Can't Stop Won't Stop (9 page)

The story of the Bronx gangs is a dub history of 1968 through 1973, the other side of the revolution, the exception that became the rule.

At 162nd and Westchester, in the Hunt's Point section of the South Bronx, Benjamin Melendez and his friends formed the Ghetto Brothers. They spawned a number of other gangs—including the Roman Kings, the Savage Nomads and the Seven Immortals. The Savage Skulls had taken their name from Melendez as well. Across the Bronx River, a small band of hardrocks at the Bronxdale Houses called the Savage Seven grew and adopted a new name, the Black Spades. By 1968, the stage was set for a new generation of gangs to take over the Bronx. What should have been five years of revolution instead became five years of gang strife.

This generation was a different breed than the Wanderer generation, the silk-jacketed, doo-wop singing gangs of the late 1950s and early ‘60s. Nor were they the optimistic youth of the mid-'60s period of brown/Black crossover, the bugalú/boogaloo generation, who had danced their nights away with James Brown, Joe Cuba, and Pete Rodriguez. And most of them did not share the college-bred, high-flying idealism of their peers, the political radicals. Only one in four youths in the borough even graduated from high school.

The gangs were a vanguard of the rubble. They were rough, grimy, dirty-down, all cut sleeves and Nazi patches. They had no reason to sing sweet harmonies. They were the children of Moses's grand experiment, and the fires had
already begun. They did not dance in integrated clubs. Those venues had closed, and the borough was resegregating, isolating Black and brown and white. They did not burn for a distant ideology. They idolized the Hell's Angels.

“You know that one percent that don't fit in and don't care? We were living our lifestyle,” Mercado says. That lifestyle was distilled into the colors on their jacket. “Back in England every family had their coat of arms. This is our family coat of arms. We don't want to be dealing with society's bullshit. This is what we are, this is what we be. You give me respect I give you respect. Simple.”

Gangs structured the chaos. For immigrant latchkey kids, foster children outside the system, girls running away from abusive environments, and thousands of others, the gangs provided shelter, comfort, and protection. They channeled energies and provided enemies. They warded off boredom and gave meaning to the hours. They turned the wasteland into a playground. They felt like a family. “We like to ride and we like to stay together so we all do the same things and we're happy that way,” said Tata, a Savage Skull girl. “That's the only way we can survive out here, because if we all go our own ways, one by one, we're gone.”
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The gangs preyed on the weak: the elderly, drug addicts, store-owners, unaffiliated youths, each other. But in time, some residents began to see them as the real law on the streets. Savage Skull Danny DeJesus says, “Before they would go to the local police, the people would come to us to solve their problems.” Even
New York Post
columnist Pete Hamill wrote, “The best single thing that has happened on the streets of New York in the past ten years is the re-emergence of the teenage gangs . . . These young people are standing up for life, and if their courage lasts, they will help this city to survive.”
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Hamill especially celebrated the gang's crusade to push to rid the streets of junkies and pushers. The gangs' reemergence had coincided with the sudden availability of Southeast Asian heroin. DeJesus says, “It got to the point where they were shooting up on the rooftops, in the hallways. And then what else came with drug addiction? Burglaries. So we get rid of them, we get rid of the problem that comes with being an addict, which is robbing, stealing, taking my mother's pocketbook. The cops weren't doing anything. We were doing their dirty work.”

Gangs broke into shooting galleries to warn junkies and pushers that they had twenty-four hours to leave. Then things would get violent. When a member
of the Seven Immortals was stabbed by a junkie, the gang retaliated by raping and murdering another. In the summer of 1971, the Savage Skulls declared war. “We took it out on any junkie we saw,” says Mercado. “We did them in.”

What happened next became known as the “Junkie Massacre.” As soon as open season was declared, the Ghetto Brothers, Savage Nomads, Roman Kings, the Brothers and Sisters, and the Black Spades all came down for a piece of the action. From Prospect Avenue to Simpson Street, gangs roved down blocks, buildings, and alleys looking for heroin-addled buzzards to draw blood.

“It was a way of helping the community, but we wasn't thinking that. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing because they jumped two of our brothers,” Mercado says. Instead, it was about pride and preservation and club rules and going all the way.

In three years, the gangs colonized the borough. Gang colors transformed the bombed-out city grid into a spiraling matrix of beefs. “If you went through someone's neighborhood, you were a target. Or you had to take off your jacket,” Carlos Suarez, the president of the Ghetto Brothers, recalls. “If you got caught, they beat the hell out of you.”

The bigger gangs fragmented into many more, and when one neighborhood got organized into a gang, another sprang up in self-defense. The police and the media suddenly realized that gangs had divided up the Bronx from Morris Heights to Soundview. In time, they estimated that there were a hundred different gangs claiming 11,000 members, and that 70 percent were Puerto Rican, the rest Black. The gangs figured the member estimates were too low, and that the racial estimates revealed more about policing than reality.
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The Ghetto Brothers gang was one of the most powerful, with more than a thousand members in divisions as far away as New Jersey and Connecticut.
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Suarez was their leader, a handsome twenty-one-year-old martial arts expert with dark curly locks and a coy, secretive smile. On the street, he was known as the short-tempered, street fighting “Karate Charlie,” but to women and outsiders, he conveyed a boyish curiosity and a shy charm. He had joined a gang called the Egyptians at the age of twelve, but left as its members all became strung out on heroin, joining other gangs until he befriended Benjamin Melendez.

Melendez, the vice-president, was the skinny, whip-smart nineteen-year-old
who had founded the gang. He was a teenage diplomat turned young revolutionary, a gifted organizer and orator. “Yellow Benjy,” as he was called, was known to give impromptu speeches to his followers, often laced with blood-and fire Old Testament scripture. They half-mockingly called him “The Preacher.” He could fight as well as anyone, but his real love was music. As children, he and his brothers had won a talent contest singing Beatles songs for Tito Puente. Now he led the Ghetto Brothers' Latin-rock band and was at the center of any clubhouse party. When they broke out the guitars, he especially favored a Beatles tune called “This Boy,” a song whose sweet, close harmonies masked menace and foreboding. It began: “That boy took my love away. He'll regret it someday . . .”

If other gangs spoke of themselves as “families,” the Ghetto Brothers actually began as one. Benjy, Ulpiano, Victor, and Robert Melendez were brothers whose family was among thousands of Moses's lower Manhattan refugees. In 1961, Moses began an “urban renewal” project to clear the slums of Greenwich Village, Little Italy, Soho, and Chinatown to make room for office and high-rise apartment buildings and the eight-lane Lower Manhattan Expressway. Although a citizen's campaign to stop the Expressway succeeded by the end of 1962, the Melendezes joined Moses's exodus into the Bronx.

Settling near the Cross-Bronx Expressway, Benjy followed two of his friends, Huey and Raymond, into a small Tremont gang on Marmion Avenue called the Cofon Cats. When Benjy tired of hanging out with the Cats and his family moved south of Crotona Park, he formed a new clique with his brothers and friends, including Huey, Raymond and Karate Charlie. Benjy came up with a number of names—including the Savage Skulls, the Seven Immortals and the Savage Nomads—and they settled on the Ghetto Brothers.

Suarez's grandmother kicked him out of the house when he was eighteen, so he enrolled in the Marines and ran with the gang before shipping out for boot-camp. On Christmas break in 1970, he went AWOL and came back to the gang. So he went by many names: Charles Kariem Lei, Charles Rivera, Charles Magdaleno. He told reporters his first name was Charlie and his surname was Melendez.

When Charlie returned, Benjy conspired to make him president. Suarez brought discipline and battle-readiness to the gang. He says, “I tried to teach them hand-to-hand combat. I tried to teach them how to throw a Molotov cocktail.”

The two became a formidable core. Suarez says, “Benjy was my Yin and I
was the Yang. Good cop, bad cop. I was the one that grabbed them by the throat and administered punishment. Benjy was the one that intervened.”

Benjy had become a supporter of the Puerto Rican Socialist Party, and was pulling the group toward politics. “The guys were wearing black berets and red stars,” says Suarez. “Everybody had grown their hair real long. They looked more militant.”

In some ways, the Ghetto Brothers had begun to resemble a
lumpenteen
version of the Young Lords Party. They criticized the quality of health care at the Lincoln Hospital, a place they called the “Butcher Shop,” questioned why youths had no jobs or recreation available to them, and decried heavy-handed policing. They forced slumlords to allow them in to clean the tenements, and set up a free-breakfast program and free-clothing drive. They became security for prominent Puerto Rican nationalists. They referred to themselves as “the people's army.” By the summer of 1971, Melendez had come up with another name that described their new activities: The South Bronx Defensive Unit. He told Charlie, “Let's stop this gang stuff and form an organization for peace.”

A charismatic twenty-five-year old, half-African-American, half–Puerto Rican exjunkie named Cornell Benjamin had come into the fold. Known as “Black Benjie,” he became the third staff leader of the Ghetto Brothers. Most gangs had “warlords,” whose chief duties involved stockpiling the arsenal, training the members in fighting skills and military techniques, and negotiating times and places for rumbles. But at Melendez's suggestion, Black Benjie became Peace Counselor.

If there was a gang that could bring peace to the Bronx, perhaps it would be the Ghetto Brothers.

After three years of gang proliferation, Dwyer Junior High had become the central flashpoint for the Bronx gangs. Located at Stebbins Avenue near 165th, the school was at the center of a number of turfs, and its halls were crowded with rival gangbangers. In March, a boy at Dwyer harassed a Savage Nomad sister. She called on Suarez and Savage Nomad president Ben Buxton to back her up. It became an event. Hundreds gathered to see the perpetrator beat down, then they followed as the gangs marched triumphantly through the schoolyard.

From a safe distance teacher Manny Dominguez watched, awestruck. He was convinced that the gang leaders were the most promising young people in
the area. They weren't sheep like the rest of the students; they were rebels with sharpened, anti-authoritarian reflexes, rappers possessed of mother-wit, renegades to whom the future should belong. With school principal Morton Weinberger's consent, Dominguez began meeting with the gangs.

Dominguez's wife, Rita Fecher, had separately gone down to the Ghetto Brothers clubhouse to demand that they leave her students alone. As they talked, Fecher became interested in their lives. Realizing no one was going to tell their stories, she picked up a Super 8 camera and began filming interviews with the teen leaders, which would be gathered years later for Fecher's and Henry Chalfant's classic Bronx gang documentary,
Flyin' Cut Sleeves
.

In these frames, Fecher captured the vitality and tragedy of the emerging gangs. Here was Melendez and the Ghetto Brothers band on a tar-beach rooftop, wailing out Grand Funk Railroad's epic of paranoia and disease, “I'm Your Captain”: “Everybody listen to me and return me my ship, I'm your captain I'm your captain though I'm feeling mighty sick”; a teenaged Blackie Mercado under a straw hat, a relaxed, dimpled grin on his face, talking about uniting Blacks and Puerto Ricans for the purpose of attacking a rival gang—”They wanted to make it a racial problem, so we made it an
un
-racial problem”; Ben Buxton in the street proudly bragging about the murders he had committed, then later, behind closed doors, thoughtfully analyzing legal aspects of his upcoming gun-charge sentencing (his verdict: he'd be gone for a long time); and most tellingly, a group of angry Puerto Rican girls confronting Buxton and Mercado. “How would you like it,” one of them asked, “if someone came along and took your kid's life, your wife's life, or maybe even
your
life?”

Together, Dominguez and Fecher took the Ghetto Brothers, the Savage Skulls, and the Savage Nomads under their wing. At their West Village flat, they held what Fecher described as “salons,” where they discussed youth crises, Puerto Rican independence, the criminal justice system, global issues. The two teachers became advocates for the gang members, particularly Melendez and Suarez from the Ghetto Brothers, in whom they found an uncommon wisdom and a desire to move beyond the streets.

Melendez, in particular, was ready for a change. “You can't walk the streets peacefully these days,” he said. “You could never tell what's gonna happen around the corner—where those drug addicts could jump you or another club could stop you, say ‘Give me your money,' and right there they kill you.”
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They secured the Ghetto Brothers a storefront clubhouse on 163rd and Steb-bins, fully funded by the city's Youth Services Agency. Through contacts at New York University, they provided the gang with musical instruments. The media, attracted by the teachers, came to the Bronx to report on the gangs.