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I’m like, three-viral-Republican-lies-about-immigration behind so I’ll make this quick: no, the Hells Angels did not travel to Aurora, Colorado because a Venezuelan gang took over an apartment complex. However, yes, I WOULD watch a Sons of Anarchy/Judge Dredd crossover directed by Paul Verhoeven, now that you mention it.
When I first saw Republican propaganda outlets like Fox News broadcasting this as fact, I knew it was fake because, well, obviously. The Hells Angels are an outlaw motorcycle club, not the Justice League. I know that over the past 76 years they’ve been active, Americans have worked hard to romanticize them as a freedom-loving tough-talking brotherhood of cool dudes but the reality is that they’re a loose collection of mostly white men who enjoy doing crimes, like drug trafficking and mixing up plural and possessive nouns and other standard gang shit. If you’ve never read Hunter S. Thompson’s book on his experience with them, I highly recommend it as a surprisingly complex and balanced look inside the Hells Angels back in the 1960s.
As that book illustrates, there is also a rich history of racism amongst the Hells Angels, and so sure, it wouldn’t shock me if you told me that some particular chapter decided to go beat up some immigrants, but this black and white framing of Venezuelan immigrants as dangerous gang members and Hells Angels as patriotic lovers of law and order is just obviously idiotic.
What I didn’t know from the headlines, though, was how this particular idiotic story was made up. Why Venezuelans? Why the Hells Angels? Why Aurora, Colorado, a town I previously only heard of thanks to a particularly memorable mass shooting. I live in the US, so a mass shooting has to be particularly weird in order to stick in my memory.
Anyway, I was curious how this story came to be, and I regret to inform you that I’m going to be extremely on brand here: this is NOT a story about how American towns are filling with violent criminals because of unchecked open borders This is a story about how American towns are being destroyed by unchecked capitalism.
I know, I know. It’s always capitalism. The end of every Scooby Doo episode: rip off the bigfoot mask and it’s just Old Man Capitalism again.
It all started at the end of August, when video footage from an Aurora apartment building went viral. It showed several men with guns breaking into an apartment in a complex in Aurora, and outlets like Fox News labeled them as potentially being members of the Tren de Aragua (TdA) Venezuelan street gang, further suggesting that the entire building had been “taken over” by the gang.
Then for some reason, I guess just because it’s social media and this is what social media does, people began sharing old footage of a group of guys on motorcycles and claiming it was the heroic white American Hells Angels on the way to murder the mean old bad immigrant gang.
So the Hells Angels part was pretty quickly debunked–too quickly for Elon Musk, I guess, because it seems community notes have now changed to only vaguely suggest misinformation is “media presented out of context” with no further context offered. Great.
But what about the Venezuelan gang? Is that true?
It didn’t take me long to dig through the Fox News and NY Post bullshit in order to find accurate reporting from local news. You know, the people who are actually there, in Aurora, seeing what’s going on.
As far back as March of 2023, local news outlet Denver7 has been documenting the appalling conditions that are forced upon tenants of the Fitzsimmons Apartments, which, like every slum I’ve ever lived in or near, is also known by a dozen other names, many of them sarcastic. Tenants contacted Denver7 because they had gone several winter months without any heat, but with plenty of mold and rodents. Their landlord, CBZ Management, had refused to answer any of their complaints, so Denver7 came and documented the disgusting state of the apartments. Unfortunately, they couldn’t stay long because they themselves reported feeling too unsafe and they ran away.
I’ll pause here to note that CBZ Management, despite owning properties in Colorado, is actually based in Brooklyn, New York. They also own properties there, and judging by the Google reviews, it doesn’t appear that tenants benefit from being in the same state as their landlords: across many properties in either state, tenants are united on the fact that they are slumlords. Rodents, bullshit fees, water falling from the ceiling, and over and over again zero response from any kind of management.
So that report was in March 2023. It took more than a year for the city to finally take action, as they announced in early August of 2024 that they would close the apartments for a multitude of code violations. Denver7 returned to the apartments to see what was happening, and they found “found mountains of trash piled up at the property” because CBZ just stopped garbage pickup. The tenants banded together to raise money to hire a company to haul it away, but obviously they couldn’t afford to keep that up indefinitely.
Denver7 reached out to CBZ for comment, as they did last year with no success. This time, though, CBZ hired a PR firm to respond. The PR firm is the group that announced that the problem wasn’t years of slumlord mismanagement but the evil Venezuelan gang who had not only taken over THAT property, but several other properties owned by CBZ, leading one Google reviewer to wonder if the gang was on the CBZ payroll.
The city responded by saying no, the code violations had nothing to do with any gangs. Further evidence against this is that vicious gangs of criminals rarely purposely keep a landlord from improving the place they’re living, instead choosing to pay out of pocket for things like garbage removal.
I have no doubt that crime IS rising in that apartment complex. The local police report that they “investigated 41 crimes at the property in 2022, 84 crimes in 2023, and 66 crimes in 2024 through July 31.” And that’s because, as Princeton sociologists detailed after completing a study in 2023, “run-down properties—places with faulty window locks, rickety doors, and malfunctioning lights—make crimes like burglary that much easier. Second, frequent evictions undermine residential stability and neighborhood cohesion. It’s hard to develop trust or a sense of community—a key aspect in crime prevention—if people are constantly getting evicted. Third, neglectful landlords rarely visit their properties, and may be more likely to turn a blind eye to illegal activity. Fourth, these landlords more often rent to tenants who may be more likely to commit crimes and are turned away by other landlords.”
In their study, the researchers looked at the location of crime in various Milwaukee neighborhoods and properties, finding that a small minority of landlords were hosting the vast majority of crimes. They even were able to control for “dangerous” neighborhoods by comparing the landlords with “extractive practices” (more code violations and more evictions) with other landlords, and found that “All else equal, properties owned by landlords with a pattern of extractive management have dramatically higher rates of assault. Properties managed by extractive landlords also show higher levels of burglary, robbery, and other types of crime.”
And lest you think that’s just in Milwaukee, back in 2022 another group of researchers examined crime in all 148 neighborhoods of Richmond, Virginia, and found that despite looking for associations between crime and data like population density, race, income, food stamps, and even alcohol outlets, the only variable that was significantly associated with crime was…wait for it…the property owner failing to pay their property tax. They write that “taken together (with previous studies) this evidence suggests that the neighborhood instability caused by those outside a given community (e.g., negligent landlords and business owners), rather than residents, may play a significant role in fostering an environment conducive to violence in cities like Richmond, VA.”
That previous research is also pretty interesting and provides a glimmer of hope and even a roadmap forward for some tenants. A case study from 2018 describes a specific neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania called East Liberty, where 10 years prior, crime was the highest in the city. The residents there got fed up and formed their own real estate investment group with the explicit goal of buying properties from slumlords and revitalizing them. Over the next few years, crime in the neighborhood dropped by 49%.
Uh oh, it’s another stereotypical Rebecca saying: collective action works.
So yeah, what clearly happened in Aurora, Colorado is that a slumlord on the other side of the country bought some properties and optimized them for maximum profit and minimum effort: refuse to improve anything, collect fees and refuse to give back deposits, and evict anyone for any reason you can. The degraded properties attract more crime, and when the news media and city finally notice, hire a PR firm to drop the name of a scary gang of immigrants and leak a video of them to Fox News, who will always choose to go with the “immigration bad” narrative before even considering the “capitalism bad” reality.
And to the average person, what’s easier to grasp, more comforting, and more fun to believe? That our entire housing system is inherently unfair and benefits the wealthy who exploit the poor? Or that Biden let a gang of immigrants in and now our own gang of Americans are going to fight them for freedom?
This may surprise you, but I was once a landlord. Sort of. When I was 21, I was living in low income housing in Seattle when my building manager announced she was leaving and suggested I and my boyfriend at the time apply for the job because it came with a free unit and $300 a month. So we did it, and it was a really fascinating job. I learned that I, along with nearly every tenant in the building, had no idea what my rights were as a renter.
As a direct result of that, when I moved back to Boston a few years later I was able to recognize that I had accidentally rented from a slumlord and I knew I could do something about it. When I was a month into my first winter with no heat and a shower that only occasionally provided hot water, I knew it was against the law so I called my landlord and asked her to fix it. She said I was just a wimp and it wasn’t really that bad, so eventually I went to the city and I didn’t leave the buildings department until someone agreed to come evaluate the problem. Even the inspector was shocked at the condition of the building, and hit my landlord with a hefty fine and forced her to fix everything immediately.
Of course, she then went back to ignoring me, even though the only thing I complained about was a drip coming from the bathroom ceiling. She ignored my first message about it, she ignored my messages a month later saying the drip was getting worse, she ignored my messages awhile after that saying it looked like the bathroom ceiling paint was bubbling, and when I came home from work to find the ceiling had fallen into my bathtub, she said, “What do you want me to do about it, I’m not your housekeeper. If you don’t like it, move out.” So I did, and then I went to her house to get my deposit back by telling her I was going to sue her for it if she didn’t write me a check right then and there. And then I got a better apartment.
The poor (mostly) immigrants living in CBZ’s slums don’t have the resources I had. They don’t know their rights, they probably don’t have the time to go to the city and demand action, and some of them may not even speak English very well or may be worried about their immigration status coming to light. So they put up with these conditions until the city shuts down their housing, leaving them with mere days to find something new.
That’s the real story, here: we must do more to educate people about their housing rights, and further we must stop predatory landlords from buying up property like this and letting it go to ruin. If you’re a renter, please learn about your rights and fight for them, because if you’re able to do that, you could be helping not just yourself but your neighbors, too.
