The Rent Collectors

This book is great for true crime nerds but the exact opposite for California tourism. The Rent Collectors by Jesse Katz follows the journey of Giovanni Macedo as a member of the Columbia Lil Cycos. It's not a spoil.er to mention some of the low-lights of Giovanni's gang career since they are in the summary. He botches a murder and ends up killing a newborn only to have his own murder at the hands of his fellow gang members get botched as well. It's enough to make you wonder why they are so bad at crime.

Katz does a great job explaining gang life while juggling an insane amount of characters. He mostly sticks to the facts of the story and criminal cases but will dip now and again into social justice commentary. The commentary sections are few and far between. They are so short that I am not even sure Katz was trying to change the reader's mind but merely just trying to plant a seed. In any case, if you are interested in true crime and specifically gang crime, then this is an excellent read.

(This book was provided as an advance copy by Netgalley and Astra Publishing House.)

In The Rent Collectors: Exploitation, Murder, and Redemption in Immigrant LA, Jesse Katz details the saga of one 18th street gang member, shares the ways street vendors are criminalized, and spells out the various ways prisons are big business in the United States and specifically, California. The Rent Collectors is at turns dizzying and exhausting when Katz describes the inevitable ways some MacArthur Park stalwarts become entwined with the Columbia Lil Cycos gang in a way that can only be described as being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The normalized violence, poverty, and crime that people in the gang’s orbit endure, benefit from, and suffer from all at once is a maddening cycle of exploitation that most of the people mentioned in The Rent Collectors don’t survive or don’t thrive in due to trauma even when they are able to escape the confines of MacArthur Park.

When I first opened the book, I was intimidated by the organization chart that introduces part one. It lists a hierarchy of aliases for rent collectors, soldiers, lieutenants, shotcallers, a lawyer, and the godfather sitting at the top. Reading it now that I’ve read The Rent Collectors it is intriguing to see the names of people who became more than two dimensional “thugs” or “gangsters” -- to see the names of those who redeemed themselves to some extent, and the ones whose minds were so manipulated by the promise of belonging and their strict adherence to a warped values system that I would say are irredeemable. That’s not to say time in prison is a just solution to the two botched murders Katz details. Throughout The Rent Collectors, it is intriguing to be reminded that the Columbia Lil Cycos were just small scale capitalists, the self-instituted MacArthur Park taxation authority overseeing a thriving economy of goods and services. Illicit goods and services, yes, but capitalist nonetheless. To be a vendor in MacArthur Park, most likely undocumented and caught between harassment from the Columbia Lil Cycos and the LAPD, “you have to lose your embarrassment. With embarrassment, you’re not going to eat,” as one vendor described as the sock queen of Alvarado puts it. The Rampart Division of the LAPD which oversees MacArthur Park is one with a particularly violent history and what Katz describes as a “cabal” of rogue cops. I would argue that the so-called Fort Apache cops operated as a gang themselves. This is the environment in which Giovanni Macedo, aka Rusty is born, raised, and hellbent on belonging in -- until he botches a murder and kills a newborn baby.

A difficult read in the sense that any account of attempted murder and trauma is, there is so much pathos permeating throughout The Rent Collectors that really felt grounded and connected to the people being described. Especially when thinking of people like Shorty, Midget, Reyna Flores, Francisco Clemente, and of course, the painfully naive Giovanni. An especially poignant moment is when Reyna is sharing advice her uncle gives her about managing a specific parental sorrow, he gives her a mantra to speak for no one to actually hear: I love you. I forgive you. I free you. I bless you. And I wish you the best. It is an unexpected moment of family tenderness perfectly included for another tender moment between Reyna and her son Giovanni. It is also a painful reminder of the newborn child Giovanni accidentally murders, and how that child and his mother will never share a moment like this. There are so many scenes in The Rent Collectors that stand out as reminders that there are people willing to look out for you, regardless of your disparate lives. Like when Giovanni is helped by gas station clerks in Mexico, or the lengths an LAPD official goes to secure green cards for two people. These moments are spread out enough to lighten all the heavy facts and psychic and physical wounds shared throughout. The Rent Collectors ends with some things unfinished, but I think Giovanni is on his way to reach the redemption alluded to in the title.

The story follows the life of Giovanni Mecado, wanting to belong to a street gang Columbia Lil Cycos. His home life and his just wanting to belong. You also get a look into the life of street vendors in L.A. at least until laws were changed and the city government became the new rent collectors forcing or moving people off the sidewalks. Giovanni keeps hanging around different members who have now decided that people selling items in their area must pay rent. Most do except for one man. This goes on until word comes down to make him an example and they pick Giovanni as the trigger man, it does not go as planned. Man is shot and lives but a baby dies. Now Giovanni must die. The story reads true to life because it is like all true of life even in prison that life is different now than it was decades ago. Now they have a prison for snitches when before it was just a small yard. They even have their gang in prison. The story that is told in these pages for me, is real I won’t say how I know except I do know the places that were talked about and that Macarthur Park was not like it is now to this extreme as back in the sixties and early seventies. Overall a very good book and good characters.

THE RENT COLLECTORS is a fantastic true crime narrative. What struck me most is the compassion extended to all of the people you meet in its pages while naming of the systemic forces at play. This is a book about a neighborhood and the laws of a city and country that create the conditions of exploitation, legal and not. I thought a lot about the American carceral system, how it extends beyond prison walls, how it is focused more on profit than people, and the inequalities of how punishment is exacted in this country. THE RENT COLLECTORS is about American tragedy, violence, exploitation, redemption and family. It is compelling and tender. I highly recommend spending time with this book.