Unfair Park from p6 The farm itself, it’s thought, was origi- nally run and leased by Japanese immi- grants who came here during a big immigra- tion push in the 1920s after World War I, Sandifer said. He said it’s thought that the Japanese family was forced to sell their land and their farm at the beginning of World War II because of their heritage. “It’s kind of sad about what happened to this land and how someone had their land taken away from them, people that were American citizens, but were Japanese by birth in this area,” he said. “So, it’s kind of a dark tale about a forgotten piece of Dallas history.” The structure was still intact when Sand- ifer first started going out to Lemmon Lake. “It had a metal tin roof to it,” he said. “I’ve been down here a couple times when storms were blowing up and it’s the only shelter out here really to get in a dry spot.” Out on the bike trail, riders used to be able to hear the tin roof rattling in the wind. “It was kind of a ghostly sound coming from this thing,” he said. Eventually, he made it to a shoreline of the Trinity River. “As far as rivers go in Texas, it might not be the cleanest. Maybe it’s one of the dirtiest, but it is our river,” he said. “It’s important to Texans.” He said it’s the most important river for Texas because it supplies our drinking, as well as the water supply for the Houston area. The water from the Trinity River is also important to the petrochemical industry. Then, in the Trinity Bay, it turns into brackish water that fuels a lot of the seafood supply for the Gulf of Mexico. “It’s a pol- luted and impaired water body. So, the fish are too toxic to eat. You shouldn’t drink the water, you shouldn’t even swim in it most of the time,” he said. “You shouldn’t even touch it in some extreme examples.” But it cleans itself out. “By the time it gets to Lake Liv- ingston, which is north of Houston, the wa- ter in the river becomes clean enough for people to eat the fish and swim in Lake Liv- ingston,” he said. After nearly two hours of toughing it through the harsh terrain of the Great Trin- ity Forest, Sandifer made it to the breach in the levee. It’s a mess of knotted-up concrete and rebar. Looking at the breach, “You can just see the explosive nature of what the river can do when it rears its ugly head,” Sandifer said. “I can almost guarantee you and assure you that we’re the first people that have come and stood here on foot to get to this spot in years. Getting to this spot, the entrance fee is kind of high for this ride.” Theoretically, the levee breach could be plugged but, Sandifer said, “It would be a quick fix to a bigger problem that wouldn’t last very long.” A man named Jeff Lane was tending to the levee before it broke. His family owns Lane Plating Works Inc., which is an envi- ronmental superfund site now. There was some worry of pollution in Lemmon Lake from the Lane Plating facility. Sandifer thought if pollution was found 8 8 near Lemmon Lake, maybe some of the su- perfund money could help restore it. He was going to all the Environmental Protection Agency meetings about this at the time. “I wanted to see this environmental problem fixed because I’m the human,” he said. “If there’s a human that’s walking down here that could be exposed to this stuff, I’m it. I carry it on my shoes on the way home.” But, when the pandemic hit, talk of using superfund money for Lemmon Lake went silent. The plans fell through, as they usually do. “I think that the people that are most en- trusted with protecting this place do the least to help protect it the way that they should,” he said. “That’s one of the problems I’ve always had with the city of Dallas.” He’s not sure if it’s a lack of awareness, or just blatant indifference by the city. “There are other cities that will spend tens of mil- lions of dollars to try to recreate a habitat, an ecological setting like this for a park inside their city,” he said. “Here, we have it, and in- stead of protecting it or trying to enhance it, we’re wrecking it.” Sandifer added: “The old Dallasites — the ones that polluted and tore up things with reckless abandon — their hands and their chainsaws and their bulldozers didn’t make it here to this spot. And I think that we as Dallasites have to protect it, not for our- selves, but for five generations from now. We can do that. All we have to do is leave it alone or manage it in a way that’s appropriate.” Davante Peters is the secretary of the Lane Plating Community Advisory Board. Peters said he’d like to see efforts to preserve the lake and “keep the promises to make this area an attraction and something the resi- dents of southern Dallas can admire and be proud of.” He said it’s important to preserve those environments that make and define local ecosystems and the city. “Investing into this lake and in Joppa could give residents a newfound pride in their community, a sense of feeling supported by local government,” Peters said. Every year the levee didn’t break, Sandi- fer celebrated. “Now that it’s gone, I’m sad- dened that we don’t get to experience the wildlife and the charismatic sun rises and sunsets over there.” But, he’s not exactly sure what to do about it. Sometimes he won- ders if doing nothing is better than doing something. In Dallas, he said, “In order to get a proj- ect in somewhere, we have to screw some- thing else to do it. It doesn’t have to be that way, but that’s just the way Dallas does busi- ness and builds stuff.” There’s a lot that could be done to help revitalize the area, but Sandifer just doesn’t think it’s the Dallas way. “It’s not a force multiplier,” he said. “It doesn’t contribute to the overall. Dallas is looking for something brand new, bright and shiny. Something you can brag about. A lot of the things that need to be done down here aren’t sexy.” He’s been going to Joppa since the late ’80s. As a kid in church youth groups, he would go down there with others to work on homes. Some of the houses he helped build as a kid are still there. These days though, “Unless I’m invited to help them with some- thing, I don’t go down there and try to do anything,” he said. “It’s not my neighbor- hood.” courtesy Ben Sandifer He said both neighborhood advocates and outside philanthropists have tried to en- list Sandifer’s help with projects in the area, but he’s not quite sure where he fits in it all. “I don’t play favorites or sides. I don’t live in South Dallas and I also don’t have a large bank account. So, where do I fit in?” Sandi- fer said. “I’ve kind of come to the conclusion that maybe I just fit in out here, not in the neighborhood or at a soirée where I’m drinking 50-year-old scotch. I’m kind of in the middle of the road with all these issues, and maybe the middle of the road is this place, the forest out here.” The future isn’t exactly bright for Lem- mon Lake, but now it serves a new purpose, Sandifer said. It has turned into this magnif- icent wet meadow where other wildlife can flourish. “[It’s] the Trinity River reclaiming some- thing that humans built. It’s literally the re- turn back to nature,” he said. “It’s the natural process of things. If humans leave something alone long enough, it will revert back to nature.” ▼ CRIME PESTILENT PRODIGY T AN ARYAN CIRCLE LEADER WILL CATCHES AN 87-MONTH SENTENCE IN FEDERAL PRISON OVER A GANG BEATING. BY PATRICK STRICKLAND hreats. Brutal beatings. Meth deals. Murders. The Texas-based prison gang Aryan Circle, the second largest of its kind in the state, has spent more than three decades building a reputation as one of the most cutthroat white supremacist out- fits behind bars. But last week, federal authorities an- nounced another victory against Aryan Cir- cle. U.S. District Judge Thad Heartfield sentenced Michael Martin, a 38-year-old Aryan Circle leader known as “Aryan Prod- igy,” to 87 months in a federal prison half a year after Martin pleaded guilty to assault resulting in serious bodily injury in aid of racketeering. The more than seven-year sentence A boy rests on a pier at Lemmon Lake in the 1950s when the lake was full of fish. comes only three months after the feds de- livered another blow to Aryan Circle. In July, three of the gang’s affiliates pleaded guilty on several federal charges related to assault and meth dealing. According to court documents, Martin, who joined Aryan Circle in the early 2000s, ordered his subordinates to attack another member who planned on leaving the gang and joining a different group in October 2016. The gang members confronted the man at a park in Tyler, Texas, and “violently beat the victim, including kicking [him] in the head while he was on the ground,” the U.S. Department of Justice in East Texas said in March. The man later had to receive medical treatment. “The defendant’s violent actions demon- strate his commitment to a hateful and dan- gerous ideology,” Acting U.S. Attorney Nicholas J. Ganjei said in a press release last Wednesday, adding that the “sentence shows that no gang is above the law.” As one of the top-five leaders in Aryan Cir- cle, Martin made decisions and issued direc- tives about “who to recruit and admit as members of the gang, who should be disci- plined or removed for violating the AC rules, and which rival gangs the AC would fight,” the DOJ’s East Texas office said in the statement. Aryan Circle was founded in the mid- 1980s as a breakaway from the larger, older Aryan Brotherhood of Texas. The group’s membership ballooned throughout the 1990s as Aryan Circle members waged war against rival gangs in lockup. In 2007, Aryan Circle was linked to the murder of two police officers in Bastrop, Louisiana, according to the Anti-Defama- tion League watchdog. Meanwhile, the gang often goes after competing outfits in prison while hunting down and killing suspected informants and members they view as “weak links,” the ADL said in a report. The ADL estimates that Aryan Circle commands a membership of some >> p10 MONTH XX–MONTH XX, 2014 OCTOBER 14–20, 2021 DALLAS OBSERVER DALLAS OBSERVER | CLASSIFIED | MUSIC | DISH | MOVIES | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | FEATURE | SCHUTZE | UNFAIR PARK | CONTENTS | CLASSIFIED | MUSIC | DISH | CULTURE | UNFAIR PARK | CONTENTS dallasobserver.com dallasobserver.com
