The Binge Cases: Scary Terri - The Sellout | 1. The Gem of Boyle Heights

Episode Date: October 26, 2021

As a working-class Latinx neighborhood in Los Angeles faces gentrification, residents are ready to fight to defend their turf. Mariachis lead a rent strike and ask their councilman Jose Huizar for help. But what they don’t realize is that he’s allegedly been taking bribes from developers building luxury housing right across the river, in downtown LA. A Neon Hum Media and Sony Music Entertainment production. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts to binge all episodes now or listen weekly wherever you get your podcasts. Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What was the last thing that filled you with wonder, that took you away from your desk, or your car in traffic, or your sink full of dishes? As an actor, it's very freeing being part of these shows. You can step in the booth and kind of be anything. Well, for us, and I'm going to guess for some of you, that thing is... Anime! Hi, I'm Nick Friedman. I'm Lee Alec Murray.

And I'm Leah President. And welcome to Crunchyroll Presents The Anime Effect. It's a weekly news show. I literally, when I saw it, when I found out about this, I literally had like a nervous breakdown in a good way. With the best celebrity guests. I've never pirated anything, but I'll steal it if I have to. That was how I felt when I started to get really hooked on Black Butler.

Oh, it's coming back. It's coming back. So join us every Friday wherever you get your podcasts and watch full video episodes on Crunchyroll or on the Crunchyroll YouTube channel. Okay, I want to take a minute to tell you about Boyle Heights. You know how some neighborhoods just kind of feel like everybody knows each other? Boyle Heights is like that.

It's just east of downtown Los Angeles. It's the kind of place where you know your street vendors, where you can hear them coming up from a block away. Maybe when they pull up, you can smell their fresh tamales. Maybe it's a hot day and you're waiting to get a paleta from the paletero coming up from a block away. Maybe when they pull up, you can smell their fresh tamales. Maybe it's a hot day and you're waiting to get a paleta from the paletero that shows up every day at the same time. It's the kind of place where you know your neighbors and the lady who runs the shop on the corner,

where you run into people you know on the street, like the mariachi who played at your wedding or someone who grew up in the same town you immigrated from 20 years ago. This kind of community doesn't just happen. It takes a lot of work to make a place feel like a home. In the 1970s, a little boy moved with his parents from Zacatecas, Mexico to Boyle Heights.

He grew up in the neighborhood and would later become their city council member. The first Mexican immigrant elected to LA's city council. His name is Jose Huizar. For a long time, a lot of people thought Huizar saw Boyle Heights the way they did. A rich, vibrant immigrant community. And maybe he did, but then he turned around and put dollar signs on it. He decided to market what the community had built and displaced a lot of people in the process. Some people might think the story starts here. Tonight corruption so bad, L.A. City Hall has never seen anything like it. FBI agents raided the home and offices of Jose Huizar.

Jose Huizar accused of accepting at least $1.5 million in bribe money. But I want to start here. On a hot Sunday afternoon in 2015, some band kids from the local high school are practicing on a big stage a couple blocks from their school in Boyle Heights in Hollenbeck Park. There was a local marching band from Roosevelt High School. These are band nerd kids that were doing extra practice, you know, like at the park. So this mobile opera comes in. This is Nancy Mesa, by the way, an organizer and longtime resident of Boyle Heights.

They ended up going to Hollenbeck Park. It was this mobile opera called Hopscotch. So in case you're wondering, a mobile opera is just a bunch of singers, musicians, and their audience riding in limousines from one location to the next around Los Angeles and doing their opera thing, I guess. It's not really clear if the band kids knew that the opera was going to be there. But anyways, that afternoon, the kids are practicing their instruments. And then, out on the street, a limo pulls up.

Then another. People start getting out with the limos. The people getting out with the limos are basically all white. And the band kids, they're all brown. The people from the limos walk into the park right near the stage. Some of them are dressed in these colorful, fancy retro clothes and singing like operatic singing. But the band kids from Roosevelt High School are still trying to practice. There is not enough room for both of them.

They attempt to kick the kids out and the kids just start playing their instruments like loud, like basically interrupting this mobile opera. The kids are like, no, this is our park. We were here first. This is a recording of a confrontation. So can you imagine seeing limousines rolled up to Hollenbeck Park full of all white people? Like the local youth were just not supposed to react to that.

News of the standoff between the Roosevelt High School band and the adult performers of Hopscotch Opera spread quick. The mobile opera had already been moving through Boyle Heights for some weeks. Local residents had noticed, and lots of them were not too happy about it. Because they understood that the opera wasn't just an opera. It was made for people not from Boyle Heights. People who would try to turn Boyle Heights into a place where nobody knows their neighbors. Where people call the cops on street vendors. It was one of a lot of little signs, and not so little signs, that the neighborhood might be about to change. That moment, although so small, was just like

gentrification is really encroaching into like our everyday space so much that like the high school kids I wrote about high school can't practice on the weekends in the stage because someone wants to have this mobile opera. So I know for me, that was just more like, this is enough. We need to do something. What happened in the park that day was the birth of something. A grassroots anti-gentrification movement in Boyle Heights. It was a militant movement that actually got kind of famous and made the national news. And it all started with these band kids kicking the adult mobile opera performers out of the park.

Gentrification is all about money. Developers and property owners deciding that a neighborhood is right for richer and usually whiter residents to move in. But it's also about who feels welcome in a neighborhood, who feels at home there. If you're a POC or face discrimination in this country, you're pretty much always thinking about whether you belong somewhere. But if you're a certain kind of white person, you might not even stop to think about that.

You might not even think about what it means for you to be in a new neighborhood or who you might be taking space from. The Mobile Opera's cast was mostly white, and they felt comfortable sauntering through the park telling a Latinx story. The main character of the opera was named Lucha, a Latina woman, literally named Struggle in Spanish. She was played by a whole bunch of women, many of them non-Latina white women.

None of them, from what I can tell, were from Boyle Heights. Hopscotch actually has a statement on its website about that day in the park. It called the band kids and their supporters, quote, aggressive and antagonistic. They wrote, quote, Although we were warmly welcomed in all the communities that Hopscotch visited, including many of the residents, businesses, and art groups of Bowl Heights,

this antagonistic group was vocal in their hostility towards the singers and the musicians and disrupted the final performance. It was kind of like one of the first times that you see gentrifiers deep in the hood, you know, like and how they showed up. But yeah, they even had a carrito and they were like, you know, passing around to people who came, who paid $100 to come to their little mobile opera. They got like a, you know, organic, vegan, like, paleta or whatever.

At the same time, we're, like, street vendors are hurt ass every day for selling at the park. We're just like, what the fuck is happening? What the fuck was happening was that some way, somehow, the mobile opera performers and their audience, who'd paid at least $125 a pop to be there, they'd been made to feel at home in Hollenbeck Park, like they were wanted there.

And there was one person in particular who was making them feel that way. Jose Huizar. He grew up in Boa Heights, as an immigrant kid. You might have expected him to act like a bouncer, you know, protecting the community from outsiders who would drive up rent prices and set off waves of evictions. But instead, he laid out the welcome mat.

So his name is Jose Huizar, but some people know him by another name. First of all, since we're starting off, fuck you, Sleazy Weezy, if you're hearing this podcast. Yeah, I just hope you have a terrible day for, you know, taking part in the ultimate sin, which is selling out your own neighborhood. But Jose Huizar didn't start as a sellout. In the beginning, he was an immigrant kid who rose to the top and promised to bring his community along with him.

He sounded like our neighbors. He sounded like our cousins. So there was this kind of sentiment of like, oh, we're going to be okay because we have someone that looks like us, talks like us, feels like us in office. He went on to UC Berkeley. He went on to Princeton. Then he went to UCLA Ball. So that is like the dream, especially coming from the neighborhood. Lots of good stuff happening in Hawaii. Thousands of new condos are being built. Three new schools, a new police station. Sending rent prices soaring.

And as he walked away, I said, this is not going to end well. This is just not the way that you run local government. Progress that results in displacement is not progress. That's just a shuffling of people. There's nothing worse than having somebody from your own community sell you out. It's like turning your back on your family. You're a snake and you deserve to be crushed. From Neon Hum Media and LA Taco, this is Smokescreen, the sellout, a podcast about a politician dogged by allegations of corruption, harassment, and pathological pettiness.

It's about the residents who fought gentrification even as their neighborhoods were auctioned off to the highest bidder. And it's about a community that feels the pain of betrayal from one of their own. That's what this podcast is about. Not just some other infamous man, but the people. Because this is really about them. We're talking about Boyle Heights, El Sereno, Highland Park, City Council District 14. I'm Mariah Castaneda. This is episode one, The Gem of Boyle Heights. Hi everyone, this is Jonathan Van Ness. Clean water, fresh air, our health. Electricity, honey. We tend to take for granted the things that matter most, like the separation of church and state.

the things that matter most, like the separation of church and state. Americans United for Separation of Church and State has been on the front lines defending your freedom to live and believe as you choose, so long as you don't harm others. Most folks don't see how church-state separation affects our daily lives until that freedom is gone. The separation between church and state covers many core freedoms like civil rights for LGBTQIA plus people, women and racial slash religious minorities, or reproductive justice and freedom. But those rights are not a given. Every day, Americans United works at the state and federal level to make sure these freedoms and more are protected for every American to enjoy and benefit from. They can't do this alone, though. Join Americans United for separation of church and state and growing the movement because church-state separation protects everyone.

Freedom without favor and equality without exception. Learn more and get involved at au.org slash curious. Hi, everyone. This is Jonathan Van Ness. Clean water, fresh air, our health. Electricity, honey. We tend to take for granted the things that matter most, like the separation of church and state. Americans United for Separation of Church and State has been on the front lines defending your freedom to live and believe as you choose, so long as you don't harm others. Most folks don't see how church-state separation affects our daily lives until that freedom is gone. The separation between church and state covers many core freedoms like civil rights for LGBTQIA plus people, women, and racial slash religious minorities,

or reproductive justice and freedom. But those rights are not a given. Every day, Americans United works at the state and federal level to make sure these freedoms and more are protected for every American to enjoy and benefit from. They can't do this alone, though. Join Americans United for separation of church and state and growing the movement because church-state separation protects everyone. Freedom without favor and equality without exception.

Learn more and get involved at au.org slash curious. I would say what I love about Bull Heights the most is that anyone that's come visit me from, you know, out of town, east coasters, or folks that have just never been to L.A. before. That's Nancy Massa again. Any house I've lived in, any apartment I've lived in, the first thing that comes out of their mouth is like, dude, you live in Little Mexico. A lot of people say this about Bowl Heights, that it's like Little Mexico. It's actually right across the river from downtown LA. Both neighborhoods are in Wisad's district, but they couldn't be more different. Downtown is mostly skyscrapers and fancy lofts at this point.

And that's partially because of Wisad, because his alleged corruption changed downtown LA into a place where rich people would want to live. And Boyle Heights got the aftershocks of all that gentrification downtown. I want to talk about what that meant for the people who actually live there. I am at Mariachi Plaza today. This past April, I went there with my colleague from LA Taco, Eric Huerta. He's from Boa Heights. He's been talking about the neighborhood for a while,

blogging, reporting. He's got his own podcast called Oralei Boa Heights. And when we went, the plaza was still a lot emptier than it used to be before COVID. Okay, so I'm looking at like a little sparse group of mostly men here, you know, hanging out, getting together and everything, eating, I think, over there, in front of the restaurant. What did it look like before? It very much looked the same, but there was more of them, more little groups, right?

More tables, more space being taken advantage of, like the benches here at Mariachi Plaza, the gazebo itself. advantage of like the benches here at Mariachi Plaza, the gazebo itself. Especially in the summer, you know, youth just come and hang out by the steps or in the gazebo and you know just kick it. Mariachi Plaza is about half a square block with a kiosk in the center, a couple of trees, some benches, and sometimes some street vendors. It's close to almost everything. There's a metro stop on one end and a bakery on the other. There's a bar across the street and a bunch of restaurants nearby too. And then I'm also right in front of the Santa Cecilia restaurant and Mexican food.

And I am trying a taco de tripa. So these tacos are incredible. The tripas is just a little bit crispy on the outside, but it's soft and just savory and supple. There's everything you want a taco to be. There are lots of reasons why you might go to Mariachi Plaza. Great food, obviously. But I think most people are probably there for the same reason, to see the mariachis. On a normal day, there are tons of mariachis in the plaza, probably hanging out

near this one landmark. The gazebo? Yeah. Yeah, it was a gift from the state of Jalisco, which is where mariachi music was claimed to have originated from. It was brought over actually piece by piece and it was actually built and put together here. So, you know, really reflecting the heritage and the community of mariachis. It's still, you live in the surrounding community, and on Fridays and Saturdays and Sundays are actively out here in the plaza, passing out business cards and trying to get gigs from folks who need a last-minute mariachi for their party or celebration. Some folks might call the mariachis the heart of Bull Heights.

It definitely seems like Jose Huizar saw them that way. He was always going to these events where the mariachis were performing. Like, this is a video of Huizar at the Mexican Independence Day Parade when he rode through East Los Angeles on a horse wearing a chado outfit. The top is white and gold. He's got on these boots with gold detail, and he's holding an enormous Mexican flag in the air. It really seemed like Huizar saw the mariachis as an integral part of the community,

a part that he would work hard to protect. So it makes sense for the mariachis to think that if there was anyone Huizar would fight to keep in the neighborhood, to keep from being displaced, it'd be them. Especially because the mariachis need to be in Bull Heights. They need to be at Mariachi Plaza. For work. So, this is Arturo Ruvalcaba, a mariachi who lives in Boyle Heights. We spoke to him because he ends up at the center of a showdown about rising rents in the neighborhood.

And interpreter Marisabeth Hernandez was with him. She's actually my friend, and she knows a lot about the mariachis. was with him. She's actually my friend and she knows a lot about the mariachis. Her dad, Salvador, is a mariachi and she grew up in the mariachi community. All right, so he said, a guy pulled up to the plaza. People come to Mariachi Plaza when they need something celebrated. Quinceañeras, weddings, funerals, marriage proposals. Like, let's say it's your wife's birthday. Let's say you forgot it was her birthday until today.

You're short on time, but you need to make it seem like you had something planned months ahead of time. So you call up a nice place for dinner, you make a last-minute reservation, and then you go to Mariachi Plaza. You find a group of mariachis. Maybe you find Arturo. You say, meet me outside my apartment at this address at this time. Play this music for my wife, who will never suspect that I just hired you this morning. The group gets all its members together and boom, they've booked a gig. But to get that gig

with a guy who forgot his wife's birthday, you've got to be at the plaza. If you're not, you can miss out on a lot of clients, a lot of work. Because the industry can be old school. A lot of times you've got to meet face to face. So anyways, when Arturo first moved to LA, he used to live far away from the plaza

and he was always driving back and forth. Before he moved to Plaza de los Mariachis, he would drive home late at night after work and then drive straight back to the plaza in the morning. But even with all that driving, it was worth it to Arturo. He wanted to be a mariachi basically his whole life. He still remembers when his dad, also mariachi, first gave him his own traje de charro. Also mariachi first gave him his own traje de charro. You know, the suit that the mariachis wear with all that embroidery up and down the pants and the jacket and the shirt with the big white collar. Arturo said getting the traje de charro was an emotional moment.

It was like that day he became someone he was always meant to be. He grew up with his dad practicing around the house. He was 14 when he started playing, and he was just really excited because his dad told him, you're going to start playing with us in this group. So Arturo grows up. He keeps playing mariachi music. He moves to Los Angeles. He's driving to Bull Heights every day for work. And Arturo decides, if I'm really doing this, I've got to move closer to Mariachi Plaza. That closeness is going to be important later. When Arturo's building is threatened, it becomes a flashpoint for the fight

against gentrification in Bull Heights, and the residents ask Huizar himself for help. The building Arturo moves into is one block down and a quarter of a block over from Mariachi Plaza. It looks like a lot of Los Angeles apartment buildings. It's stucco with a gate winding around the outside of the property. About half the units in Arturo's new apartment building had mariachis in them. So did a lot of the buildings nearby. The plaza is basically surrounded by buildings full of mariachis. It's been this way for decades, like Marisabeth's dad, Salvador, who lived near Mariachi Plaza in the 80s. He lived with like five uncles and seven friends in an apartment with two bedrooms and one bathroom. Here he is rattling off all their names from memory.

So, Arturo moves into his new apartment near Mariachi Plaza sometime around 2008. And his mariachi career is going pretty well. He's getting regular gigs. At the time, Arturo was paying about $1,200 for a two-bedroom apartment that he shared with his wife and two teenagers. And at $1,200, the apartment was more or less affordable. Working as a mariachi is like any other kind of gig work. Some weeks you bring home more than others. And then one day, in early 2017,

Arturo gets a letter on his door. And then they got another letter. on his door. A letter that said that the apartments had changed in the last year. Then another letter came. And then they got another letter. It said Arturo's rent would be going up by a lot, $700. And they only had a few months until the new rent went into effect. At the time, we thought, well, let's see what we were going to do. So Arturo said that after they received the second letter,

they were all wondering what they were going to do next. It became really clear pretty quickly that not everyone in the building had gotten rent increases. Only some of them had. But everybody knew that it was coming. So it may have initially started with just those first tenants, but everybody in the building, there was a plan to raise it for the entire building. Elizabeth Blaney is an organizer and advocate for the Tenants Union in Boyle Heights, Union de Vecinos. That's not unusual. There are landlords that is a very common tactic of landlords is to start with a group of people.

Because if they were to rent increase the entire building, then they'd have massive people against them. If you do it in increments with certain sections, that's a tactic they use to try and make sure that there aren't too many people mad at them at the same time. So it's a little bit like a divide and conquer kind of thing. But the maneuver didn't work. This isn't the kind of building where neighbors don't talk to each other. maneuver didn't work. This isn't the kind of building where neighbors don't talk to each other.

The mariachis in the building are all going to the same plaza every day to get work. Some of them are like family to one another. So the tenants started meeting, the ones who'd gotten the increases, and most of the ones who hadn't yet. So the building, in Boyle Heights, there's like over 200 alleys. Alleys really are the extension of people's backyards, or in some cases, the backyard. And there's an alley that went from their second street to first street where Mariachi Plaza was, which is where the mariachis would go to get work. They'd set up events in the alley, these kind of meetings to raise awareness about the rent hike. They would stop and be, oh, what's going on? And then we'd come up and find out more about the struggle

and how could they support. And we would play lotteria and bring food. And so it was really kind of like a convivio just as a way of building community. They were in this together. They were all worried, even if they weren't part of the first wave of tenants to get the rat hike.

It's very nerve wracking. Am I going to lose my home? Where am I going to house my children? if they weren't part of the first wave of tenants to get the rent hike. It's very nerve-wracking. Am I going to lose my home? Where am I going to house my children? So coming in, I think, to the meeting, tenants were wanting information, wanting to figure out solutions, and also uncertainty as to what was going on. So there were two dozen units in the building. More than half the tenants went on rent strike and stopped paying rent. Lots of residents who hadn't been served rent increases yet also went on strike.

It came to be known as the Marachi Rent Strike. But there were other tenants in the building who went on strike too. That really is what made the strike so successful, was the building of these relationships and of trust among people, because now people didn't feel alone. And now that they knew that they could do something together and be successful by putting pressure to have dialogue with the landlord. So they got together to try to stop the landlord from raising their rent by almost double. But they didn't know if that was actually going to work. Were they going to get evicted?

Or were they going to be able to stay in their homes at a rent they could afford long term? This is The Sellout. Infamous is celebrity gossip, but smart. It takes you deep into the stories that we just can't stop ourselves from following. From who Meghan Markle really is. Apparently ambition is a terrible, terrible thing. To the scandal at Lululemon. You've got this man saying that his yoga pants don't work for women because they're too fat to

wear up. We've got over 100 episodes ready for your binging pleasure. Listen to Infamous, the gossip show that's smart. Hello, it's your beauty and wellness BFFs, and we're here to answer all your burning questions. Skincare, makeup, parenting, and more. We have got you covered. Oh, yes, we do. We'll speak with industry insiders, celebrities, and our close friends. And give all our honest and unfiltered thoughts always. Listen to Lipstick on the Rim now on Apple or wherever you get your podcasts. So let's be clear about something. The mariachis were not the only people in Boyle Heights facing rent hikes at the time. Remember how Boyle Heights is right next to downtown?

Downtown was rapidly gentrifying. And at the time when Arturo's building went on rent strike, the gentrification downtown was starting to spill over into Boyle Heights. We saw it posted a video on his YouTube channel around this time. You know, a few years ago, you could turn off the light switch in downtown LA. There was nobody here. People who came here to work would leave in the evening. And it was a ghost town. And now it's alive. It's a ribbon-cutting for a fancy-looking hotel downtown. This hotel's developer is actually going to be part of the FBI corruption probe into Wissad. We're going to get there.

But on that sunny day in 2017, years before he was charged with racketeering and corruption, Wissad is standing carefree on that stage, grinning. Ten years ago, 10,000 people lived here. Today, 55,000. The year 2040, we expect 125,000 people to live in downtown Alaska. Wissad is standing up there next to a bunch of other people in suits, all holding one absurdly long red ribbon. Wissad cuts his part of the ribbon, then holds it up in the air triumphantly.

Arturo's apartment building is just three miles away, back in Iztale. So close to trendy downtown, rents here in the community of Boyle Heights are skyrocketing. This is from another video Hu saw to post to his channel that very same day. It's a news story about rent hikes and tenants rights, about volunteers going door-to-door to inform their neighbors about their rights as tenants. Take this apartment complex on East 2nd Street. In this clip, the reporter is standing outside Arturo's building, talking about the rent increase he and his neighbors are facing. Where renters are trying to fight off a proposed 80% rent increase in some units.

Wisad is also in this video. But what we found is, although they're protected, they don't know their rights, and landlords are using any means possible to get them out so that they can charge higher rents. And so what we're doing is launching a campaign to inform residents about their rights under rent control law. So, Huizad is making it seem like the mariachis just need to know their rights, and boom, they can stay in their homes. Like his Tenants' Rights campaign was going to do that. But it didn't. Here's Nancy again. The council member went door to door knocking and gave people like a pamphlet of like, these are your rights when facing eviction.

So for me, that's some bullshit. You have the gentrifying chief going door to door being like, here are your rights, as he's literally selling out the hood. Plus, Arturo's building isn't even protected by the law Huizar is talking about. It's called the Rent Stabilization Ordinance of the City of Los Angeles. And it only applies to buildings built on or before October 1st, 1978. Arturo's building was built in 1983. It's not that the mariachis didn't know their rights. Knowing their rights wasn't enough to protect them. It wasn't enough to protect them from a new landlord who probably saw luxury buildings going up just a couple miles away

and figured, hey, I can get more money out of this place. And there's a reason that a TV reporter was standing outside Arturo's building. The mariachi rent strike became famous fast. What they did together was pretty incredible. This was years before the recent wave of rent strikes across the country. But for Arturo and his neighbors, it was also a scary decision. No está uno acostumbrado a andar en ese tipo de problemas. So he said, just in general, we're not used to being in trouble because we're responsible. El día primero, pues ya tiene uno la renta ahí junto. Entonces, pues nomás imagínate el día que se llegó que ya no longer paid the rent, we felt unprotected. We know that when the first of the month comes, we have the money ready for rent.

When they decided to not pay rent, they just felt very vulnerable, very much feeling unsafe in their own home. So one thing the mariachis and their neighbors did was write a letter to the council member, José Huizar, to see if maybe he could talk to the landlord for them, advocate for them. And it's not like that was some wild, long-shot idea. It's the kind of thing that council members do sometimes, especially for constituents like the Mariachis,

the heart of Bull Heights. Plus, we saw it wasn't just any council member. So, damn, we're going into a time machine. Okay, so this is Norberto Briseño. He co-founded this really cool channel called Pero Like for BuzzFeed about being Latinx in the U.S. Norberto didn't grow up in Bull Heights or even East L.A.

He grew up in Culver City, all the way on the other side of town. But he remembers when Wissad was elected. He was a teenager, about 16. All I can remember is my mom. My mom loves watching local news, especially like Channel 52, like Telemundo and stuff. And I that's where I would walk into the living room. She'd be watching that. And I do remember them talking about his upbringing. His upbringing was the hook for his entire persona. Right. He's going to be the first Mexican city council member.

His family's from Zacatecas. Like these moments where you you can hear that, like, this man is going to be something incredible. To a young Latino, even all the way across the city, Visar getting elected felt like a big deal. Huge. Keep in mind, I was 16 at the time, and I just thought, this man is a progressive powerhouse, and he's going to take care of us. We all kind of thought that this was a very hopeful, it was a very hopeful time. It was our own personal AOC. Yeah, so you're saying that you would have never foreseen any of this happening.

Well, no. So, back to Arturo and his neighbors. They wrote Huizar the letter, and in response, Wissad did not much. Two things. He wrote his own letter to the landlord telling him to meet with them, and... They needed his support. And the most they ever got was his secretary attending one of the protests. For a local politician without much pull, maybe a letter and a staffer is all you'd expect.

Maybe you'd think that this was Huizar giving it his all. But what nobody knew yet was just how powerful he had become at this point. The mariachis and their neighbors had no idea how much power he had to propel a development forward or stop it in its tracks. They didn't know that Wissad was at the head of what the feds would later call a criminal enterprise based in City Hall. But all these years, they watched Huizar hold up the mariachis as the gem of Boyle Heights. And then when it came time to fight to keep them in their homes, he just didn't.

Which, from Arturo's perspective, was kind of baffling. Well, now we were expecting more support, and we were expecting more from the community. kind of baffling. Simply because he was part of the community, the expectation was that it was almost a given that he was going to support them. And so it's kind of like being betrayed by one of your own, essentially. Is it worse to be sold out

by someone from your own community? Yeah, it's the worst of the worst. To have one of our own do it, it's heartbreaking. It's like turning your back on your family. You're a snake, and you deserve to be crushed. This season on Smokescreen, the sellout. As soon as he walked into the room, he just had a lot of presence, extremely charismatic.

I mean, for God's freaking sakes, you know, he would run for office coming out in the chadro outfit on the horse, like, you know, the messiah, you know, the Mexican people. I felt like the blood just left my body. Like, oh my God, he sold out a thousand families. And I started seeing the dark side of him. FBI agents left Jose Huizar's office this afternoon with a lot of boxes, possible evidence. Former L.A. City Council member Jose Huizar has pleaded not guilty to charges, alleging that he ran a multi-million dollar real estate scheme right out of City Hall.

All of these indictments are full of just the most bizarre and amateurish behavior. You get a scoring sheet. You get negative numbers or positive numbers based on how they perceived you in supporting the council member. But then we found out he wasn't the only criminal. So there's obviously a systematic issue. Jose Huizar is nothing. Jose Huizar is the top layer of the epidermis

of a cancer that goes to the bone. We reached out to Jose Huizar and his lawyers with more than 40 questions asking about his time in office and the crimes he allegedly committed. They never got back to us. The Sellout is produced by Neon Hub Media and LA Taco. I'm your host, Mariah Castaneda. My co-reporters are Alexis Olivier-Ray and Carla Green. Carla Green is our lead producer, and she wrote the episodes.

Our editor is Catherine St. Louis. Vikram Patel is our consulting editor. Associate editor is Stephanie Serrano. Associate producer is Liz Sanchez. Our executive producer is Jonathan Hirsch. Samantha Allison is our production manager. Fact checker is Sarah Ivry. Our sound designer is Hans Dale Sue. Eduardo Arenas made our theme music. Other original music by Moni Mendoza, with an additional track from Blue Dot Sessions. Special thanks to Erica Lindo, Javier Cabal, Tanner Robbins, Haley Fager, Natalie Wren, Adrienne Riskin, Shara Morris, Navani Otero, Janet Villafana, Vanessa and Jorge Casaneda,

and Ivan Fernandez. Janet Villafana, Vanessa and Jorge Castaneda, and Ivan Fernandez. If you want to know more about what you've heard on the show so far, head over to lataco.com to see a beautiful map of some of the places we talk about made by Tommy Gallegos, as well as new reporting and interviews. Thanks so much for listening. I love you, LA.