The Rent Collectors

Starred review from June 1, 2024
Katz centers his narrative on MacArthur Park, an L.A. neighborhood made famous mostly for a song that bears its name, filled with immigrants searching for a better life and all the messy complications they find along that journey. There are the rent collectors, made up of the local gang, the Columbia Lil Cycos, and there are those who pay that rent, the street vendors trying to eke out some form of financial independence. Within these confines, Katz focuses the story on Giovanni Macedo, who, in his fervor to fully integrate into the Lil Cycos, commits an unforgivable act that has far-reaching implications. Katz writes with a propulsive verve, his prose both evocative and raw. His journalistic style allows readers to connect with the individuals, from Giovanni's worried mother to Shorty, the young street vendor who finds herself at the core of the investigation, to Special Agent Paul Keenan, who has been trying to mount a case against the Lil Cycos for years, as well as the ever-connecting story that ties them all together. Tackling immigration, the prison system, city ordinances, and the complicated bonds of family, the experience of reading The Rent Collectors is white-knuckle and, ultimately, wholly transformative.

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Starred review from June 15, 2024
A veteran Los Angeles journalist delivers a searing account of gang violence and its consequences. Katz, the author of The Opposite Field, engagingly delineates the story of Giovanni Macedo, who, like so many immigrant kids in L.A., didn't have much direction in life, swept into MacArthur Park as part of "a diaspora hastened by the US government's geopolitical meddling and the American people's appetite for cheap and tenacious labor." By the early 1980s, that area, writes Katz, "had become an immigrant crossroads: America's new Ellis Island." Macedo joined the gang that controlled his neighborhood, a fearsome outfit called the Columbia Lil Cycos--part of a still larger and surprisingly well-organized syndicate with perhaps 20,000 members in Southern California alone, as well as thousands more in "at least" 120 cities in the U.S. and a handful of Latin American nations. Macedo began as a gofer of sorts in an enterprise designed to extort protection-racket "rent"--thus the title--from the street vendors of the neighborhood; if he had killed a reluctant customer, he would have graduated to a full collector. But he botched the job, becoming a target himself for a dreadful mistake made along the way. Katz's narrative serves to explain why so few gang crimes are ever punished, thanks to loyal foot soldiers and a culture "where survival has long depended on forgetfulness." There are countless ironies throughout, not least that the city government broke the gangs' power in one small corner of the world by regulating street vending--so that now, with onerous business licenses, "the vendors still had to pay to be policed." Macedo's grim story, expertly documented by Katz, cries for a documentary series to follow his fortunes as, after years in prison, he strives for redemption. A masterful work of true crime--and, to be sure, true punishment.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

August 19, 2024
Journalist Katz (The Opposite Field) delves into the dark heart of L.A.’s MacArthur Park neighborhood in this devastating look at a gang-related murder. The account centers on teenager Giovanni Macedo, who struggled to fit in with his peers while growing up in MacArthur Park, and eventually sought acceptance by joining the Columbia Lil Cycos street gang in the mid-2000s. For his initiation, Macedo was tasked with assassinating a street vendor who’d pushed back against the gang’s extortion attempts. He botched the job, however, and instead killed a newborn in broad daylight. With L.A. in an uproar over the murder, police offered a $75,000 reward for Macedo’s arrest, leading him to flee to Tijuana, Mexico, to stay with gang members who promised him safety but planned to kill him. He narrowly escaped, and returned to L.A. to turn himself in, informing on the Lil Cycos in an effort to reduce his own sentence. Katz expertly traces the tale’s jaw-dropping twists and turns, complementing the intrigue with a deeply empathetic portrait of Macedo and scrupulous interviews with law enforcement. This pulls back the curtain on an appalling tragedy. Agent: Jay Mandel, WME.