanted to be loved, and he definitely wanted to be loved by these older, savvier, more powerful men who were running the gang in the absence of a strong male figure under his own roof.
In school, he had a counselor that noted that he was in trouble and noted his background at home, and also his mother recognized that there was a threat of him joining a gang. So what did people try to do to intervene in the direction that it seemed that Giovanni was heading him too?
You know, I think lots of people saw the warning signs. You're right, there was a school counselor who visited and the home and talked to his mom and sort of saw her desperation. There was a gang officer from the LAPD who who tried to intervene and would sometimes pick Giovanni up from the street and rather than arresting him, would just take him home and deliver him back to
his mom. There there was a point at which his mom you know, realized that Giovanni was in a gang and was you know, being exposed to the drug trade. That she contacted the LAPD. She wanted them as I mean, what a difficult moment for a mom to essentially turn in her son, although she didn't really think she was turning him in. She she more than anything wanted the LAPD to kind of scare him straight and kind of break this cycle or slow this descent that she was witnessing.
But you know, the LAPD came to their house and rousted Giovanni out of his bed and found some crack cocaine and next thing you know, he's being hauled off to juvenile hall and you know, that's his introduction to
the criminal justice system. I'm sort of triggered by his own mom out of deep concern for him, but also not really understanding the implications of what it's going to mean for her son to be part of that system, and also the extreme danger of the gang perhaps discovering that she is interfering with, you know, their business, or at least compromising the ability of one of their new
young soldiers to assist in that business. So there's some really heartbreaking moments, and I would try to put myself in Mom's shoes, recognizing danger but feeling just utterly powerless to do anything about it.
You say, at this point, he's not a gang member, but he's trying out the uniform. He shaves his head, and he gets noticed in the neighborhood by the Eighteenth Straight or the Columbia Little Psycho's gang. So what happens in terms of this seduction and his transformation into believing that he belongs to the gang and rejects the lessons and the warnings from his mother.
Well, up to that point, Giovanni had been kind of like a skater rocker kid. He had like big spiked up hair and wore the skinny jeans and he was just skating around the community, listening to you know, metallica and red hot chili peppers and sounds quite frankly, a lot like my son when he was that age. Sure, and not that I didn't worry about him, but it didn't seem like the worst thing in the world. And there's just this moment where he realizes that this identity
isn't isn't working so well for him. And in particular, you know, a teenage boy interested in girls, and he was kind of kind of a grimy, grimy skateboarder kid, and he wanted a new look, a fresher, harder look, and that's when he shaves his head and suddenly has the creased genes and the white T shirt and he kind of puts on the uniform of the gang and he immediately gets recognized, like girls are stopping looking at him,
seeing him in this new light. And I know that sounds like kind of kind of silly, like is that really the great motivating force? Is that what turned this kid into a gang member? And I would say probably probably had a lot to do with it. I mean, was that was a very potent draw. And the gang was wary about Giovanni. They didn't really see him as
this sort of hard tough kid. And there's one gang member, you know who I quote in the book who who warned Giovanni to stay out of this, that this wasn't for him, that this wasn't a game, that this was like a really heavy racket and he wasn't cut out for it. And he just kept insisting, he kept showing up. He wanted to be recognized, he wanted to be accepted, and you know, he called it respect. He wanted to earn that respect from the gang. And eventually, you know,
he gets you know, he's there, the gang's there. They're gonna take advantage of his availability and find ways to exploit that.
Let's use this as an opportunity to stop to hear these messages. Now you talk about that he is trying out the uniform.
He is.
Attempting to impress the people in the neighborhood that are involved in the Columbia Little Psychos tell us about the tentacles of the gang itself. And you talked about rent collection. That's the title of this book, The Rent Collectors, about
that the Little Psychos. Obviously, the cocaine is their main source of income, and like you say, there are people selling cocaine on their behalf tell us about this vendor market and some of the people and characters that end up being important to this story.
Yeah, I thought. You know, even within the gang world, there was a feeling that, you know, if you're out there selling drugs like this is just the price you pay to be part of that illicit economy. If you're selling a fake ID, you can't really complain if the gang is extorting you, they want to cut of that
action' That's just how it goes. But the vendors were a more complicated equation because a lot of vendors were people from the community, and a lot of gang members had grown up with those vendors, and those vendors had looked out for them, and you know, if they were a poor, hungry kid, maybe gave them, you know, a tortilla or a mango or something, and so they were
not quite viewed as part of a nefarious economy. But some things changed in the early two thousands, and there was a big boom in bootleg CDs, and so there were some vendors who were getting access to Hollywood screeners and they were burning those and suddenly the biggest Hollywood hits were available for a five dollars CD and often available before the movie was even in theaters, and you could you could walk down the streets of the MacArthur
Park area and other communities and just see these CDs lined up on the sidewalk, usually atop a blanket or a towel. And then there were there were other people who were using the community to sell stolen merchandise, and there was a boom and stolen tools for construction workers, power tools, and so I think the gang one gang member in particular, saw this as these were not the
quote unquote you know, good mom and pop vendors. These were vendors that were taking advantage of the MacArthur Park demographic and the marketplace there, and he thought that they should pay their fair share too. So there was this decision made that they were going to expand taxation to those vendors as well, but only those vendors, not the beloved vendors. But you know, this gang is a maximalist gang.
They extract from everyone, and pretty soon it was it was hard to draw lines between which vendors you're going to tax, which ones you're not going to tax. And suddenly it was just a it was a tax on everyone. And when you combine all these taxes, from the drugs, to the IDs, to the gamblers, to the you know, the Tostata lady, the gang was bringing in close to a eighty thousand dollars a month just in tax revenue from a neighborhood that's about two miles by two miles,
maybe less, maybe it's one mile by one miles. It's a hostage stamp of a neighborhood and it was just generating literally a couple million dollars a year just in tax revenue. And so this became, like, you know, a very lucrative thing for the gang. And I should add the Columbia little psychos are they're nefarious, they're imposing this taxation system, but they're also subject to one. They answer to a higher authority, which is a prison gang, the
Mexican Mafia. And there is a Mexican Mafia member who was and still is incarcerated at Supermax Prison in Florence, Colorado, known as Puppet, and Puppet was orchestrating all this stuff out on the streets of MacArthur Park. This was his domain. And so the money that the gang was collecting from those streets, a certain percentage of that was making its
way up to this higher, more powerful gang. And so even if the Columbia Little Psychos wanted to stop, or if law enforcement was interfering with what they were doing, the Mexican mafia was not going to be content with that disruption to their revenue stream. So the money still has to keep flowing. And you know, nobody's going to sympathize with the Columbia Little Psychos for being in this bind. This is the world that they chose for themselves. But it's not as simple as just just the gang out
on the street. There's a highly organized element inside our prisons and they control those prisons. And if you think that you or maybe your homie or loved one is likely to end up in prison, they're going to have to answer to that prison gang.
Let's talk about her dues that she has to pay as a vendor. She's accepted from those fees and why her name is Shorty and her family members work on the streets in MacArthur Park. But she has been with her parents and grown up with the vending business since she was in kindergarten. You right, So tell us about this particular person that has a special status in MacArthur Park and the vending community.
At the time of the crime that we're going to get to here in just the second. This young girl, Shorty, she was fourteen years old, and she was a friend to everybody, and she triangulated these various interests that were out there on the street. Her parents were from a really remote, distant part of Guatemala up in the mountains that had suffered through terrible kind of ethnic cleansing from the Guatemalan military, and they had fled to come to the US and were making their living as vendors in
the MacArthur Park community. And so she, yes, Shorty, grew up in that world. She was out on the streets every day. She would go there after school and be there all day on weekends, and the police would stop by and chat with her and try to milk her for intelligence on what the gang was up to. And she was always nice to them and would chat with the cops and maybe throw them a tidbit without necessarily
understanding how it was going to be used. And the gang would also be chummy with her and sort of flirtatious with her and also protective, and you know, they would ask her for intelligence about what the cops were up to. And because of that role, when the gang, on the occasions that they did try to collect money from her or her family, she would make it very clear that yes, they were exempt. They had a waiver here because of their role hurdle supplying this intel and
also being a warning system for the vendors. So she was almost like a lookout when the police would come through to roust vendors. And I should add that in this time, street vending was illegal in the city of Los Angeles. It's not any longer. For decades, really, it was illegal. There was no there was no permit you could get, there was no license to vend. To sell anything on the sidewalks of LA was just against the law.
It was a misdemeanor. And so when you mentioned the title the rent collectors, the gang is a rent collector entity for sure. But in some ways the city was too. Vendors would be rougsted and sometimes harassed, and their merchandise would be seized, and a lot of times they would
be ticketed or even arrested. And suddenly the city is now collecting revenue from people who are involved in that survival economy and so Shorty would be their lookout, and she was working these various interests and found herself ultimately as a witness to this terrible crime.
You talk about an officer that's a central character in this and Edgar Hernandez, and he also not only knew Shorty, but also knew Giovanni and had seen him over the years and had stopped him many times, so he knew who he was and had been warning him as well that there was time.
To get out of this life.
And so there is a situation where a person named Tricky, a member of the Little Psychos, doesn't really trust Giovanni and thinks maybe he's a snitch and has a rumor that he's a snitch. Meanwhile, Giovanni thinks that the only reason that he might have been accused of being a snitch is because of his conversations with this police officer.
So what does happen with a member named Face and the remedy of the situation for Giovanni who desperately wants to be involved with the Columbia Little Psychos.
Yeah, so Tricky was what they call the shot caller. He had a tattoo shop. He was actually a pretty talented tattoo artist and was running a more or less legitimate business, although he was selling a crack from behind the counter as well. And that was right there in the middle of the MacArthur Park community, and that's where
Giovanni went in and got his first gang tattoo. Tricky tattooed to one and eight on Giovanni's forearms and kind of, you know, signaled his formal, you know, induction into the gang.
And I don't know if Tricky genuinely believed that Giovanni was a snitch or just became like a kind of a convenient way of trolling him, and you know, using that kind of as leverage to manipulate Giovanni, who already seemed, you know, gullible and susceptible to you know, doing whatever these older older guys wanted them to do and wanted him to do. And Tricky got kind of like a right hand man or a prince in waiting named Face.
And Face is running the taxation scheme out on the streets of MacArthur Park, making sure that the vendors are all all paying their rent. And there was this one vendor man from Mexico City named Francisco, who is just a very proud and I think courageous man who and righteous who decided he was not going to pay his rent to the gang anymore. And he stood up to the Columbia little psychos, stood there on a street corner in the summer of two thousand and seven and basically
told them to go to hell. You know, he's he does not owe them anything. These streets belong to everyone. Now. I think if Francisco could do it all over again, he probably wouldn't have chosen that moment to make his stand. But when you think about what that must have been like and how much guts it took, because he was, you know, he was making a stand not just for himself, but for all the other vendors out there who were, you know, being mistreated by this gang. And he's like,
screw you guys. And of course the gang says you have to leave. If you don't pay, you got to go. And Francisco didn't leave. He just dug in his heels and you know, this was this was not a battle that he was going to win. He you know, he only owed the gang I don't know forty or fifty dollars at that moment, but it was just a matter of principle, and the gang couldn't let it slide. Right if you let if you let Francisco off the hook and he doesn't have to pay his rent, then you're
going to lose control of this whole taxation scheme. So the gang decides tricky and then face that they're going to have to teach Francisco a lesson. But of course this is still like a low rent dispute, right if you are tricky in face, they're they're thirty or above, they're you know, this is this is old for the for the street gang world. They're not going to want to dirty their hands on something like that. So they need somebody who is gone, somebody who is expendable, and
somebody who's going to do whatever they say. And that's where Giovanni comes in. He had just turned eighteen, and they summoned him out to the street corner and they put a gun in his hands and they told him, you have a mission. And honestly, you know, I don't think anyone believes that Giovanni woke up that morning with the intention to kill somebody. I don't think he had just didn't have that. He didn't even know who Francisco was.
He wasn't part of this taxation scheme, so there was there was no beef, there was no fury, there was this was just a job. And you know, unfortunately Giovanni at that time in his life wasn't able to see Francisco's humanity. He just at that moment he was an impediment in the way of Giovanni's effort to rehabilitate himself and rise of the gang's estimation.
You write that when he is summoned, he doesn't know what he is intended to do. He maybe had some inkling, but he has handed a gun and they said, he said, what the hell is this for? And they said to shoot this vendor and he said, hell no, and they said, you know, you got to do this, And so he decided right then and there he had no choice and he was going to get it done one way or another,
over and done with. Francisco has a wife that works with him, Jessica Guzman, and also a friend that they've taken he's taken under his wing as well, named Daniella, and she had been recently pregnant. So tell us a little situation that they are in in terms of their work on the sidewalk that day.
Yeah, so you know, this is really the bargain basement level of the informal economy. Francisco is selling cheapy electronics, little earbuds or iPhone cases that he's buying in bulk and selling for a couple bucks each. He's an auto mechanic and he's got a body shop that he wants to grow into a larger business. But he's undocumented and he doesn't really have access to credit, and so he's trying to make some extra money to grow a business, which is one of the reasons why he's so frustrated
with this rent collection. He's now got a girlfriend slash wife in his life who he's just discovered is pregnant and so they have a baby coming. And then there's Jessica had a friend, a roommate named Daniella, as you mentioned, and she had just had a baby and was all on her own and was just an incredibly vulnerable person. You know, her baby, whose name was Luis an Hill. She was out there on the streets on a Saturday night when this baby was twenty three days old. And
I don't know about you, I'm a father. I would never imagine having my child newborn out on those streets under those circumstances. But Daniella did not have healthcare. Daniella did not have childcare. Daniella didn't have any sort of safety net. And she's got this, you know, newborn infant that she needs, she needs to buy diapers for, she needs to sustain this new life. And so she is out there next to Francisco and Jessica, and Giovanni marches
up to Francisco again. He doesn't know Francisco. He has to go, he has to be accompanied by another he's not actually a gang member. He is technically a rent collector who collects for the gang. To point out to Giovannie that that's Francisco, that's your target. And you know, Giovanni doesn't want to shoot the wrong person. He doesn't really want to shoot Francisco, but at least, you know, let's get this right. And so he walks up to Francisco.
He's got a twenty two caliber gun, which is pretty tiny, tiny weapon for somebody who's about to do this execution mission. And he shoots Francisco four times and hits him in the chest and in the jaw and a couple other spots. Francisco fortunately lives, he survives, He's around to this day. I've sat with Francisco in his living room on multiple occasions. This is the worst thing that's ever happened to Francisco. But he's he's he's alive, and he's functional, and it's great.
The atrocity here, I mean, and then really, one of the reasons why there is a book growing out of all these threads is that one of the bullets hits, strikes kills danielle A's baby, who's swaddled in a stroller next to Francisco. Giovanni never saw the baby, didn't discover that this had happened until a couple days later, and I think didn't even quite grasp the gravity of it. But in the gang world, where where all sorts of violence in Mayhem is is tolerated or even condoned, killing
an infant is a bridge too far. That's like a war crime. You've crossed the line and the consequences are enormous.
Let's use this as an opportunity to stop to hear these messages. Now, you say that what happens is that Giovanni runs to the crash house, from the gang where the gang is set up. Next day, Tricky is there, and you fucked up, You screwed up. And Giovanni doesn't want to believe that this baby has been killed by him. He knows he didn't intend to kill a baby, would never shoot a baby or a child. But and so
Tricky says, don't worry about it. We'll blame it on a rival gang, the Rockwood Gang, I believe, and I'll try to fix it. So he's supposed to lay low. And while Tricky vows to fix the situation, meanwhile, what do police do, what do police know?
And how do they proceed? Well, I should add here that what Giovanni doesn't understand, what he doesn't see, is that the killing of an infant has the potential to rise up to the level of that prison gang, the Mexican mafia, and they're going to be so outraged by what the Columbia Little Psychos have done that they will impose what's called a green light on that neighborhood. Just basically open season. Go, shoot, stab, whatever you want to do.
Any member of the Columbia Little Psychos, whether they're on the street and a jail and a prison, you got the green light, go go take it out on them, because they have messed up in the worst possible way. And the only way that the Columbia little psychos can remove that green light or reemp that green light is to get rid of Giovanni, and they refer to that as cleaning up their yard or taking out the trash.
And Giovanni does not just doesn't get that. He doesn't see that, he doesn't know who who who are the Mexican mafia godfather's running all of this. He just thinks that he's dirtied his hands and yeah, maybe he screwed up. Well, and when he finds out he screwed up, he's aghast, he's heartbroken, he's you know, sobbing and hyperventilating. But he still thinks that the gang will look out for him
because he did their bidding. He did what they wanted him to do, you know, he showed that he had the stones to walk up to somebody and open fire. And what the gang does is they tell him they're going to take him down to Mexico. They're going to take him to Tijuana, and they're going to hide him out until the heat dies down and it's safe to return.
And you say that they always thought he was naive, so they still believe that. And he goes down there willingly. And there are other people accompanying him on this trip, including a woman named Midget and another person named Ranger. So they go to Mexico. Tell us what happens in Mexico and in terms of when he gets some recognition that something.
Is amiss, Yeah, it's a really bizarre sequence of events in Mexico. They get there, you know, and they sort of party for twenty four hours. They take Giovanni out to the clubs, the bars, They go to a strip joint where there's a prostitute that Giovanni's interested in, and you know, it's just they're almost like throwing him a bachelor party that he'll never have. I'm not quite sure why they were doing it that way. Was it to assuage their guilt about what they were going to do
to him? Did they want him just to be kind of, if, I don't know, relaxed and off guard that this was going to turn out badly. But after a night of partying, they get back in the car and they drive on this windy mountain road called La Ruem Rosa that separates. It's about halfway between tj and Mexico, calling kind of right along the US border, and it's and it's a super dramatic cinematic spot. It's all these prehistoric rock formations and twisty roads. It really looks like another planet. It's
a rather extraordinary environment. And this is where in the middle of the night, they pull over to the side of the road and Giovanni's own homies, members of his own gang, throw a rope around his neck and strangle him and they're yanking and yank, and they're telling him, you know, motherfucker and face you know who put him
up to this shooting? Is one of those guys yanking and he in this kind of I don't know, is it a tender moment, says, you know, you were a good homie, you were a good homie that you fucked up, And it's almost like he feels bad about strangling him, which of course he doesn't, but they they yank so hard they've practically pulled Giovanni out of the front seat of the car and to the back seat and they and they feel his body go limp and they drag him out of the car and they're up on this
this cliff, you know, looking down into this huge gorge and they you know, one of them's got Giovanni by the hands and the other by the feet and they just do a heave ho over the edge and dump him down there. And this this crew of eighteenth Streeters. They drive back to la and they they report to the big homies that they've they've taken out the trash,
Giovanni's gone. Business can go back to normal, and they just wash their hands of this whole thing, and lo and behold, Giovanni wakes up on the side of that cliff. And to me, this is just this is like the part of the book that reads more like fiction than nonfiction. You know, there's this this beyond belief quality. His his neck is core up, he's he's bleeding, he's he's vomited
on himself, but internally he's basically intact. They didn't really do any now, all the damage is superficial, and you know, Giovanni wakes up and he's trying to figure out like what happened to him, Like last thing he knew he was partying with his homies, and here he is, you know, clinging to the side of a cliff, and he and he crawls out, he crawls up the cliff and to hoists himself onto the side of the road. And he's,
you know, standing there in his socks. They've stolen his shoes, and and he's and and I'm just like obsessed with that moment. Like this kid who has like risen from the dead and now has to decide what he's going to do. He's got no idea on him, he's got no money, he's got no cell phone, he's he's a hand. You know, he's done, like he's done the worst thing imaginable, and he's going to have to figure out how to
live with that. On the other hand, literally nobody knows where he is, and anyone who does know where he is thinks he's dead. So he's kind of home free in a way. He's gone off the grid in some respects.
But his mother is the person he would like to speak with. He can only remember one phone number, remarkably, and that's his girlfriend, Mehra, and so he gives her a call and wants the message to get to his mother to come and rescue him, and of course she goes out gets lost, but finally does pick him up in the desert, doesn't she.
Yeah, I mean, you know, I think this says a lot about who Giovanni was, in his level of naivete and the pressure that these older people applied on him to do their dirty work. I think somebody with more resources or more cunning might have restarted their life. You know, they would have they'd go down Baja and become a fisherman on the Sea of Cortes or something. Giovanni, what did he do? He called his mom, you know, a
truck driver brought him down into Mexicoli. He goes into a convenience store, a nice cashier lady gives him coins for a payphone, and yeah, it takes his mom a while to come down there. She comes down with Giovanni's girlfriend, Mara, and now what do you do? What do you where do you go? I mean, he probably should have talked to a lawyer and weighed his options and proceeded in a way that would serve his interests and also serve justice.
But they were scared. They had to think on the fly, and he ends up getting on a greyhound bus with his girlfriend and they end up in Utah and girlfriend has a friend there. The friend's stepdad works in a
slaughterhouse and a meat processing facility. And interestingly, this facility had just been raided by immigration a few months earlier, and they had a huge workforce problem, like they needed warm bodies, and so, you know, I'm not sure that this is exactly what the what the immigration enforcers would be looking for. But there's Giovanni covered in Eighteenth Street
gang tattoos and his neck all torn up. But Giovanni is a US citizen and he can prove it, and he gets hired by this meat processing company and finds himself carving up how carcasses in a slaughterhouse for the next month and a half. Yeah, it's very, very interesting.
And then you introduce another major character, Detective David Holmes. There's, of course, the person we meet mentioned Shorty. She eventually talks to police. Eventually there's an anonymous call, there was an interview with police, but eventually she comes clean. But prosecutors and detectives know that they need more information in terms of just what she witnessed and her story, so they need somebody from the inside, and David Holmes decides
to go see Maira and talk to her. Tell us about David Holmes and what he intends to do speaking to Myra.
Well, first of all, we should credit this this gang officer, Edgar Hernandez, who knew about Myra and knew she was Giovannie's girlfriend. And he decides he's going to go to her house and just pay her a visit. Yeah, and he shows up and Myra's sister is there and she, I think, without quite realizing the circumstances, says, you know, they tried to kill Giovanni. And up to that point,
everyone just assumes Giovanni's dead. Right, Like, the police know how the green light works, They know that the kid who does this terrible crime is likely to be killed, so they almost have no expectation of ever finding Giovanni alive.
When the girlfriend's sister says they tried to kill him, suddenly, you know, light bulbs are going off and the LAPD realizes that Giovanni he's not dead, and they're able to make contact and get word to or the sister gets word to Giovanni in Utah, or through her sister to Giovanni, and next thing you know, Giovanni is calling this homicide detective David Holmes, and Holmes is right out of Central Casting.
He's in this elite homicide unit. He broad shoulders, conservative background, blonde, sandy, blond, cru cut, he's he's got the suit and tie, and he just hops on a plane straight to Utah to you know, take his man into custody. And Giovanni, I think a lot of things were going on in his head. He was grappling with the guilt of what he'd done. He also saw that the investigation into who did the shooting, who ordered the shooting, was starting to touch people that
he cared about. The police had raided his mom's house and looking for him, and his mom kind of misdirected the police, saying she didn't know where he was, when of course she did know where he was. And I think he felt that nobody should take the fall for this. He needs to man up, you know, live with the consequences of what he did. And so he tells Detective Homes that that he'll he'll turn himself in. Just don't
come barging into this house with guns blazing. He'll come out and and he does, and there's this this kind of extraordinary moment where he walks out of the house and down the driveway and there's Detective Homes and you know, he tells Giovanni to put his hands up, and he's got to, you know, frisk him and turns him around to check his waistband. And Giovanni just sort of on his own pivots and wraps his arms around Detective Homes, who you know, his instincts are like, oh my god,
here it's on. You know, I'm gonna have to take this kid down. And what Giovanni's doing is he's hugging him. He buries his face and Detectives Homes chest here's here's here's this guy who's who's reeling in his prey and and and it's going to bring Giovanni to justice. And Giovanni just he needs a hug from this, from this strong, authoritative male figure who's come to get him.
That chooses has an opportunity to stop to hear the messages. Yes, you you write that it's extraordinary and remarkable that he keeps asking will will I be able to go home? Or how much time do you think I'll be able to do? And Holmes is as elicited a confession from this person and really doesn't know how to answer this, because it doesn't look like he's going to go home
anytime soon. I mean, his stepfather advised him to come clean, but they didn't think of the ramifications of not having a lawyer to advise them before he spoke the police.
Yeah, you know Holmes, Holmes is a master interrogator. He's he plays the fatherly figure, and you know this is there some manipulation going on. Well, you know, he's trying to extract a confession while he can. On the other hand, he's also giving Giovanni a way out a terrible predicament. And you know, he tells Giovanni they're they're after the bigger fish, they're after face, they're after tricky like these are the heavyweight dudes from the gang that they're trying
to take down. And and Giovanni sees that and that's all true. But in helping Holmes make the case against those older gang members, Giovanni is, you know, hanging himself, right. He's confessing, he's he confesses that he's the trigger man and and that spot without quite realizing that maybe he's just doomed himself. And and it's it's a really heartbreaking scene. I was able to get several hours of tape of
that interrogation, and I and I recreate the dialogue. There's a whole chapter that is just the dialogue of that interrogation, and you just see him kind of you know, they've given given him just enough rope, and Holmes keeps telling him, Look, you know, good things will happen to people who tell the truth. And you know it's self serving because now he's got a case against Giovanni and these other people.
And at the same time, if Giovanni had fought this case, if he hadn't cooperated, you know, he'd be doing life without the possibility of parole. So it did create an opportunity for Giovanni to cooperate and by himself a second chance.
You also write this very interesting development as well, from somebody that got involved with the gang after being a prestigious criminal defense lawyer. So this person named coach you right, maybe we briefly talk about how he becomes involved with the Eighteenth Street Gang itself and the Columbia Little Psychos.
Very interesting, I Saul Goodman on Breaking Bad. He is a criminal defense attorney. He could probably be a whole book.
Unto himself. This was a guy who grew up tough, grew up in the gang world, and really cleaned up and turned his life around, ends up going to UCLA Law school, graduating with honors and just being like a real authentic redemption story, and gets a job with the Federal Public Defender's Office in Los Angeles at the exact time that the FBI has pursued a reco case against the Mexican Mafia, and the public Defenders recognized that a coach his name's Isaac Gehan is from that world or
was from that world, and that he would be a good person to help them connect to their clients and put on a better defense. And as coach is you know, getting to know members of the Mexican Mafia, it's almost as if the prison gang understood him better than he understood himself. And look you when you when you, let's give credit where credit is due. The Mexican Mafia does, you know, terrible things. They're a nefarious organization. And yet, man,
some of those people are really smart. They're master manipulators, they're expert their they're psychologists there they they they know what buttons to push, they know what rewards will motivate people, and they converted Coach from a defense attorney into ultimately their money launderer and eyes and ears on the street, and he became the conduit for that, the godfather at Supermac's prison in Florence, Colorado and the streets of Los Angeles, and he gets caught up in the FBI investigation and
taken down and loses his law license.
Well, we haven't mentioned, or maybe the audience doesn't realize, is that this was an ongoing FBI and LAPD investigation, and so there was surveillance and wiretops. So while this investigation is going on, there is all kinds of evidence being gathered in secret from these players that are involved in the Columbia Little Psychos.
Yeah, it's a very complex tapestry. So the LAPD is trying to solve the shooting out on the street of MacArthur Park. They're trying to figure out who killed, who shot Francisco, who killed baby Louis on him. Meanwhile, the FBI has been busy trying to unravel the entire gang and build a different kind of case, a federal case that's more about the conspiracy and the financial aspect of it and less about the crime. On the street. And it's one reason why there's a whole host of characters
in this book. And I have a legend at the beginning of the book almost like this is like one of those Russian novels where you need to keep track of who's who in what their role is in the gang hierarchy.
So you say that many of these gang members, twenty of them of the twenty seven or so, take some sort of plea agreement, and there's only a few that don't. And so we have the case of the trial that basically of the people that tried to kill Giovanni, and Giovanni obviously being a witness at that trial. So tell us what happens at that trial, and then tell us about this what all this cooperation and his attitude and even people in law enforcement trying to recommend that he
gets something less than maybe what he might get. Tell us about those efforts.
Yeah, so you know, Giovanni agrees to cooperate. He does this, you know, without an attorney advising him. Once I eventually got to know Giovanni, I wanted to, you know, grab him by the collar and say, dude, don't you watch don't you watch TV? Don't you watch the movies, don't you know you're supposed to act, ask for an attorney. And he was just so naive that he he felt that if the government appointed him an attorney, that that attorney would then tell the DA or tell the prosecutor
everything that Giovanni did. So he didn't really understand that there would be somebody who would be ethically bound to defend him and him alone, and that you know, that cost him, That cost him many, many, many years. So the upshot is that Giovanni testifies in three trials. So he testifies in the trial about the shooting that he participated in, He testifies in that federal Rico trial against
the whole organization of the gang. Testifies in one more trial when one of the people involved was captured in Mexico after four and a half years and brought back and extradited, and you know, a great risk to himself, right this gang already wanted to kill him, and now he is going into a public courtroom and testifying further against that gang. And you know, I just think of the you know, it also takes a lot of courage
on Giovanni's part. You know, Giovanni did something terrible. But there's you know, there's then there's different ways of dealing with that. You could just keep your mouth shut and be one of the bad guys forever, or you could say I've done something terrible and I'm going to do everything in my power to right this wrong. You know, I think it was really scary for Giovanni to take the witness stand, and he gave, you know, extraordinary assistance
to the government. As a result of his cooperation, he was given a prison sentence of fifty one years, and that I don't know. I'm sure there's people listening who think that he should get one hundred and fifty one years. But I'll tell you that the homicide detective who took him into custody thought that Giovanni was so cooperative and so helpful to the investigation that he should get twenty five or thirty years. But of course that person doesn't get a vote. The DA was holding all the cards
and that was the best deal. By then, Giovanni did have a lawyer, and that was the best deal they could get. Fifty one years. And you know, when you're eighteen years old, fifty one years is sounds like a life sentence. Yeah.
And what's interesting too is that there was all kinds of plea agreements from people that were in much higher positions because he was in such a low position within this gang, but really high ranking gang members got much less in terms of their plea agreement sentences.
Yeah. I mean, it really exposes the first of all the different agendas between a state prosecution and a federal prosecution. In this case, the state prosecution is all about solving the crime, and the people that participated in that crime largely got sentences of life without parole. In the federal case, where it was more about exposing the mechanics of the organization and finding ways to dismantle the enterprise, they need
more cooperation from those participants. You need cooperating witnesses to kind of pull back the curtain and expose the the mechanics of the gang. And a lot of those people cooperated and got extraordinary I think sweetheart deals. The shot caller of the gang, you know, the guy who ran everything out on the streets of MacArthur Park, he ended up cooperating with the federal government and got a twenty
four year sentence. And so the idea that the guy who wanted Francisco dead got less than half the sentence that Giovanni did. Just seemed like a kind of an extraordinary asymmetry and just a reminder that you know, when you get into the criminal justice system, expedience is often the rule, and it often beats out justice itself.
What was the legal fate of the killers of Daniello's baby?
So you know, Giovanni, the killer fifty one years face, who was out on the street that night, got a life sentence. The person who brought the gun a life sentence. The person who showed Giovanni to the vendor walked him up there, got a life sentence. Person who disposed of the gun got a life sentence. Only one person was able to negotiate their way out of that and was a kid who took the weapon from Giovanni after the crime and then passed it over to the person who
disposed of it. There were six people out there that night, which seems like a lot. Definitely a wider range of sentences in the federal case.
Very interesting that you tried to write Giovanni in and eighteen and a response came in late two and eighteen, and you were you say that he was surprised to hear anybody wanted to hear him out, to hear his story. And you say you were moved by by his willingness to open up his life, and it came with no conditions or expectations. He just wanted to show people, or to impart people, what was in his heart. So thus this book project.
Yeah, there's no way this book would exist without Giovanni's openness and bravery. I didn't know him, I didn't have any introduction to him. I had only read about his testimony in the newspaper, and I thought, I thought he was the key to everything. Here was this person who commits a crime, a terrible crime, and then who survives a terrible crime, and he could talk about both of them. You don't usually get that in one person who's able
to give a blow by blow account. So just from the I suppose, from the storytelling the true crime aspects of the book, I thought his involvement was essential. But on the deeper level, I just wanted to know, you know, who he was, and how this environment of MacArthur Park,
which has been in the news. We should add, you know, the very prominently Ice Enforcement Immigration Enforcement agents showed up in the park a couple of weeks ago with armored vehicles and on horseback and really tried to send a message of fear and intimidation to this community. You know, I wanted to know how that environment led Giovanni astray and who he was today or in the year that I wrote to him, which was seven years ago, and
who did he want to become. And I started the letter by saying, you know, I don't know you, and you don't know me, and if you want me to leave you alone, I will, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say you're not the same person today who pulled the trigger back in two thousand and seven. And if you want to talk about who you are now, who you are trying to become, I have an open mind. And that started a relationship that has spanned letter writing, phone calls, in person visits, and
it continues to this day. Giovanni has become just a really important person in my life. You know. I approached him probably a little more hands off in the beginning because he's a character in the book. He's a subject, and I need to establish some boundaries now that the book is done, and you know, he's still incarcerated, and he's still, you know, looking for ways to improve himself. I get to be more of a of an ally
and a cheerleader and a source of support. And when when Giovanni calls me up to tell me that he got a one hundred percent on a test he took, whether it was for his ged or a college class, or he got a commendation from his supervisor in the job that he does inside the facility, and he wants to share that with me, it just really it really moves me. And I get to tell him I am
so proud of you. And when I say those words to him, I sort of catch myself because you know, I've said those words to my son ten thousand times. My son's just a couple of years younger than Giovanni, and you know, I've said it so many times that he's allowed to take that for granted, right, And then I think how many times did Giovanni hear that? What were those moments when Giovanni needed a parent, a dad to say, I'm proud of you. I believe in you.
I know you can be something more than what we're seeing outside our door here. And to me, that's like the real, real tragedy of this that all the ways that adults failed Giovanni in his life, all the ways that our system failed Giovanni. You know, he he didn't ask for anything when he joined me in this project. He just really funny. People will ask him, oh, did you did you get paid for this book? Well, of course not. But he what he tells people is it's
a blessing. It's a blessing to be able to tell his story. And I'm just incredibly grateful to him for that.
Absolutely, and so are we. Thank you so much for coming on and talking about your extraordinary The Rent Collectors Exploitation, Murder and Redemption in Immigrant La. So for people that we might want to find out more about this book, do any you have a website, do any social media?
The book is summarized on my website, The Rent Collectors dot com and I'm on and Facebook and Instagram under by Jesse Katz.
Thank you so much, Jesse Katz, The Rent Collectors, Exploitation, Murder and Redemption in Immigrant La. Thank you so much for this interview, and you have a great evening, and good night.
Thank you, Dan, It's been a great pleasure. Thank you.
Good night