Jesse Katz talks about how he came to write about a botched gang hit and the young man who pulled the trigger.
Jesse Katz is the author of “The Rent Collectors: Exploitation, Murder, and Redemption in Immigrant L.A.”“In some ways, I’ve been preparing to write this book almost my whole adult life,” says Jesse Katz about, much of it covering crime and gangs for the Los Angeles Times. “The Rent Collectors” follows the aftermath of a gang-related crime that shocked a city already accustomed to acts of violence.
I didn’t know anything about L.A. when I arrived here in 1985. The first story I ever wrote about MacArthur Park was in 1987; it was a story about how people celebrate Easter in L.A. I saw these guyswhich at the time really was kind of apocalyptic. It was just filled with hundreds of people using and selling crack, turning tricks. It was a really difficult place, but here are these chess players, and it turned out that they were masters. They were ranked in the U.S. Chess Federation.
He realized that that was all an illusion in some ways. He said to me, “If somebody else can have their eyes opened by what I’ve been through, if some other person can avoid my mistakes, then my life is an open book.” He wrote that to me in 2018. Did he know what it meant to tell me that his life was an open book? I’m not sure. But he has never wavered from that principle. He has always chosen truth over secrets. He has never tried to sugarcoat anything.
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