Police and federal agents swarmed downtown Los Angeles’s notorious MacArthur Park Thursday afternoon to bust addicts who flock to the open-air drug market to use in broad daylight.
The California Post watched as dozens of LAPD officers and DEA agents set upon the once-proud park’s tragic turf, tackling cleanup of the eyesore that LA Mayor Karen Bass boasted about hosting viewing parties for the World Cup.
Officers immediately targeted stupefied users openly smoking fentanyl at the park’s the litter-strewn corner near Alvarado and Seventh streets, placing several in handcuffs and hauling them away as others scurried from the scene.
A crowd of onlookers at the corner broke into applause at the sight of officers flooding the park.
“I like to see law and order,” said one observer, Chuck McSorley.
LA’s top federal prosecutor, Bill Essayli, said the latest push is meant to target users themselves, after successful raids took out narco-gang leadership and major suppliers of fentanyl and methamphetamine.
“Drug use in the park is over,” he told The Post.
Stella Magallanes, a homeless woman who spends her days in MacArthur, said it’s about time the authorities cracked down on drug use.
“This whole park is out of control. This used to be my family’s park but now people are blowing some of their poison drugs in my face,” she said. “If there was a police presence here all the time it wouldn’t be that way.”
Within 40 minutes of the officers’ arrival, drug users had fled the park, leaving behind chairs, shopping carts and garbage on the ground.
Once known as the Champs-Élysées of Los Angeles, MacArthur Park dates back to the 1880s and is bisected by Wilshire Avenue. Featires include a lake, a bandshell and tennis courts.
The park fell on hard times in the 1980s as dealers and gangs moved in, with as many as 30 murders occurring there in 1990. Today it’s an epicenter for homelessness and drug use, with throngs of addicts buying fentanyl and meth there each day.
The LAPD’s Gang and Narcotics Division put the park’s dealers on notice in March, as officers arrested several leaders of the city’s notorious 18th Street Gang, which controlled drugs sales on one side of the park.
Among those busted was suspected 18th Street Gang head of operations Keiko Gonzalez, better known as “Moms,” on racketeering and murder charges.
During the monthlong investigation leading up to the dramatic bust, agents seized more than 175 pounds of meth and fentanyl, $80,000 in cash and six firearms.
The very next day, officers and FBI agents again hit the park, this time searching storefronts on Alvardo Street allegedly operating as drug dens for the 18th Street Gang’s dealers.
That night, officers recovered a garbage bag filled with cash and fentanyl from one of the drug hot spots there.
In May, DEA agents led yet another raid of the park’s deadly drug trade, with dozens of agents carrying out a series of arrests targeting the leadership of the prison-based Mexican Mafia, which supplied dope to the park’s dealers via Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel.
Wednesday’s sweep heralded another chapter in the crackdown on the drug trade. Essayli said officers will now commence regular sweeps of the park to arrest addicts who use drugs there with impunity.
“We’re actually arresting people for using drugs in the park,” said Essayli. “That’s something that hasn’t happened for a long time.”
