Tuesday, March 11, 1997 | 11:59 a.m.
THE naked truth about the Naked City is surfacing.
Since July 1, 14 shootings and five murders have occurred in the Meadows Village area -- long known as the Naked City -- just behind the Stratosphere Tower, said Metro Police homicide Sgt. Kevin Manning.
The most recent murder happened over the weekend when a man died from several gunshot wounds in the 1800 block of Fairfield Avenue, in the heart of Meadows Village.
"It's a war zone," said Mayor Jan Laverty Jones. "You used to not be able to drive through there at night. Now you can't drive through there during the day because of the shootings. Someone shot at the (Stratosphere Tower's) parking garage with a machine gun."
And the increased violence has at least one Stratosphere executive calling for more policing in the area.
"The (policing) efforts that are being applied to the Meadows Village area at this time are clearly inadequate," said Richard Schuetz, chief executive officer and president of the Stratosphere Corp. "The statistics demonstrate that they're clearly inadequate. I think the citizens of this community should be frustrated and embarrassed. The (police) seem to have lost control of the situation a bit."
Schuetz said he'd "absolutely like some attention" paid to the area and would "love to see the police force assume greater responsibility for maintaining law and order in an area that they're clearly not performing well in at this time."
Metro's bike patrol team, which was federally funded for two years, pulled out of the area after just one year last February to help man the downtown substation. Deputy Chief Dick McKee explained at the time that the bike team was pulled out because "the weeding of Meadows Village is finished."
Weeding is a term from the federal Weed and Seed program, which targets certain neighborhoods, weeding out criminals by arresting them and seeding new social programs and education to help neighborhoods maintain a lower crime rate.
Sgt. Will Minor, spokesman for Metro, said bike cops still patrol the Meadows Village area "whenever (Metro) has them available."
Schuetz, who lives in the Stratosphere hotel, said, "I have not seen the bikes and I live here in the building."
A Stratosphere security guard working the parking garage, however, said Monday night that he saw two bike cops ride through the area earlier in the day.
What Schuetz said he does see are hookers, drug dealers and gunmen who brazenly walk and work the streets of Meadows Village, bordered by Commerce Street on the east, Industrial Road and Highland Avenue on the west, Sahara Avenue on the south and Wyoming Avenue on the north.
The biggest fear is that a guest or employee of the Stratosphere will get shot or killed.
Jones, who has been a supporter of the Weed and Seed program, disagrees that weeding is finished in Meadows Village. She described the area as one of the worst places for crime in the city.
"If I were a patrol officer, I'd be afraid to go in there," Jones said.
Police sources said Cuban refugees, including alleged Cuban organized crime members, as well as Guatemalan and Mexican refugees, are predominant in the area.
Two hundred families were relocated when their houses and apartment buildings were razed to make way for the Stratosphere, which was formerly Vegas World. Grand Casinos Inc., the Minneapolis-based company that owns the 1,149-foot tower and hotel, bought and leveled a four-block area for its expansion.
Schuetz said he and his vice presidents personally went out to the area and hauled away trash, raked yards and gave away food to residents.
He said the Stratosphere has "tried to be good corporate citizens, but we can't do it alone, especially with the issue of crime."
Manning, who is leading the investigation into the weekend murder of 29-year-old Edwin Lopez of Guatamala, said the statistics do show that there's "an awful lot of violence in a concentrated area."
Manning said he requested statistics on the area "to get a clearer understanding of what was occurring and see if we could do something about it.
"I've given this information to different pro-active units in the department to see if there's some sort of an impact that can be made on reducing this trend," he said.
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