A man in Arizona has pleaded guilty to violating federal fire restrictions and unlawfully residing in a national forest, after authorities said he spent years living at a makeshift campsite surrounded by what officials described as “approximately 1,000 pounds of trash”.

Mark Aaron Gatz was arrested on 25 June at his illegal campsite in Arizona’s Tonto national forest, according to court records. A United States Forest Service (USFS) officer wrote in documents submitted to court that Gatz had been operating an “illegal campsite” with a “hot wood burning campfire” despite fire restrictions and that he had told investigators that he had been living in the forest for about eight years.

The officer wrote that a records check found that Gatz had previously received multiple citations and was the subject of six outstanding federal arrest warrants for earlier violations, including for building fires during fire restrictions, constructing on national forest service lands, unsanitary conditions and occupying national forest as a residence.

Gatz “said that he knew about current fire restrictions but had to have fire to eat”, authorities said. The documents show that USFS officers made contact with Gatz multiple times over the last year or so, and issued him warnings as well as a violation notice for having campfires during fire restrictions.

Notes from officers’ previous encounters with Gatz earlier this year, submitted into the court docket, state that authorities observed “trash such as clothing, pans, tools, and plastic cups scattered throughout the campsite along with a structure that was four feet in height build using wood panels”.

During an encounter with Gatz in May, officers reported observing “approximately 1,000 pounds of trash” at the site, which they said included tires, plastic bags, trash bags, aluminum cans and other items. They also wrote that they found that the campfire site had been left unattended by Gatz the previous day while still hot.

In a separate report filed by law enforcement from an encounter in February, one officer wrote that “upon arrival at the camp, I was flabbergasted by the amount of debris in the area”.

Investigators said that during that encounter, the debris consisted of three ladders, six to eight totes “overfilled with debris”, five 55-gallon drums, eight tires, multiple bicycle frames, 5 gallons of motor oil, plywood and other “miscellaneous lumber”, and they wrote that trash was scattered over approximately half an acre of Forest Service land and creating what officers described as public safety concerns.

In a separate report from July 2025, officers said they observed what they described as a “large messy campsite” while patrolling the area due to complaints “from the district office abut one large messy camp”.

“There was roughly half an acre of resources ruined due to so much trash and goods on the ground for an extended period of time,” the officer wrote.

This week, after Gatz pleaded guilty, he was sentenced to time served and three years of probation, according to court records.

A representative for Gatz did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

It’s midafternoon outside KIPP Academy of Opportunity, a charter school serving children in fifth through eighth grade on South Figueroa Street in residential Los Angeles. As children inside prepare for their futures, a young female struts by in high heels, wearing nothing but a bikini and a jacket. 

“We’ll see some police officers roll by and some young women out here just prostituting. They’re walking right by, and the police drive right by them,” the school’s gun-toting security guard said. “It’s normal.”

This is Figueroa Corridor, one of California’s most notorious sex markets. Here, prostitutes gather, night after night, selling sex acts that, according to one former cop, cost as little as $25. Last year, members and associates of a gang were indicted after allegedly trafficking adults and minors—including foster children—along the corridor and branding them with tattoos.

This was all the predictable result of public policy. In 2022, Governor Gavin Newsom signed a law decriminalizing loitering with intent to commit prostitution. When he signed the bill, Newsom suggested it would help would reduce the harassment of women.

We went to Figueroa to see the results for ourselves. As we walked the corridor, saw the sex market, and rode along with a former LAPD vice cop, one thing became clear: on Figueroa, human flesh is big business—something state leaders appear to have no desire to change.

The scene stretches across almost four miles of hot, dusty cement. Nearly nude women cluster at the start of side streets just off the main road. Lines of cars slowly cruise along, apparently hoping to buy. Pimps either oversee the prostitutes themselves, on a nearby phone, or through hired low-level watchers. Sirens blare constantly, but officers often just roll on by. When asked about activity on the corridor, one prostitute said, “money and p*ssy,” before twerking and walking away.

Stephany Powell, a former sergeant in an LAPD Vice unit and former executive director at Journey Out, a Los Angeles–based nonprofit serving human trafficking victims, rode with us along the corridor.

“Statistically, the average age of entry for human sex trafficking is between the ages of 12 and 14 years old,” she said. “We’d see 14-, 15-year-olds that were out on the prostitution tracks. We also would see 25-to-30-year-olds . . . some of them had been out on the streets on the prostitution tracks since age 13. And in those cases, nine times out of ten, they had a trafficker.”

Figueroa has been a sex-trafficking den for decades. But recent policy changes have made the corridor harder to police. In California, it had been a crime to loiter with the intent of committing prostitution since at least 1995. Patrol officers could use this law to curtail the street market—and stop, identify, and rescue trafficked minors.

That began to change in 2016. That year, then-Governor Jerry Brown signed S.B. 1322, prohibiting minors from being charged with solicitation of and loitering with intent to commit prostitution. The law was arguably well-intentioned, reflecting a belief that trafficked children shouldn’t be treated as criminals.

But that wasn’t enough for the state’s progressives. In 2021, State Senator Scott Wiener authored S.B. 357, a bill that would fully decriminalize loitering with intent to commit prostitution. A trio of the state’s most powerful progressive institutions—the Anti-Defamation League, the ACLU’s California chapter, and Equality California—rallied behind the bill, which passed in 2022.

Governor Gavin Newsom signed the bill in July of that year, suggesting that it would reduce the “harassment of women.” He also referenced “transgender adults,” seemingly endorsing LGBT activists’ view that the loitering statute had criminalized “walking while trans.”

“Black adults accounted for 56.1% of the loitering charges in Los Angeles between 2017-2019, despite making up less than 10% of the city’s population,” Newsom wrote. “To be clear, this bill does not legalize prostitution. It simply revokes provisions of the law that have led to disproportionate harassment of women and transgender adults.”

Since the law’s passage, however, Figueroa has more prostitutes than it did before. Before S.B. 357, Powell says she delivered around 30 makeup kits along the entire corridor each night that she engaged in outreach efforts. When we drove past a particularly active handful of blocks, Powell said that after “S.B. 357 passed, we counted about 60 girls just from this track [alone].”

More minors are apparently being trafficked, too. The Times reported that LAPD Sergeant Al Navarro’s officers, who work at the nearby 77th Street station, rescued 123 children in 2024—a nearly eightfold increase from 2022, the year before S.B. 357 took effect.

The law itself is driving these trends. Before S.B. 357, police officers could use a woman’s attire and behavior to determine that she was loitering to commit prostitution. Once that behavior was decriminalized, prostitutes began wearing hardly any clothes—and law enforcement found itself helpless to control the sex trade.

“A lot of the girls hardly have anything on, they’re practically naked. In many cases you can see right through whatever they’re wearing,” Powell said. “Before S.B. 357 . . . what would happen if we were working vice and we’d see somebody out there like that, we could arrest them for solicitation of prostitution. Now, in order for you to arrest them for solicitation of prostitution, there has to be an act involved.”

S.B. 357 has also enabled traffickers. In the past, a patrol officer could arrest a loitering prostitute to get her off the streets and encourage her to testify against a trafficker. Today, law enforcement has to use resource-strapped undercover units to target traffickers one-by-one.

“SB 357 removed a key enforcement tool that kept communities free from red light blight,” former Los Angeles County sheriff Alex Villanueva told us. “This ill-advised bill condemned the marginalized to be sex trafficked, and human trafficking has exploded.”

The situation is so dire that the federal government intervened. In August 2025, First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli spearheaded the region’s first-ever RICO human trafficking case against the vicious Hoover Criminal Gang. Essayli’s office charged six members and associates of the Hoovers with various crimes, including sex trafficking of minors, money laundering, and sexual exploitation of a child.

The indictment spells out the depraved allegations. The Hoovers and their associates allegedly targeted adults and children as young as 14; branded their victims with tattoos; and, in some cases, required their victims to secure $1,000 per night. In one instance, a Hoover associate and two unindicted co-conspirators allegedly tried to kidnap prostitutes from San Bernardino, a plot that failed only when the two targets broke free and escaped.

On July 1, 2026, a federal follow-up operation took down another ten suspects, including the operator of a seedy motel, who was charged with “financially benefiting from the Hoover gang’s sex trafficking operation.”

City Journal’s four-day visit to the corridor took place just before the second operation against the Hoovers and revealed the challenges faced by the ongoing federal efforts. Figueroa still pulsed with activity, with the entire apparatus of apparent prostitutes, pimps, watchers, and Johns out in the open for all to see. Police drove on by. Women walk the corridor, risking disease, beatings, and death with each step.

When he signed S.B. 357, Gavin Newsom suggested that the new law would help reduce harassment against women. What it enabled instead is a wave of crime, suffering, and abuse.