By Sunny Day
Las Vegas Tribune
What started as a typical news story pointing out the ineptness of Las Vegas City Code Enforcement enforcing the city codes with people running businesses without a license, insurance and even safety precautions became a life-threatening story.
For more than two years the Las Vegas Tribune has written articles of people building apartments without permits, mechanics working days and nights, car-washing blocking the traffic with cones in front of their homes, independent car salesman from a private residence, parking up to eleven cars on the street, bought at California and local auctions and paying no license or insurance fees and no taxes.
The articles were based on cases from different areas of the city and about people cooking in the middle of the street; the Health Department told the newspaper that there was nothing they could do — do about ice cream vendors in different corners of the city without a license, including the infamous Lilliput Lane, but Code Enforcement never took action because the code enforcement agents were being paid by someone in the area.
The code enforcement agent in the area, Anthony Rogers, was transferred from the Ward One area and another code enforcement agent, Lori Hageman, came to that area and business continued as always for three years.
The Alpine Hotel fire took place in December of last year and the malfunction of the code enforcement department came to light so they started to enforce the city codes to cover up their incompetence and those on Lilliput Lane assumed that it was because of our series on code enforcement, blaming the Alpine Hotel fire on lack of enforcement of the city code.
By Lori Hageman’s own admission, she had not been in the Lilliput area in two years and the Code Enforcement agent assigned to the Alpine Hotel was Anthony Rogers, since he was transferred from Ward One to Ward Five and admitted that he had not visited the Alpine Hotel in three years.
The car washer, Benjamin Diana, who lives four houses away from the residence of the owners of the Las Vegas Tribune, started yelling at one of the owners of the newspaper. “You are a snitch; you are as good as dead,” he said, repeating it again and again, adding that “You’re gonna be sorry for it.”
If the Las Vegas Tribune staff was going to be scared or take every threat seriously every time the newspaper writes a controversial article, they would never write anything, or not even step out of their home.
However, this time the threat was a little more real and was taken as serious as it needs to be; a man that visits the residence of Diana and the car salesman by the name of Luis (last name unknown, and AKA Tony), who lives across the street from Diana, pulled over at the owners of the Las Vegas Tribune’s family residence in a White minivan yelling “Communist” and “Snitch” while waiving a gun and telling the person in front of the house “You are dead!” Police arrived in a very short time and officer Salas inquired about what happened.
Officer Salas was told that the man with the gun came out of Benjamin Diana’s residence in case they wanted to inquire about the man’s name, but they both seemed reluctant to do so appearing to be scared or afraid for their lives. The event was captured on the security cameras, but it was not clear due to the bright light during the time of the day, but it seemed to be the same image of the person who was caught vandalizing the family car. The family is now waiting for the police report to be able to consult legal advice in the case.
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