Juan “Termite” Romero was once a leader of the 18th Street gang, shaking down drug dealers on the streets of Westlake in the 1990s. After being targeted for death by his imprisoned boss, Romero became the government’s star witness in a racketeering case that sent dozens of his associates to prison.
Romero disappeared into witness protection, living under an assumed name far from his old neighborhood. But Los Angeles County prosecutors have brought the 57-year-old out of hiding, alleging he set fire in 1993 to a crowded apartment building, killing seven children and three women, two of them pregnant.
Romero appeared Wednesday morning in a downtown Los Angeles courtroom, where he deferred entering a plea to 12 counts of murder. Dressed in an orange jumpsuit, the short man with thinning hair hardly resembled the gang member who stared into a camera decades earlier, a thick gold chain draped above the words “Baby I’m For Real” tattooed along his collarbone.
The last of four defendants to face charges in the arson, Romero has been a fugitive since 2016, when detectives traveled to the Phoenix apartment complex where he had been living and found the protected witness had moved just a week earlier. One detective testified she found the timing “incredibly strange.”
Deputy Dist. Atty. Victor Avila declined to specify where or when Romero was arrested, but said he was extradited from Mexico. Records show he was booked into the Los Angeles County jail on Dec. 5.
Daniel Nardoni, an attorney who was initially assigned to represent Romero at his brief appearance Wednesday, said he knew nothing of Romero’s apprehension or the evidence against him.
Romero is accused of setting fire to a three-story, 67-unit stucco building on Burlington Avenue the afternoon of May 3, 1993. Testifying at a trial in 2022, a retired firefighter recalled people leaping from balconies while paramedics tried to revive others sprawled on the sidewalk. The smoke inside was so thick, he recalled, it was “like being underwater and trying to take a breath.”
Dead from smoke inhalation were Lancey Mateo, 1; Jesus Camargo, 4; Jose Camargo, 4; Rosalia Camargo, 6; Yadira Verdugo, 6; William Verdugo, 8; Leyver Verdugo, 10; Rosalia Ruiz, 21; Olga Leon, 24; and Alejandrina Roblero, 29. Ruiz and Leon were pregnant.
Informants told Los Angeles Police Department detectives the fire was tied to the neighborhood drug trade. Outside the building stood the traqueteros — street-level dealers — who sold crack cocaine and heroin all day and night, according to testimony. The building’s residents, mostly Mexican and Central American immigrants who subdivided units or slept in shifts to save money, couldn’t afford to move.
“We all have limitations,” testified one man who lost two nephews and a niece in the fire. “We didn’t earn a lot, so you can only live in a place you can afford.”
For the right to work in this corner of Westlake, a dense neighborhood just west of downtown Los Angeles, the traqueteros paid “rent” to the local gang, the Columbia Lil Cycos clique of 18th Street. So did the mayoristas, or wholesalers, who supplied them.
The mayorista who ran the Burlington Avenue corridor was Johanna Lopez, who testified in 2022 she got her start in the drug trade as a traquetero after immigrating from Honduras in 1990. Lopez was selling cocaine outside the same building that would catch fire three years later when, she said, she was confronted by Romero and another 18th Street member, Ramiro “Greedy” Valerio.
Valerio, testifying at his trial in 2022, said he met Romero after joining the Columbia Lil Cycos at 15. Seven years older than Valerio, Romero bought him clothes and taught him “to dress like a gang member,”…
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