Free Can't Stop Won't Stop by Jeff Chang Page B

not burn for a distant ideology. They idolized the Hell’s Angels.
    â€œYou 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 memberof 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.
    â€œIt 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