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Stereotypical tools of the trade for street drug dealers used to include just a safe hiding place for the contraband and fast shoes, but some residents and merchants of the West Adams area of Los Angeles claim that definition now leaves out one very important item-the pay telephone.
As a result, and largely because of the efforts of Coy Sallis, a 52-year-old retired contractor who moved here from Barbados five years ago, homeowners and shopkeepers in the southwest Los Angeles community have banded together to oversee the removal of pay phones from Adams Boulevard between Crenshaw Boulevard and La Brea Avenue.
Already, nine pay phones have been removed and if Sallis has his way, at least two more will soon ring for the last time.
Street crime in the area has gotten so bad, Sallis explains, that many residents who don't have phones in their homes are afraid to use the area's 850 pay phones for fear of confronting the drug dealers and prostitutes who congregate around them.
Rather than keep large quantities of drugs with them, merchants say, West Adams drug dealers ply their illegal wares on street corners until their supply runs low, and then use the phones to replenish their stocks. Similarly, they say, prostitutes use the phones as their home base for quick access to customers or pimps.
Used Phones as Headquarters
"They (drug peddlers) were using these phones as their headquarters and were selling dope like they were selling hamburgers. The people who didn't have phones weren't using them and were afraid to go use them," said Sallis, the president of the 60-member West Adams Neighborhood Watch Club.
Add to that the fact that local businessmen have complained that customers have been scared away by the drug dealers, and what emerges is a picture of a community fighting to regain its own streets.
Not that everyone thinks that removing...