Can't Stop Won't Stop (8 page)

“Back in the seventies, this was the Apache line for the Javelins,” Lucky says. “I used to come down here and watch.”

Painted on the middle of the wall was a graffitied genie, the symbol of passage, the end of the Apache line. Two rows of twenty guys stood in the way. If a kid could make it past the swinging fists and boots and chains and baseball bats to touch the genie, they could don the Javelins' colors: a denim jacket with a hand-painting of the green genie on the back, ready to be customized with letters and patches, iron crosses and swastikas, emblems of war. They earned their stripes up to the crowning piece on the back: a large hand-painting of a bronze-skinned warrior wielding a spear. “They were put to the test to see if they more or less had the heart to do it,” he says. “Most of the time they would get hurt.” Some never passed the test.

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.

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 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 the 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.