A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jesse Katz's new book, "The Rent Collectors," tells the graphic true story of two botched murder attempts and the accidental killing of a baby. The book begins with a cliffhanger, read here by the author.
JESSE KATZ: (Reading) Flailing his arms, pawing at dust, Giovanni felt the scrape of chaparral. He wrapped a hand around a gnarled root. For a moment, he was suspended. Blinking away the fog, Giovanni tried to make out the road above him, too high to see. Below, the gorge looked bottomless. He touched a finger to his throat. A collar of torn flesh, pulpy and raw, branded his windpipe. That was where the rope had seared him, where his killers, before tossing him over the edge, had cinched it tight.
MARTÍNEZ: What follows is a detailed portrait of the city of Los Angeles and its treatment of Latin American immigrants and their children. The book is set in the neighborhood of Westlake, once home to movie stars and media barons. By the turn of the 21st century, it was one of the poorest and most densely populated in the region. The heart of Westlake is MacArthur Park, 35 acres of ball fields and walking paths, with a lake in the center that has the skyscrapers of Downtown Los Angeles towering over it to the east. Katz says you can see the whole of the human condition in the course of a day at MacArthur Park.
KATZ: (Reading) The sudden concentration of so many dreamers, refugees and exiles, former soldiers and onetime insurgents, made MacArthur Park feel both futuristic and primal. No other place in Los Angeles thrummed with its subversive energy or labored under the weight of so much trauma. It was the kaleidoscope that rendered every superficial trope about the city unrecognizable.
MARTÍNEZ: This park is a mile from where I grew up. I went there all the time with my grandpa until the early 1980s, when gangs took control of the neighborhood. When Katz and I met up there recently, he told me the gangs are still there.
KATZ: I think I saw MS-13 spray painted on the tree right next to us, and across the park on the Alvarado side, that's 18th Street turf.
MARTÍNEZ: In the early 2000s, immigrant vendors were an easy group to exploit. Denied access to the formal workforce, they would turn a little piece of sidewalk into employment, but they were fined by the city and harassed by police.
KATZ: And at the same time, the gang all around them see how vulnerable they are. They can't really go run to the police if they're being extorted by a gang, and so the gang started charging them rent.
MARTÍNEZ: Many paid, but one vendor, Francisco Clemente, a Mexican immigrant, refused, so in 2007, 18-year-old Giovanni Macedo was chosen to murder Clemente. Macedo was himself the son of immigrants, his childhood full of instability. By the time he was 15, he had lived at 10 different addresses.
KATZ: Giovanni wasn't part of that extortion racket. He had never encountered this vendor before. But the gang put a gun in Giovanni's hand and said, that's the man you need to go kill, and Giovanni was - I mean, he wanted that acceptance from the gang so badly that he was willing to do just, I mean, the most terrible thing we can think of.
MARTÍNEZ: Francisco Clemente survived, but one of Macedo's bullets killed a newborn baby sleeping in a stroller nearby.
KATZ: Even in the gang world, this is considered an atrocity, so Giovanni immediately suffered the consequences. His own gang lured him down to Mexico and, in the middle of the night, drove him on this, you know, windy mountain road between Tijuana and Mexicali, and they strangled him.
MARTÍNEZ: But Giovanni Macedo survived. He eventually turned himself in and confessed to the crime.
KATZ: He agreed to cooperate with the police and the prosecutors, ultimately testified against his own gang in several trials, at great risk to himself. I mean, it's kind of mind-blowing to think about this young man who rose from the dead to haunt his former gang.
MARTÍNEZ: He was sentenced to 51 years in prison and will be up for parole next year. For someone like Giovanni, I mean, is it possible for him to forgive himself first and then his victims to forgive him for what he did?
KATZ: Can a person who commits an ugly, ugly crime possibly not be an ugly person? Once you see his face and you understand something about his backstory, you know, is it possible that you might see him in a new light? He has to be able to live with the fact that he committed this terrible, terrible crime, and it takes a lot of work and a lot of healing to try to recover from that.
MARTÍNEZ: His target, Francisco Clemente, still lives with two bullets in his body, which made him eligible for a type of visa for immigrants that suffer harm and cooperate with law enforcement. He and his wife eventually got green cards. It was only because he was the victim of this gang violence that Clemente was offered a legal path to citizenship. Katz says this is just one example of the absurdity of the criminal justice and immigration systems that make up the backdrop of his book.
KATZ: Systems, institutions, are, you know, in the end, people, right? You know, they make them work. We have seen changes in our criminal justice system, I think for the better, here in California. I'm optimistic about that. I'm less optimistic about our immigration system. I think it's so clouded by partisan politics. I don't know how we get out of that.
MARTÍNEZ: Today, the streets around MacArthur Park are still filled with immigrants selling goods. In recent years, the LA City Council legalized street vending, but Katz says there still are too many restrictions.
KATZ: Rules on where you can stand and how far - how many feet from another vendor and how many inches from the curb. And, you know, I think it's great that the city has finally begun to think of vending as something that enhances the streetscape in a more, you know, pedestrian-centric way, but they still view it as a thing that needs to be contained, administered, rather than celebrated.
MARTÍNEZ: Katz says he wants to see a shift in attitude when it comes to immigrants and incarceration and poverty.
KATZ: I just hate the idea of a society divided between us and them. I think we do that at our own peril, and so I think Giovanni kind of has reaffirmed, you know, my belief and my faith that there really is just us, and there's not them.
MARTÍNEZ: The book is titled "The Rent Collectors: Exploitation, Murder, and Redemption In Immigrant LA." Jesse Katz, thanks for meeting us here at the park.
KATZ: It's been so great to be with you.
(SOUNDBITE OF DONNA SUMMER SONG, "MACARTHUR PARK") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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