The Rent Collectors
Exploitation, Murder, and Redemption in Immigrant LA
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
WINNER of the 2024 Los Angeles Times Book Prize
"For a tough-guy book about tough guys, this is a work of almost unerring tenderness. If its subtitle promises “redemption,” the book itself delivers something more honest: stories about people broken by powers larger than they are and who nonetheless find the will to fight on." — Ben Ehrenreich, The New York Times Book Review
"Katz has constructed a riveting and masterful urban narrative."
—Lorraine Berry, Los Angeles Times
Baby-faced teen Giovanni Macedo is desperate to find belonging in one of LA’s most predatory gangs, the Columbia Lil Cycos—so desperate that he agrees to kill an undocumented Mexican street vendor. The vendor, Francisco Clemente, had been refusing to give in to the gang’s shakedown demands. But Giovanni botches the hit, accidentally killing a newborn instead. The overlords who rule the Lil Cycos from a Supermax prison 1,000 miles away must be placated and Giovanni is lured across the border where, in turn, the gang botches his killing. And so, incredibly, Giovanni rises from the dead, determined to both seek redemption for his unforgivable crime and take down the gang who drove him to do it.
With The Rent Collectors, Jesse Katz has built a teeth clenching and breathless narrative that explicates the difficult and proud lives of undocumented black market workers who are being extorted by the gangs and fined by the city of LA—in other words, exploited by two sets of rent collectors.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
