The Daily: March 3, 2011
COVER STORY: The New Mafia: Suburban Invasion (part 1). A brutal new crime wave from Mexico is hitting America’s suburbs.
Part 1: Suburban invasion
A brutal new crime wave from Mexico is hitting America’s suburbs. Drug cartels and their heavily armed henchmen are moving into the house next door, torturing and imprisoning victims for profit in middle-class neighborhoods. Law enforcement agencies from Texas to Northern California report being overwhelmed by the surge of violence.
“Mexican drug cartels are in well over 200 cities here in the United States,” Gil Kerlikowske, the White House drug czar, told The Daily. When his boss, President Obama, meets with President Felipe Calderón of Mexico today in Washington, violence from the drug war will be at the top of the agenda.
One of the most disturbing and least discussed aspects of this new crime wave is the “drop houses” — rented homes that function as makeshift prisons where criminal gangs and human smugglers hold large numbers of victims for ransom. The phenomenon is centered in the Southwest, often in foreclosure-devastated suburbs, but is spreading across America.
“What we’re talking about is nightmares, the stuff of nightmares,” said Los Angeles-based special agent Jorge Guzman of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. ”[It’s] playing out in suburban America — playing out all over America.”
Hundreds of police reports and thousands of crime scene photographs obtained by The Daily expose a startling pattern of torture, rape and murder.
The victims are mostly illegal immigrants who have paid smugglers, or “coyotes,” to bring them across the U.S. border. But instead of letting their clients begin a new life, the cartel-connected smugglers rob them, strip them naked and pack them — sometimes by the dozens — into small bedrooms where the windows are boarded shut and the doors are padlocked from the outside.
“These coyotes treat people like product. That’s all they are to them, vicious and ruthless and don’t really care about human life,” said Lt. Joe Sousa, division commander for the human smuggling unit of the Maricopa County (Ariz.) Sheriff’s Office.
The kidnappers typically force the captives to call family members and beg for ransom payments.
“They’ll have the relative come on the phone and then they’ll torture the [captive] so the other person can hear the screams,“ Guzman said, “blood-curdling screams saying, ‘Help me, help me, help me.’ ”
If they’re lucky, the hostages will be released upon payment of their debt or rescued by police. But many remain victims indefinitely, beaten and tortured until their families pay off the debt.
“They are crimes against humanity,” Guzman said.
Sousa said he has seen victims shocked with Tasers, pistol-whipped, raped and murdered. The 14-year veteran recalls uncovering one drop house full of traumatized, naked victims and one person lying on the floor of the closet with a bullet wound in his head.
“I did not know if I was going to live another day,” said Renan Fernandez-Rivera, who survived nearly four weeks in a Phoenix drop house like the one described by Sousa. “There were four coyotes with machine guns. It was a house of torture.” There were about 16 other captives in the house with him.
Because the drop houses blend into the backdrop of suburban America, they’re difficult for law enforcement to uncover. Cartel leaders often take advantage of poor real estate markets, renting from desperate landlords willing to accept cash and ask few questions.
Still, the numbers are staggering: In Phoenix alone, investigators have uncovered more than 800 drop houses.
Federal law enforcement officials say the drop house phenomenon is spreading from the Southwest to Colorado, Kansas and Georgia.
The federal government does not track drop house locations. The Daily had to rely on statistics from local law enforcement and the courts.
Many victims never speak up, fearing their captors will make good on promises to kill them and their families if they cooperate, Guzman said. “Is that a chance you’d want to take?”
Former drop house captive Fernandez-Rivera was an exception. After being freed, he testified as a key government witness. Based on the strength of his account and other evidence, Efrem Sanchez-Plaza, Milton Guzman-Lopez, Jose Meza-Hernandez and Ulises Mora-Alcantar were indicted on felony kidnapping and extortion charges.
Fernandez-Rivera, who lives and works in southern Florida, regrets the entire journey. “I don’t recommend this to anyone,” he said. "It’s better to stay poor your whole life.”
SHEEN-POCALYPSE CONTINUES: Dude nation has a new hero, and Richard Johnson interviews Brooke Mueller’s mom.
HISTORY PAGE: What came before cute cat videos and Internet memes? Hula-hoops.
Wham-O! The Hula-Hoop takes off as a '50s fad
Two pals sell playthings that capture the world's imagination
BY BENJAMIN F. CARLSON
Before a cute cat video could spread around the Internet at the speed of thought, Arthur “Spud” Melin and Richard Knerr were engineering fads. From Frisbees to SuperBalls to Silly String, these two founders of the company Wham-O had a hand in many of the most popular toys from the 1950s onward.
Of all their inventions, none created a bigger splash than the Hula-Hoop. To this day, the hooping mania that swept the country in 1958 remains one of the most iconic toy crazes in American history. Twenty million sold in the first four months. And then, as with even the best Internet meme, the public’s infatuation subsided.
Wham-O started, as so many great California companies have, in a garage. Melin and Knerr were 20-something students at the University of California. Their first foray into the contraption business was fortuitous. While the pair were trying to sell a falcon the two had tamed, a customer offered instead to buy the meat-firing slingshot they used to train their birds. Seeing the potential for sales, they bought ads in mail-order catalogs and started filling orders for slingshots. The company’s name refers to the sound produced when a slingshot projectile hits a target.
Their big break came in the mid-‘50s, when they met a building inspector named Fred Morrison, who was selling a plastic disk-shaped throwing toy in a parking lot. The two bought the rights to his floating “Pluto Platter,” rebranded it the “Frisbee,” and sold millions throughout the 1960s.
In the long run, this toy was their most enduring success. But it was the Hula-Hoop that became a symbol for an entire era of American life. To this day, the image of poodle-skirted girls twirling plastic hoops around their waists signifies the innocent, optimistic days of the 1950s.
The initial inspiration came from Australia, where kids used bamboo hoops for exercise. Melin and Knerr took the concept, built a hollow version out of a new type of plastic, and named it after the Hawaiian hula dance. Then they hit the playgrounds. Their wives demonstrated the toy in city parks. And Wham-O workers were required to take the hoops onto planes so that fellow travelers would ask about them.
The idea of hooping wasn’t original to Melin and Knerr, or to the Australians. For millennia, people in Africa, Europe and North America looped grasses or metal into circles and twirled them around their hips, or flung them as toys. Lithe Greeks used hoops for exercise. Medieval England went bananas for hooping, resulting in an epidemic of back injuries. Native Americans were particularly creative: They used hoops as targets for harpooning and bow-firing, as toys, and as props in sacred dances.
So Melin and Knerr clearly didn’t invent hooping. But they sure did capitalize on it.
Once the Hula-Hoops went on sale in the spring of 1958 at $1.98 apiece, orders swelled into the millions in a matter of months. Every kid in America demanded one, or two, or three. In April of that year, Wham-O cut production of other items to focus on meeting the surging demand for Hula-Hoops. Twenty-five million hoops rolled off shelves, with 100 million orders coming in from overseas. The toy became so pervasive in Japan that the government banned it for fear that the lewd hula motion would inspire impure thoughts among youth. The Soviet Union, meanwhile, condemned Hula-Hoops as a sign of American decadence.
And then, just as suddenly as sales had skyrocketed, the orders stopped. By September 1958, nearly every man, woman and child in the United States who wanted a Hula-Hoop owned one. At that point, “you couldn’t give them away,” Knerr’s son Chuck told the Los Angeles Times. Wham-O was left with millions of hoops on its hands, and actually ended up taking a $10,000 loss on the product.
It wasn’t the end of Wham-O. Using the lessons they had learned from their experience with the hula hoop, together with their knack for creating cheap, addictive toys, Melin and Knerr built Wham-O to more than 1,000 employees strong. At the company’s sprawling San Gabriel, Calif., campus, in-house inventors and scientists churned out new ideas, some great, some awful. Many of their creations were defined by a single motion — the SuperBall’s frenetic bounces, the hovering flight of the Frisbee — and could be used in a variety of surprising ways, producing a “Holy cow!” reaction in both users and bystanders.
And it wasn’t the end of the Hula-Hoop, either. Wham-O’s nifty tube continued to whirl throughout the following decades. Every six or seven years, the company saw orders spike as another generation of kids discovered the toy. In the ‘80s, hooping came back as an exercise fad. Today, experimental hoopers gather at the joyfully anarchic Burning Man festival each year. Across America, there are local hooping groups, hooping cancer walks, professional “fire hoopers” and hooping exotic dancers.
The toy even inspired the 1994 movie “The Hudsucker Proxy” and the 2010 documentary “The Hooping Life,” in which a devotee says it saved him from depression: “It’s that rocking-in-the-cradle kind of motion for me,” he says.
So despite the fad’s quick flame-out, the hoop endured, and Melin and Knerr eventually made a tidy profit. In 1982, they sold the business for $12 million to the Kransco group. Wham-O has since changed hands many times and is now owned by Cornerstone. The company today still markets signature toys, but few new ones, except the Hacky Sack, have penetrated the collective consciousness.
All of Melin and Knerr’s toys share that power to capture the imaginations of millions, and to speak to some primeval notion of play that we all share. It’s not a simple business formula to replicate, even as today’s professional viral marketers try their best.
Benjamin F. Carlson is a reporter at The Daily.
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Credit: The Daily (www.thedaily.com)
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