Can't Stop Won't Stop

by Jeff Chang

  Lucky could still picture himself, a sullen teen slung against the fence, watching the Javelin initiates run the line below. He was an outlaw in combat boots and Lee jeans and a decorated denim jacket with cutoff sleeves. At his nape, a black hoodie hung over his own colors: a grinning white skull under a steel German war helmet.

  Born a Savage, To Die a Skull One Day

  Other gangs kept Third Avenue hot—the Chingalings and the Savage Nomads to the west, the Black Falcons to the north. Below Crotona Park, in the heart of the burnt-out South Bronx, were the turfs of the Ghetto Brothers, the Turbans, the Peacemakers, the Mongols, the Roman Kings, the Seven Immortals and the Dirty Dozens. Most of these gangs were predominantly Puerto Rican. East of the Bronx River, the Black Spades consolidated the youths of the mostly African-American communities. Further east and north across Fordham Road, in the last white communities in the Bronx, gangs like the Arthur Avenue Boys, Golden Guineas, War Pigs and the Grateful Dead were foot soldiers for angry wiseguys who spent their days cursing the imminent loss of their neighborhood.

  But the Savage Skulls were one of the most feared gangs in the Bronx. They were brazen and reckless. The First Division of the Skulls, the original set, had moved their base on Leggett Avenue and Kelly Street in the Longwood section to an abandoned apartment building just a block away from the infamous Forty-first police precinct—the one called Fort Apache, a “fort in hostile territory.” If you were looking for protection or trouble, you quit your clique and joined the Skulls.

  The gangs of the Bronx, 1970–1973.

  Map layout by Sharon Mizota

  By the time Lucky joined the Sixteenth Division, the Skulls were second in size only to the Black Spades. As many as fifty divisions of the Savage Skulls were flung across the borough and into Queens, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Alongside the western edge of Crotona Park, on Third Avenue at the Cross-Bronx Expressway, at the very beginning of the mile that the women of East Tremont had fought and lost to Robert Moses in 1952, the Skulls’ Sixteenth Division had taken over four blocks of abandoned buildings and transformed them into their clubhouses. Lucky was not the kind of kid that looked for trouble, but the Skulls ruled his neighborhood.

  To Lucky’s Puerto Rican father and Cuban mother—who arrived from Miami during the mid-1960s as part of a Latino wave that filled former Jewish communities along the Grand Concourse—he was simply Michael, a boy who loved birds. He cut school to be with his birds, dashing across the street past truancy officers and climbing several flights to a pigeon coop he had built on the roof of an abandoned building. He told a friend, “When you’re on the roof, when the birds are actually flying and nobody’s around you, it feels more free.”

  But things changed quickly. One day, he and some friends went up to Little Italy, north of Fordham Road near Bedford Park, looking for some pet stores to buy some birds. Twenty Italians swooped down on them, brandishing bats and chains and yelling slurs. Michael and his friends ran all the way back to the train station. They were learning you just didn’t go anywhere without backup.

  He met Carlos, a kid just a year older who called himself “Blue,” the only one who seemed to know more about flying birds than he did. They became fast friends, and built a fortress coop of five hundred birds across the street from Michael’s school. One day they took down some birds from a roof a block away. The owners came over to get them back—two big, scowling Savage Skulls in their early twenties named Cubby and Ruben.

  As soon as he was asked to, Blue joined the Skulls. He came back and told Michael to do it, too. “They’re just like a family,” he said. In order to be down, he would have to be checked out by the Skull leaders. If they thought he could be a good Skull, he would go through the initiation. But there was no Apache Line here. To become a Savage Skull, you played a game of Russian Roulette.

  It was a summer’s twilight when Michael arrived at the main Skulls clubhouse. He was sweating, nervous as hell. In the initiation room, a few older Skulls, their aces masks of stone, told him to take a seat. One of them brought out a rusty .22. Michael was told to examine the long bullet. The Skull dropped it into the chamber of the six-shooter, spun the barrel, and passed it to Michael. It was the first gun he had ever held. He was told he could either put it to his chin or to his head.

  He closed his eyes. He lifted the cocked gun to his head. He thought, this is it. He thought, this rusty old thing, maybe it’ll get stuck. He thought, what if it’s all gonna end right here. Sweat dripped from his chin. He pulled the trigger.

  For a while—an eternity, perhaps—he kept his eyes closed. Then, he thought, I did it. He had heard the chamber click over—just like that, click, nothing else—and the enormity of what he had done began to fill him up. Damn, he thought, I did it. He took a deep breath and exhaled.

  When the Skulls led him out of the room, they broke open a beer for him. It was the first one he had ever drank. That was how Michael got the name “Lucky Strike”—just plain Lucky, for short. He was thirteen years old.

  Soon the Skulls would be spinning out of control and Blue would be dead, killed by rivals and left in the gang clubhouse. Lucky would quit the Skulls and meet Afrika Bambaataa, a former Black Spade who was uniting Blacks and Puerto Ricans in an organization called Zulu Nation. In so many accounts, the story begins there. But here is the half that comes before, the half less often told.

  The Gangs and the Revolution

  The lifespan of youth style in New York City parallels the life-cycle of a neighborhood. It’s about five years, the time it takes for youths to come through their teens, long enough for them to imprint their own codes, styles, and desires on the block. Youth gangs returned to the Bronx around 1968.

  Back then, new rebellions were exploding every week. The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense staged “Free Huey” rallies. Ten thousand Mexican-American high school students in Los Angeles marched against racism in the schools, launching the Chicano youth movement. Black power leaders Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown joined antiwar protesters to shut down the Columbia University campus. Students of color hoisted the banner of the Third World Liberation Front, demanding a college of ethnic studies at San Francisco State. Onto the Paris streets striking students, workers and les Enragés poured, while the spraypainted walls cried, “Be Realistic, Demand the Impossible.” Young radicals thought they could smell revolution in the air. “We thought it would take five years, at most,” says Gabriel Torres, a former member of the Young Lords Party. “Maybe by 1973.”

  But the urgent spring soon descended into a long hot summer. Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot dead on April 4. Bobby Hutton was shot dead on April 6. Bobby Kennedy was shot dead on June 6. The generations clashed at the Democratic Party Convention. By September, J. Edgar Hoover had announced war on the Panthers, “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.” Perhaps it was a bad season for the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense to set up their New York offices.

  The Panthers’ discipline and fearlessness drew in disaffected kids from the ‘hood to their offices in Harlem, Brooklyn and the Bronx, and across the country. Many pushing the ten-point program—demanding freedom, jobs, justice, housing, education and an end to police brutality—had been former gang members. In Chicago, Panther leader Fred Hampton was forming alliances with the powerful Blackstone Rangers, Mau Maus, and the Black Disciples gangs.1 He believed that the gangs collected the fearful and the forgotten. If gangs gave up robbing the poor, terrorizing the weak, hurting the innocent, they might become a powerful force for revolution.

  In a March 1968 memo, J. Edgar Hoover had laid out the objectives of the FBI COINTELPRO operation against “Black Nationalist-Hate Groups,” including the Nation of Islam and the Black Panthers. Hoover’s last goal was to “prevent the long-range growth of militant Black nationalist organizations, especially among youth.”2 To that end, the FBI joined with local police agencies to sweep up the Panthers, netting 348 arrests. On April 2, 1969, twenty-one Panthers from t
he New York leadership of the Party were rounded up and arrested on charges of conspiring to set off Easter day bombs in the midtown shopping district.

  One of the New York 21, a woman named Afeni Shakur, addressed her captors in a letter she composed in her cell. “We know that you are trying to break us up because you can’t control us. We know that you always try to destroy what you can’t control,” she wrote. “History shows that wars against oppression are always successful. And there will be a war—a true revolutionary war—a bloody war. No one not you nor us nor anyone in this country can stop it from occurring now. And we will win.”3

  The charges did not stick and after two years behind bars, the Panther 21 walked free. But amidst constant internal and external harassment from authorities, the Panthers imploded in convulsions of bullets and bodies. Newton himself expelled the New York chapter, and the Party split into armed camps. The revolution that Afeni had fought for—full employment and decent housing—left her with nothing. She raised her son Tupac Amaru alone, often jobless, sometimes homeless.

  When the Young Lords Party brought their purple berets from East Harlem across the river to the South Bronx in early 1970, local gang leaders were not impressed. The Savage Skulls’ leader Felipe “Blackie” Mercado told his gang members, “Politics is only about bullshit.”

  Richie Perez was a South Bronx native who had grown up on Kelly Street, where the Skulls had taken over. He returned there with his cadres as the Young Lords’ Minister of Information and got a rude welcome: “One night after we had finished our work for the day, we closed up the office, and were sitting out front on some chairs and just talking. We got hit with three firebombs, Molotov cocktails from across the street. The grapevine had it that it was done by some gang members.”

  But later that summer, Fort Apache cops intensified their stop-and-frisk operations in the neighborhood, with the pretext of stopping the Skulls. One afternoon cops were seen beating down residents on Longwood Avenue, including a Skull member. Members of the Young Lords joined angry residents to encircle the police and jeer. Mercado led his Skulls into the angry crowd. Since the Lords and the residents only wanted to yell, he says, “We started it off, threw the bottle, all hell broke loose.”

  Police cars were smashed and set afire. Besieged, the cops retreated for more support. When they returned, they were showered with rocks and Molotov cocktails from the tenement roofs. Perez says, “We told them, ‘Get the fuck out of here! This is a liberated zone.’ ”

  The battle raged back and forth through the week, along Longwood and down to Prospect, up to 163rd and down to 139th. At times, the police vehicles cruised slowly through the neighborhood, so that everyone could see their drawn guns. The Skulls and the Lords had found a common enemy.

  “After we had battled the cops for about four or five nights, one day we were hanging out with the Savage Skulls,” Perez continues. “And they said, ‘You know? You guys ain’t so bad after all. They told us you’re a bunch of fucking communists and that you was here to hurt the community.’ They told us straight up that some anti-poverty pimps in the neighborhood had paid for them to firebomb us. And it was funny. We said, ‘We are communists!’ ”

  The rapprochement between the Young Lords and the Savage Skulls reached its peak late in 1970 when the Young Lords began a health care campaign. First the Lords seized an X-ray truck from the Lincoln Hospital and placed it on Simpson and Southern Boulevard to provide free services for the community. Then they staged a full-scale takeover of the hospital. In both actions, the Savage Skulls and the Savage Nomads served as the first line of defense against the cops.

  But the relationship was short-lived. By 1971, the Young Lords refocused on exporting their revolution to Puerto Rico. With the Lords in San Juan and the Panthers off the streets, the youth gangs were left to fill the void of the revolutionaries.

  The Other Side of the Sixties

  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.”4

  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.”5

  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 Mas
sacre.” 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.

  The Ghetto Brothers

  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.6

  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.7Suarez 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.