The Guardian Angels

Faded red beret cocked atop his head, an unsmiling Curtis Sliwa stood on a Westwood street corner, the carnival of the village on a Friday night swirling around him.

While a sidewalk preacher and a street band playing Mick Jagger tunes vied for the crowd’s favor, Sliwa paced, his hands bunched in his pants pockets. Born and bred in Brooklyn, the founder of the Guardian Angels was clearly out of his element.

There were no muggers here. Just scores of cashmere-clad coeds, boys in Topsiders and Polo shirts and a cop cruising every corner. The 31-year-old Sliwa and his band of Guardian Angels had brought their nationally publicized assault against crime to the city of palm trees and limousines. And now they waited. And waited.

In recent months, Sliwa and his Angels have been everywhere in Southern California, or so it seems. From the frenzy of nighttime Hollywood and the danger of a Mexican border canyon to the quiet of an Orange County community struck by a mass killer, the Los Angeles Guardian Angels are enjoying a sudden resurgence of popularity that has boosted their ranks from a handful to hundreds and earned them enough newspaper ink to make the most shrewd politician’s heart pound.

Taking a cue from their celebrated subway-riding counterparts in New York, they swagger through some of Los Angeles’ meanest streets--and some not so mean--on the lookout for the pickpockets, purse snatchers and petty thieves that are their nemesis.

On patrols through Skid Row, Venice and South-Central Los Angeles (where they went once or twice but were driven off by gangs), these strutting young volunteers have created the same uneasy tug of war with police that has plagued them in New York and other big cities since their beginnings.

But unlike in New York, these Angels are no savvy children of the streets. And, while Hollywood residents have opened their homes to Angels patrolling their streets, there is not yet the outpouring of affection they enjoy in New York.

More of a curiosity in Los Angeles than crime fighters, they are part-time musicians and high school juniors, nurses aides and electronics salesmen.

Yet the Los Angeles chapter, an estimated 150 to 200 strong, is making its strongest bid since its founding in 1981 for the kind of notoriety that Angels live on in some of the nation’s toughest and grimiest cities. The publicity-wise Sliwa and his 27-year-old fashion model wife, Lisa, have taken charge, ending four years of near-anonymity here.

The turnabout began with the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles.

“We were just floating here,” Sliwa said. “Then it was made, the national decision on my and my wife’s part. We would make L.A. a major focus point that summer.”

Sliwa began to spend time here, plotting the Angels’ course.

“The true success is to compete directly with the gangs,” Sliwa said. “We’ll make our presence felt by beginning to take blocks.”

With red berets sprouting in Los Angeles, the Angels and Sliwa became a story in themselves. And just as in other cities, much of the Angels’ publicity is an outgrowth of tilting with police and other authorities. The Angels accuse police of a variety of sins ranging from tardiness to timidity.

“I know sometimes we have to be patient with the police because they’re patiently waiting for those fresh, buttermilk twists to pop out of Winchell’s doughnut oven and they don’t want to be disturbed,” Danny Lewis said.

Lewis, a UCLA psychology graduate who co-directs the local Angels from a shabby Venice apartment, said: “Sometimes our presence forces them to do the job they aren’t doing and that causes some tension and friction between us.”

Some police officials counter by calling the Angels “naive children” (nationally, the average age is about 20) whose daredevil antics place themselves and others in jeopardy. Since the group began patrolling in 1979, three Angels have been killed, one of them shot by mistake by Newark police.

Authorities in other cities where Angels have patrolled simply brush them off as publicity hounds.

“It’s smoke and publicity to me,” said San Diego Police Chief William B. Kolender.

“They want to be notorious, that’s all,” added Tijuana Municipal Police Chief Rafael Rubio Alarcon. “The Angels can go to hell, where they are needed.”

“Curtis has been accused many times of being a media freak,” Lewis acknowledged.

“He doesn’t deny the charge. . . . It gets the word out. More people can find out about the Guardian Angels from one 30-second segment (on television) or one article in the newspaper than through four months of street patrols.”

In the midst of one well-publicized skirmish against crime a few weeks back, Sliwa got himself arrested on a Hollywood street for blocking traffic. It was the first of three minor incidents that ended with his arrest.

After being taken into custody the first time, Sliwa is said by Los Angeles police to have apologized to them for his repeated--and public--verbal attacks on them.

“He just thought this thing up as a great publicity stunt,” said Los Angeles Police Capt. Lawrence Fetters, “and he’s good at it. . . . He knows we don’t spend our time in Winchell’s, and he would readily admit to us--off camera, when he’s talking to us in our jail--that he’s making the stuff up.”

Such feuds with police have led to questions of whether the group is more paper tiger than real power. Unfortunately, the arguing is based mostly on perception.

While the Angels claim 5,000 members in 59 U.S. cities, four cities in Canada and an outpost in Guam, there is little data to show what impact they have on curbing crime.

“Deterrence is hard to measure,” said Susan Pennell, who recently completed a two-year U.S. Department of Justice-sponsored study of the Angels for the San Diego Assn. of Governments. Pennell estimates that the Guardian Angels have 2,000 members nationally.

“The general feeling is when they’re around, the crime is probably not going to be committed in their presence,” Pennell said. “Where the Angels are visible, the citizens are supportive and glad they are there.”

Lewis boasts that the Angels have prevented “countless crimes” on their nightly forays.

Move to Next Block

“You see these red berets walking up and down the streets and you can see these criminal elements,” he said, snarling his words. “They’re not too difficult to see, the smell of the sleaze and slime. . . . These people scatter like cockroaches when they have a light shined on them.”

Police believe that lawbreakers may scatter--but only to the next block. Reluctant to admit that that might be so, Angels vow to nab them no matter where they go.

Whatever impact they have on crime, the Angels revel in acting tough. The signs of macho are everywhere.

Waiting for a New York subway, they kick their legs karate style, chop their fists through the air.

In Santa Ana, they play the theme song from “Beverly Hills Cop,” a film where good guy triumphs over evil, on their telephone answering machine.

And in their Venice headquarters, they have hung a massive poster of Arnold Schwarzenegger, filmland’s “Terminator.”

The gruff-talking Sliwa, dubbed “The Rock” by his Angels, calls their quarry “street mutants from the bowels of the city.” A solid 6-footer who stalks more than walks, Sliwa looks as if he could handle any of them.

In New York alone, the Angels take credit for arresting 600 “mutants” since they began patrols. In Los Angeles, the claim is one a week. Few of the arrests are verified by police.

New York police, in fact, credit the Angels with less than 25 citizen’s arrests since police began keeping tabs on the the Angels activity in 1981, most of them being apprehensions for jumping subway turnstiles or for being a nuisance inside the graffiti-scarred cars.

Police, on the other hand, have arrested or issued summonses on hundreds of Angels, the bulk for failing to pay subway fares, a New York Police Department official said.

It is in the subways, territory Sliwa calls the Angels’ “meat and potatoes,” that the red berets are most at home. Since 1979, on trains nicknamed by Angels the “Mugger’s Express,” “The Beast,” the “Zoo Train” and the “Chain Snatcher’s Delight,” groups of eight to 10 Angels have stood guard, one to a car, night after night.

Then in single-file formation, they have poured out of the trains to wind their way from the noisy immigrant neighborhoods of New York’s Lower East Side through the tawdry glitter of Times Square and into the streets of Harlem, where their greeting is a shower of empty beer bottles.

Colorful Names

Armed only with their reputation for toughness, some instruction in martial arts and the beads and buttons they wear on their berets (useful in swatting “mutants” on the face), the New York Angels, some of them too young to shave and few of them old enough to buy a beer, have names like “Tut” and “Tiger,” “Bear” and “Cool Breeze.”

Like Luis Torres, 16, his shoulder holster jammed with subway maps and recruitment flyers, they join because “fighting crime was one of the best things I ever heard of, you know.”

“This is my life,” said Torres in a voice just now deepening with manhood. “I put this in front of everything. Except for my mother.”

What payment they receive is obvious after a subway trip beneath the city.

The public adores them.

“In New York, if the mayor walked down the street, the chances are the public wouldn’t recognize him,” said Joseph Albini, who took a yearlong leave from his teaching post at Detroit’s Wayne State University to become an Angel to study the group.

“You can’t say that about Curtis. You can’t walk a block without someone knowing him and he stops and talks to each and every one of them.”

Response From Public

On an Angel patrol through Manhattan, two stylish matrons try to press money into their hands and a woman in a wheelchair cries: “These are the best people in New York City.” A young mother stops to take a snapshot, a cabbie toots his horn and a transit patrolman shyly offers his hand.

It was in the New York subways that Sliwa, feeling that crime had gone out of control, began his crusade.

To test his hunch that a citizen patrol could work, he put on a suit and glasses, slicked back his wavy black hair and sat in the last subway car. A friend--”We’re talking a 360-pound Mongolian monster”--sat at the opposite end of the car.

“While sitting there minding my own business . . . the buzzards and vultures would come back,” Sliwa recalled in a recent interview. “They’d jump me and assault me. . . . But I had a beeper. The Chinese guy would come charging back through the train, like a bull running in Spain.”

Sliwa’s test a success, he recruited a dozen acquaintances and the Guardian Angels were launched under their original name, the “Magnificent 13.”

They caught the public’s fancy--and fire from officials--almost instantly. With the notable exception of then-Lt. Gov. Mario Cuomo, the Angels were lambasted from police precinct to City Hall.

The relationship is only slightly less sour today.

“There’s a bunch of kids out there playing cops and robbers,” charged William McKechnie, president of the 3,300-member union of transit patrolmen. “They would follow Curtis blindly, and I’ve made analogies to Hitler and Mussolini and some people said they were unfair and ridiculous. I don’t think so.”

After years of public jousting with New York officials, media coverage of the Angels waned recently. With that has come an apparent slide in membership.

Some police officials estimate that there are as few as 50 Angels remaining in New York City, a number Sliwa calls “preposterous.” He insists that the New York contingent is 10 times that.

Wave of Excitement

Despite his claims that the New York City chapter is thriving, Sliwa spends much of his time jetting from city to city to pump up local chapters and to keep the Angel name in the news. His travels are financed mostly by his wife’s modeling work. (She estimates that at $20,000 to $30,000 this year.) Another $80,000 in donations collected nationally last year pay expenses for the 59 chapters, including rent, phone bills and postage.

In Los Angeles, the Angels’ chapter was launched in 1981 in a wave of excitement. But the group quickly became mired in internal problems and dropped from sight.

“We weren’t responding to the immediate needs of people under siege,” Sliwa explained.

In its first years, the chapter patrolled mainly on buses and streets of the San Fernando Valley, where most of the Angels then lived.

“Our members complained they were in need of Geritol supplements waiting for the bus,” Sliwa said. “There were areas that they were not forging into. . . . They were timid, overly cautious and you can’t be that way as Guardian Angels, not in a big city.”

If the Angels made headlines, it was elsewhere in the country.

They went to Atlanta when a string of child murders terrorized that city’s black community, to Massachusetts where a woman was gang-raped on a barroom pool table and to Dallas and San Francisco, where the 1984 political conventions were held.

When Sliwa finally turned his attention to Los Angeles, when the 1984 Olympics were about to take center stage, the local chapter “really began to blossom,” he said.

On the eve of the Games, when a mentally disturbed man drove his car down a crowded Westwood sidewalk, the Angels were there, linking hands to keep back the crowd and directing traffic until the police took command.

Afterward, they popped up with increasing frequency on the West Coast, following some of the biggest stories of the day.

When several hundred street people were recruited by the central Oregon religious commune of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, Sliwa and his Angels were there to protest the plight of the homeless.

They converged on the Mexican border near San Ysidro when crime made headlines there, boldly announcing that they would protect illegal aliens from border bandits.

And when Mexico was ravaged by an earthquake months later, they were back, trucking food, clothing and medical supplies across the border. They maintained overnight vigils in the homes of Southern Californians terrorized this summer by the Night Stalker. And they came to Westwood this fall to escort coeds to their cars the week after a UCLA student and her boyfriend were kidnaped and shot to death.

With the publicity that came with those moves and the beginnings of public recognition in Los Angeles came a resurgence in chapters elsewhere in California.

In the north, Angels began patrolling along the Sacramento River and on the streets of San Francisco and Stockton. A tiny chapter of eight even opened in Riverside County’s rural Norco, although “there’s not a lot going on in Norco,” founder Jeff Kleinfelter admitted. “We go to Riverside to patrol.”

Attracted by publicity and recruited on patrols, prospective Angels are taught some martial arts, skills such as cardiopulmonary resuscitation and how to handle verbal abuse. By the end of the training, Lewis said, “We’re like wild dogs . . . ready to take care of business.”

On their nightly patrols, Angels wear the red beret (purchased at military surplus stores) and the Angel T-shirt, with its all-seeing eye, shield and angel’s wings.

It is in Hollywood that the Angels are making their strongest push against what they call “the slime factor.” Their most visible walks are along Hollywood Boulevard.

Among the Los Angeles Angels are a former Explorer Scout leader, a mother of three and a one-time gang member, Jimmy Brown.

Describing himself as one of four “dedicated blacks” in the chapter, Brown is a thickly muscled martial arts expert.

Wearing camouflage pants and leather gloves, a feather dangling from his ear, the 21-year-old Brown said: “When we go into a neighborhood, we set an example. This is our neighborhood. Don’t hurt us; don’t mess with us.”

Echoing many of the others, he added, “You see, when a crime is being committed, it hurts. It hurts me bad inside.”

Through their patrols and street corner vigils, the Angels hope to roust drug dealers from the city, block by block. But more than a month after their well-publicized assault began in Hollywood, the battle clearly is an uphill one.

Near the Hollywood corner of St. Andrews Place and Melrose Avenue, “the drug traffic is still awful,” bemoaned longtime resident Don Durkee. “I can say everybody is glad they’re here, but no, they haven’t cleaned it up.”

And with the rush of publicity that came with the Angels, Durkee added, “Everyone who didn’t know where to get drugs do now.”

Sliwa is determined to show results. “We have to have the credibility of cleaning up large sections of Hollywood,” he said. “We’ll go into East Los Angeles and probably by Easter make an assault on South-Central.”

Already looking beyond Los Angeles, the ambitious Sliwa hopes to take his Angels international, patrolling trouble spots such as Northern Ireland and the Middle East.

“I don’t think of myself any longer as just a citizen of the United States,” he said. “I consider myself a citizen of the world.”