Original subtitles

The Bronx was like a world of its own.

In the early '70s, man,

crime was like major income of the Bronx.

In the Bronx,

it was a deep-rooted gang culture.

There were gangs literally on every corner.

The violence was everywhere.

You could feel the tension in the air.

You could see the fights across the street.

You could hear the shots in the nighttime.

It was that fateful day that I sent him to bring peace.

That was one of the worst days in South Bronx history.

The word on the street was that he was trying to make peace,

and he was murdered trying to make peace.

Basically after that, the South Bronx,

fort Apache was out of control.

They were running through the streets.

They were burning everything. I mean, pandemonium hit.

I put out a bulletin,

and I started calling all the ghetto brothers.

Charlie wanted to get the ghetto brothers

to mobilize for the biggest bloodbath

in the history of New York.

We lost a member.

They viciously murdered him out there in the street.

Now It's an eye for an eye.

The Bronx was gonna be bathed in blood.

How rumors spread, how news spread.

There was not a gang in the whole of New York

that was not aware what's happening.

And it was like the movie "the warriors"

when the lady's on the radio telling everybody,

"hey, Boppers, you've got to make that move."

Let's get down to it, Boppers.

We're gonna a have to do better out there.

Everybody was tense because nobody knew

when it was gonna jump off.

Remember that scene from "the warriors"...

"can you dig it"?

That really went down. That really happened.

Can you dig it?! Can you dig it?!

We moved up to the South Bronx in 1963

from Greenwich village to the South Bronx.

It was a completely different world.

The buildings were beautiful, very spacious.

The blocks were wide.

There were still Jews living there at the time,

pockets of Italians and Irish still lived in the community.

The South Bronx at the time was fantastic.

It was just a completely different world.

It was a world of discovery.

In those days, I didn't like the idea of joining a gang.

I started my own thing.

When I started the ghetto brothers,

originally it wasn't supposed to be a gang.

It wasn't supposed to be an organization.

It was a brother thing.

It was basically my brothers and I.

We lived in Manhattan, we moved to the Bronx,

and those days, it was the ghetto.

So we were ghetto brothers. Who were ghetto brothers?

Robin, Benjy, Victor, those were the ghetto brothers,

my brothers, okay?

Then later on, since I knew a lot of the kids

in the community, I was very friendly,

I was amicable, everybody got along with me,

so I said, you know, let's expand this.

I met Charlie at 150th St. And trinity Avenue.

I was with my friend Raymond. He was like a brother.

We grew up together, and we saw this guy

taking a wood thing and going... bah!

And breaking it. I said wow.

I found that amazing because I was into the martial arts.

And I said, "that is fantastic I wanna make friends with him."

That was me.

"I want to make friends with this guy."

I walk up T him, and I said, "hi, my name is Benjy."

It's 1960-something.

I only know they rob, they steal.

Nobody's gonna rob me. So I prepare.

I'm ready to take this guy on.

"I just want to shake your hand."

That's Charlie.

I said, okay,

the moment he moves, his ass is mine.

But he's standing there with his hand out,

and he starts telling me about there's a few guys

that study martial arts that he's been watching,

and he can imagine that I'm a pretty good martial artist.

"And we sat down, he said what's your style?"

I Says, "I'm Goju. Talk to me."

And we just talked and talked and talked.

I stick out my hand, I put my hand in his,

and the ghetto brothers are one.

The '60s were a time of worldwide

social and cultural reckoning.

With movements demanding change spreading across

the college campuses and the front lines

of America's ghettos, it truly felt

like the seeds for a full-blown revolution were being sown.

So we thought this revolution was gonna happen.

We knew that this was the end of the world order.

We thought revolution was possible.

For the first time, we had a multicultural movement.

For me, it reconfirmed in a strange way

my faith in America.

But as the '60s came to a close,

the Vietnam war and racism

continue to erode America's soul

and fade all optimism.

A systematic backlash against organizations

like the black panthers coupled with the assassinations

of nearly every iconic figure of hope

left a new generation with nothing more

than unfocused rage.

They killed the king.

And then they killed Kennedy.

My heroes died in the '60s.

The hope is deflated.

I was so mad at America. I was pissed.

Heard of the troubled '60s?

Well, the troubled '60s give rise to the violent '70s.

"I have a dream."

No, you don't.

"My people!

We will overcome!"

Boom, no, you're not gonna overcome.

You ain't getting nobody out of this fucking ghetto.

Remember the '60s?

Hey!

Peace!

Now it was peace.

America's unrest was reflected locally as New York City

struggled under the weight of its own mounting crises.

A failed vision of urban renewal pushed all

but the city's wealthiest to the brink

and a new pessimism and desperation

made its home in its streets.

Here was this great city, the international capital

of commerce and culture and communications and finance,

and it was on its knees asking, begging for help.

The city was on the edge of bankruptcy.

All through the '70s remember, industries were departing.

Jobs were disappearing.

If there was a safety net before,

the federal government was basically not just ceasing

to protect it but cutting holes in it.

Despite the city's financial troubles, in 1970,

New York's cultural scene was as vibrant as ever,

construction of the world trade center

would soon be complete, and the New York Knicks

would win their first championship.

However, only four Miles away,

due to reckless urban planning,

the district of the South Bronx

was rapidly becoming a symbol

of urban decay around the world.

When we were young, we remember Robert Moses.

I remember the teacher talked about a guy

who was fixing up the area.

They were saying they were renovating the area.

Buildings are being taken out of commission.

Hey, gotta go.

We're gonna build this highway over here.

The cross Bronx expressway at one time,

that whole area was nothing but houses, beautiful houses.

He takes a wonderful borough

that's made up of ployglot... I mean, everybody was there,

Ralph Lauren comes from there... and he cuts across,

he cuts a huge swath,

literally destroying the neighborhoods.

This is amazing.

I mean, It's amazingly creative

even though it was also humanly destructive

that he thought the shortest distance between two points

is a line even If there are houses

and people, you know, in the way of the line.

And that's when things started to go down.

The economy, the store owners, everybody just took off.

You see a quiet white flight

where everybody was migrating, you know,

from the concourse up to, you know, Nyack, white plains.

"Come on up, pops, come on up.

"You can't stay down here no more," you know?

The rich move out to their second and third homes.

The middle class is not far behind,

and left will be the poor

who require enormous services and who will suffer.

The South Bronx.

It has all the superlatives... highest crime,

poorest people, greatest unemployment,

worst blight,

and the world's record for arson.

In just 10 years, more than 30,000 buildings

have been set ablaze and abandoned here.

You got rats, bugs, no heat, no water.

It was terrible, terrible.

It's like another domino effect here.

Then you see the burnings start.

The landlord wouldn't provide services,

and the people had to ultimately move out,

and then the landlord burned the building down

and got the insurance.

You know, having buildings torched was the norm.

The Bronx was like a world of its own.

The Bronx to us was a whole world.

Well, this morning on our way into work,

we had a report that the police had located

a carcass in the street on 172nd and Bryant.

Turned out to be a stripped carcass of a gorilla.

It was headless, and the fur was removed,

the skin was removed.

South Bronx.

It was just a feeling of hopelessness.

It wasn't like murder was hidden.

You know, murder was very rampant.

The number of homicides about quadrupled

from 1960 to 1971.

There was crime from, like,

the crooked politicians to the crooked cops.

In the early '70s, man, crime was like...

crime was like the major income of the Bronx.

There was lines of people wrapped around the corner

just waiting to buy a bundle or a couple of bags of dope.

When the cops drive up and down,

it was like a total pharmacy drugstore.

When it got virulent, people got into it.

It's almost as If they wanted to die,

and so they got into heroin because there was no dream.

All this stuff was happening.

It was too much for anybody to understand,

but one of the byproducts

was a lot of kids out on the street

and a lot of locations that would have been

alternatives to the street ceasing to exist.

The system had totally let us down.

They let us do what we wanted to do.

We deal with whatever we deal with.

They deal with it in their own manner.

At the police department was beating on us

like they had a permission card.

It was just total chaos. There was nothing for us here.

So we turned to each other and said, you know,

let's do something for ourselves.

Basically, that was it.

Every gang was for themselves back then.

We had nobody looking out for us, so it was us.

It was the brotherhood, it was the gang, and that's it.

Out of the rubble and chaos of the city,

a new breed of outlaw street gangs arose,

transforming the urban wasteland

to a dark and dangerous playground.

Police estimated gang membership

in the tens of thousands, and these new outlaws

maintained a firm grip on New York City's streets.

The mentality of the gangs that came out of the '70s

was very violent.

The street gangs that was coming out in the late '60s,

early '70s was more what you could say savage and outlaw.

These guys kicked you and cursed you

and spit on you and urinated on you,

and then showed you, "this is who did it."

Weren't you charged with shooting a policeman?

Yeah, last time I got busted,

they told me, "we gonna catch you one of these nights",

and we're gonna kill you." Some people would say

they'd be very worried If somebody told them that.

Why don't you?

Because, you know, If I'm gonna die,

you know, let it happen now than later.

It was all about power.

I ain't got a pops.

My moms ain't gonna tell me what to do.

I have all this anger.

I'm gonna grab all these guys,

and they're gonna do my bidding.

So whatever I want that lacked in my life,

I'm gonna get it right now.

It wasn't like you had a choice.

Whatever gang ran the block, you had to be a part of it.

There was no civilians.

You had to be in it or you were a victim.

On the outside looking in, it looked really good.

We're fighting all the time.

We didn't take any bullshit from anybody.

We pretty much did whatever we wanted.

There was nothing to look forward to.

This was our life. We lived for each other.

We lived and died for each other.

We bled for each other.

Whether you was right or wrong, it didn't matter.

In the steel and concrete jungle

of the big city, a tribal group survives,

the one-percenters.

These are the motorcycle freaks.

They get a charge out of spooking the citizens

in a straight neighborhood.

They live in a different world,

in a strange cop-out world of their own making.

With a kick pedal and a boot,

they work off their frustrations on the maddened street.

Everybody wanted to be the giant that everyone's afraid of.

Everybody wanted to be the hells angel.

Everybody wanted to be the guy on the roaring machine.

Real hard-core motorcycle, you know,

outlaw culture adapted to the streets of New York.

We had pretty much accepted it.

Puerto Ricans in general and blacks, they're like,

"fuck it," you know what I mean?

"We're gonna fuck everything, you know?"

Because of the anger that we had towards the system,

we figure, "well, fuck it, we can do that, too."

You know, they were raising hell,

and we figure we could raise hell

because we had something to raise hell against.

As much as America thinks we're not watching it,

we are watching it, and we're imitating it.

And so what you see with the retention

of some of the garb, the biker garb,

what you see is Americana, but It's an outlaw Americana.

They don't want to be Mr. wasp,

but they can see themselves as hells angels.

And, yeah, we had the swastikas and everything

because they had the swastikas and everything.

We tried to emulate them as much as possible,

and as they wanted to shock society,

we wanted to shock society.

So we just wanted to be as repulsive

and repugnant as possible.

We put the colors on the floor. The guys surround the colors.

Everybody takes out their penis

and starts leaking on the jacket,

and then If you're lucky, the guy vomits.

Then you take your jacket...

Put it on, wha!

That's an outlaw.

And not even flies will want to hang around you!

The patches are the family's coat of arms.

The colors is your shield.

Most of the gangs of yesteryear

wasn't nervous to say who they were.

So If you was a skull, a spade, a reaper, a turban,

you would wear with honor on your back of who you was.

Supreme enchanters, you see that?

Javelins, you see? Get a good look at it.

Gang culture street law Says, "this is our turf."

If you want to walk through our turf,

this is like our nation.

In order to pass through our nation,

you have to show respect and not fly your colors

"'cause this is our turf."

You walked into another turf

and you didn't have their permission,

you might lose your colors or you might lose your life.

I mean, you would walk certain places,

they see you in a cut-off dungaree jacket,

yo, they'd take it from you,

stomp you out and stuff like that.

I mean, If you had M.C. Boots on,

you weren't in the club, you're walking home barefoot.

If you could walk.

They'd just beat you up, take your colors,

hang 'em up on a wall, that's how they used to do it.

Our conquered enemies.

Those are our conquered enemies right there.

Bachelors, encounters Bron... enchanters Bronx,

royal javelins, Latin eagles.

Girls had major roles because back then,

there were no policewomen.

So we'd carry the guns, which was a big issue

because If the cops stopped you, they'd tell the women,

"keep it moving," and they would search the guys.

The guys are beautiful.

We all get along.

We're calling each other you know?

That means respect. We're brothers and sisters.

We got respect for each other. Brothers and sisters.

We bore their babies.

We fought alongside them, not behind them

or in front of them, although many of us

did fight in front of them, but we were hand-in-hand.

Back then, to join a gang,

you did have to go through initiations.

For every gang, the standard initiation

is the Apache line.

The Apache line is something we used to test your mettle

and your fighting skills and your heart.

People would set up on each side,

and somebody would beat you with their fists.

Some gangs might even hit you with bats or sticks.

It's almost like going through rites of passage.

Other guys was jumping a cop.

We used to have to fight.

It wasn't a choice. We had to fight.

But ours was different. We didn't do the Apache line.

We had a 45.

As long as that record was playing,

you had to fight three guys at the same time.

So we put grand funk rail road, you're gonna have to...

"all right, song's finished."

One day I looked at my brother Victor, said,

"Vic, I'm going to the store. Take care of this.

I'll be right back." Go to the store.

Come back, he had an album.

"I said what the hell you doing with an album?!"

"I just want to see the guys beat him up."

Supposed to be a 45. He had an album on.

The poor guy got his jaw broken.

The skulls were the ultimate

because their Apache line was a .32...

one shell, spin, and pull the trigger.

From the Saigons of Harlem

to the jolly stompers of Brooklyn,

outlaw gangs followed a system of law and organization

that was common despite their glaring differences.

The ranks in most gangs, there was only three levels.

There was the president, the vice president,

and the warlord.

Your president, he had to have the charisma,

and everybody would want to follow him.

There has to be someone you respect and someone you admire

to give you a different perspective.

That person has to have not only the power of love

but the ability to beat you down.

Vice president came in

in case the president was ever killed.

And then you had the warlord, and the warlord was the person

that either declared or stopped a war.

The warlord was the one who would go in and negotiate,

to see If you're gonna go to war with just the hands,

the bats, chains and knives, or the guns.

Some gangs had gestapo,

and those with the guys that were in charge

of inflicting punishment on their members.

They were like the police.

Like, you policed your own gang.

There you go, cool off.

The gestapo were like the real hard-core gang guys.

Like, they followed street law to the "T."

I represent gestapo in the savage nomads,

which is a different squad.

I get one of my members where school's up

but doesn't know how to behave on the street

or talk to anybody like a human being

the way he's supposed to, he comes to my little cell here.

Biggest gangs in Brooklyn from my time,

known gangs, the dirty ones.

The dirty ones, they were the most famous.

We heard about the tomahawks out in Brooklyn.

Gangs like the assassinators, the Dukes.

And the homicides.

The majestics, sandpipers.

There were gangs literally in every corner.

Dynamite brothers were a big gang

in the lower east side.

Towards the lower east side,

you had the choccos.

You had the Harlem Turks.

You had the renegades of Harlem.

In those days, the meanest borough was the Bronx.

You came from the Bronx, you was bad.

It all started up in the Bronx.

In the Bronx,

it was a deep-rooted gang culture, okay?

They lived it.

There was 101 gangs in the Bronx, so take your pick.

Black assassins, peacemakers.

Roman kings. Young kids, deadly.

You see them, they're little kids.

You look at them wrong, they're gonna shoot you.

The turbans, the javelins, reapers.

Seven immortals.

Turbans.

Turbans.

Ex-veterans from Vietnam.

These guys didn't have guns. They had rifles.

Bachelors was... there were big.

One of the biggest gangs in the Bronx... black spades.

Black spades had a division

in every area they had a police department.

Black spades, you could count them

because when they came, like, they blackened,

like, the whole street.

We had nothing but respect for them

because they earned their respect.

The savage nomads.

These guys, once they put those colors

on, remember doctor Jekyll and mister Hyde?

These guys turned mean.

Savage skulls.

Savage skulls was one of the most respected gangs

that walked the streets.

There was gangs in the north Bronx also,

and they were predominantly white gangs, right,

and they was just as vicious as gangs

in central Harlem and the South Bronx.

You had gangs like the war pigs, the aliens,

white lightning, junior KKK, grateful dead,

and these guys were like a lot of guys, right?

Famous... golden guineas.

Well, the golden guineas I would have to say,

they were the baddest white boys on the block.

They weren't taking no crap from nobody

as far as they were concerned,

and we had to give them their respect.

181st, 182nd,

and that was like the cut-off right there.

Yo, dude, If we went up to Fordham road, it was on.

We had guns, but we didn't have guns like they had guns.

These guys had transportation, they have the weaponry,

you know, and they have the balls.

The golden guineas,

now they had a reputation for cutting two gs

into your face so that you know

that you ran into the golden guineas.

Good evening. I'm David Susskind.

First part of the show tonight

are the emergence of the street gangs once again.

My guests are leaders and spokesmen for these gangs.

I want you to meet them now.

First, Benjy Melendez

is a spokesman for the ghetto brothers.

Former marine Charlie Suarez

is the president of the ghetto brothers.

With the black panthers and the young lords,

the further you got in the '70s,

the less influence they had on the younger generation,

even the older generation.

The ghetto brothers was kind of like filling that void,

but they still had that street cred.

We are being oppressed by the north American Yankee.

We the Puerto Ricans should rise up and defend ourselves

against these dogs who will oppress us

and liberate our country from capitalism and imperialism.

The north American is trying to steal our identity

as Puerto Ricans and call us Americans.

We Puerto Ricans are Puerto Ricans

to the day we are born until the day we die.

When the black panthers came into the scene,

the young lords came into the scene,

these groups went around talking to the gangs,

"stop the violence.

Let's direct all our energy this way."

Lot of the gangs didn't want to hear that.

The ghetto brothers took heat to that.

What we wanted them to do is understand

that there was another vision of America,

that they were killing themselves...

that's what our intent was... and that the neighborhoods

that they were in were their neighborhoods.

We wanted them to feel ownership over those blocks.

There's a lot of clubs that help just their own friends

and forget about other people who live around us, you know?

But we don't think like that. We like to help everybody.

I loved the ghetto brothers.

We honored them because they were... they seemed...

to me, it seemed like they had enough courage to do something

that we all really wanted to do

but didn't have the courage to do it

because you were known for your brutality in those days.

You weren't known for being a nice guy.

Ghetto brothers was definitely political minded,

but they also, you know, didn't take no shit either.

It wasn't that they couldn't fight.

That was the South Bronx. There's no not fighting.

So even If you're a nice guy, everybody had to fight.

If you saw them coming down the block, you know,

okay, the ghetto brothers, they're cool.

They got a lot of kids off the street.

They got a lot of kids, man, like, going back into school. From what I understand,

they did start helping the neighborhoods a lot.

So far, since I've been in the ghetto brothers,

they have Dave me back my self-respect

because I am an ex-junkie.

They was with me almost 24 hours a day.

I kicked cold.

More than eight or nine ghetto brothers

in the organization that we got now are ex-junkies,

and If you go right now to ghetto brothers headquarters,

you don't see no junkies in that block no more.

The ghetto brothers started to grow

and grow and grow and grow.

2,500 in the Bronx alone!

Then the ghetto brothers started to expand

to Manhattan, Brooklyn, queens.

They knew how to articulate and use the media

to actually let not just New York City

but kind of let the United States know that,

look, this is happening here in New York City, right?

I guess It's what the teenagers are gonna make it, right?

If we shoot dope, they're gonna be shooting dope

when they get older, and If they see

the ghetto brothers... like my club is doing,

that we are... get ourselves together,

we do something from the community,

then they're gonna think that's what's hip.

We're in the ghetto. Someone smashes a bottle.

Someone bends a can and tosses it.

Someone grabs a piece of paper and tosses it.

We're in the ghetto because we created the ghetto.

So we just said no more.

No more.

I started to think, I said it would be good

to channel all this energy

into doing something for our community.

Let's have a good time. Let's get together.

Let's sweep the community. Let's give out free food.

Let's give out clothes to this community

because in those times, things were really bad.

I want people to say

the ghetto brothers has done something.

I want my child to say when he grows up

my father's done something for society, see?

And I want things to change because I don't want

to be living in the South Bronx where everything is messed up.

Three names that always popped up...

Benjy, karate Charlie, and black Benji.

You know, I'm an ex-drug addict.

I'm not gonna lie about it.

When I came to them, I was still using drugs.

Due respect to them, and I went to kick.

I've been straight since, and I love ghetto brothers.

There's a purpose here.

It's something that's beneficial to the neighborhood,

the establishment, and everybody else.

Black Benji, Benjamin Cornell

was introduced to me by Charlie.

He said, "Benji wants to check out the ghetto brothers."

Sure. I said, "would do you do?"

He said, "I work as a drug counselor."

Said, "very good. That's very good."

So one day, kids were in the program,

and the ghetto brothers club, I'm looking at them,

and he sits down in a chair and he's talking to kids,

and I saw they were on the floor telling them stories,

and I looked, I said, "that's wonderful."

And then he talks to the older people in my community.

He said, "man, there's something about this guy, I like that."

Charlie, come here.

I think we should stop the warlords

and put a peacemaker, that's the man.

"Let's make them into a peace ambassador."

He became the third staff of the ghetto brothers.

You're gonna be the ambassador for peace.

What I knew about the ghetto brothers,

the first thing was I heard a lot about karate Charlie.

Everybody kept hearing about this guy

karate Charlie, right?

Guys in gangs, you had to have a karate something.

Like in this one gang, you had a karate Kenny.

I remember him. Then you had a karate Joe nose.

We had a guy named karate Moe,

but it was all because of everybody

heard about this guy named karate Charlie.

The rep for him that we heard

was that he was a bad dude.

He was into karate and stuff.

They were saying, Oh, he knocked a guy out

by kicking him in the head,

and it was like an urban legend almost.

Charlie was a warrior.

He lived like the Japanese Bushido.

You cross me, you cross my honor?

Yah! You're going down.

Remember, I just came out of the marine corps.

So what I wanted was a little marine corps.

Because he brought the military discipline

to the ghetto brothers.

The ghetto brothers were not known for guns.

We were known for the hands.

Ghetto brothers were very good with hands and legs.

So Charlie was the instructor.

They called me karate Charlie, and they called the founder,

Benji Melendez, the preacher.

Charlie and I were brothers. I mean, we were very close.

But we were two worlds.

Benji was a yin while I was a Yang,

black and white, soft and hard,

rain and shine... we were the opposites.

The yin and Yang? That's true. That's me and Charlie.

Charlie was...

and I would say, "no, Charlie."

"Come on, Benjy!" "No, Charlie, come on."

Sometimes it was the other way around, too.

Charlie had to calm Benjy down.

You know, they kept each other, you know, at bay.

Yellow Benji, he was more of a peacemaker.

He was also trying to let people know,

look, let's stop fighting amongst ourselves

'cause we're only hurting each other.

Let's fight the man. Let's hurt him.

The enemy around the Bronx now at this very moment

is the policeman.

Yes, this is a warrior thing. Yes, it is.

And we're here to defend our brothers and sisters

against people like them.

If you're gonna communicate, communicate, man.

If you're gonna strike us, we're gonna strike back.

Right on!

Beyond running the gang, yellow Benjy

was also the leader of the ghetto brothers band,

a unique and well-loved rock and Latin funk outfit.

The band and the gang were two separate entities.

The talent was definitely there.

It was definitely a Latin flavor.

It also showed what clubs could do.

If they took a different direction.

I tell my brothers, listen,

I notice that when you talk to people,

some people will listen, some people don't.

But the idea of music, my brothers and I,

music caters to all type of people.

So If you want to get a message,

why don't we put it into song, watch them listen.

Then when we play the music, what we always wanted to say

to them and you put it behind guitars is,

"yo, man, that's me, man. I live that type of life.

What would be that song for you, my brother?"

I remember a lot of bongos.

I always, you know, remember bongo music.

If they were jamming up the street, you know,

up the hill, you could hear the music.

When we played music, why don't we play

a little rock here, a little Latin here,

a little soul over here?

So you heard Beatles, sly and the family stone,

Santana, you heard all of that.

So every Friday, the gangs knew

that we had music and a message.

In 1971 despite all efforts by social workers

and specialized police units,

gang violence had escalated to a fever pitch,

plunging the streets into a state of continual war

unlike anything the city had ever experienced before.

Drugs was a big factor in gangs going haywire,

lust for power, lust for turf.

The wars with street gangs could start from something

that could be just as silly as stepping on somebody's boots.

Wars could get started just from a rumor.

Territory was a big issue.

I had heard of some dudes just getting popped

from running down the wrong block.

The garbage can is here.

If you go past that garbage can,

although It's the same block

in the same neighborhood, it could be a war.

The devil's rebels is fighting gang,

and on this night, they found their first victims

outside a corner grocery store.

What looks like child's play is not.

In the middle of all this, a young man was stabbed.

It was the thing about conquering.

You go to their turf, beat the hell out of these guys,

and come back again and again until they were forced...

either they break up or become part of the majority.

So they did it through barbarian style,

warrior, vikings.

They tried to take over one of my divisions.

They didn't quite make it, and we killed two of they guys.

They tried to burn down my clubhouse.

We killed two of they guys, and five of they guys rolled up

on one of the savage nomads.

Know what they told him? "We gonna give you hell, baby.

"We gonna give you hell." And they didn't even kill him.

There were big gang wars

between the savage skulls, black spades,

between the savage skulls, the bachelors.

Back then, nobody had cell phones,

but It's like drums... you hear it.

You hear it all over the place.

You know, one way or another, you hear who's beating who.

The violence was everywhere.

You could see the fights across the street.

You could hear the shots in the nighttime.

What made life interesting in the South Bronx

for these young guys was fighting, was killing.

"Yo, I killed a dude today." "What'd you do?"

"I stabbed him in the throat. What'd you do, man?"

"Yo, I shot that dude." "I burned this guy."

You hear this, and this is every day.

It was a lawless time.

If somebody got killed on Hewitt place,

their body stayed there.

An ambulance wouldn't dare come and pick that body up.

The police came in riot gear to take that body out there,

and they didn't do an investigation.

They took that body out of there as quick as possible

because they didn't want to get it.

There's no ambulance coming.

There are no ambulances, all right?

How long It's gonna take, man?

The '70s when the drug trade came in the city,

that totally changed the whole vibe on how we rumble.

Now It's serious.

Now we're gonna start shooting at each other.

In the '70s, you had firepower.

You had some gangs with arsenals.

I've seen .357s. I've seen 12-guage shotguns.

I've seen dynamite on the street.

I've seen all this. You'd be surprised, man.

Pretty soon, they're gonna steal the damn atom bomb.

As the bloodshed continued,

the ghetto brothers worked fervently to mediate peace

amongst the ever-growing web of turf battles.

A lot of things was happening in the Bronx at the same time.

We felt the whole world was going through these changes.

I said this is getting out of hand.

You know, we were pretty much hurting fighting each other

instead of going against the real enemy.

Benjy, he tried, man. He tried to let us know that.

They were like the club that would be the mediators,

you know, stopped a lot of us from going out there

and going ballistic on a whole lot of wars, you know?

I would sit down and reason with a lot of these brothers.

"Come here, guys. Savage skulls, come here."

"Savage nomads, come here. Black spades, come over here."

That's the way we used to talk.

"It doesn't make any sense with this turf thing, guys."

It's us against the government. It's not me against you.

You are not hurting me.

You're not the one that's keeping me down.

I don't have to fight you. You're not the problem.

"Yo, brothers, come on, man."

"Nah, but you don't understand, man!"

He came into my turf with his colors, man!

"And he was just trying to tell me..."

because colors?

Come on, guys, think what I'm gonna say.

Colors is gonna make you go insane?

On December 8, a series of events transpired

that rocked the ghetto brothers and the rest of the Bronx.

As a result, the outcome would come

to change gang life in New York City forever.

They came to the storefront and said

there was going to be a fight at the bottom of the stairs.

"Benjy, three gangs are coming from Southern boulevard..."

bongos, black spades, and seven immortals.

"They want to get the Roman kings."

Benji said, "let black Ben go, Cornell go."

"Benji, you got your job cut out for you."

You're gonna get me the president, vice president,

warlords of those three gangs.

Bring them here so we can broker a peace.

"Bring them here, take some ghetto brothers with you."

So he left.

He went with playboy

and a few of the younger ghetto brothers.

We came down the stairs, right?

And we stopped there,

and there was about 13 to 20 of us.

And then when we looked down, we seen them,

and you couldn't even see the corner.

That's how many there were, and when we got to the bottom

of the stairs and they could've seen us,

there was only about nine of us.

That's when Benji came out, and Benji said...

he took a step forward, and he said,

"listen, brother, we're here to talk peace."

And the guy who came out, he said, "peace, shit."

That's when the guy pull out the machete.

That's when they had us all surrounded.

Benji said, "take, brother..." Because there was too many.

So I heard a noise, you know, pow, like a slap,

and Benji had got hit in the stomach, and he tripped.

At that time was a time when they were killing,

killing, killing, killing, and Cornell wasn't recognized.

They recognized violence,

and they recognized somebody that'd throw a punch.

It was a moment in time that could have been avoided.

If I could just turn back the hands of time,

this wouldn't ever have happened.

And I looked at my brothers today, my real brothers,

Says, "think about it... there was that fateful day"

that I sent him to bring peace."

My brother looked at me, said,

"Benji, but you didn't know what was gonna..."

"no, you're right, I didn't know what was gonna happen."

I didn't know the fate,

"but it was my decision to send him."

That was one of the worst days

in South Bronx history when he got murdered.

The word on the street was he was trying to make peace,

and he was murdered trying to make peace,

and basically after that, the South Bronx,

fort Apache was out of control.

When this tragedy happened,

they went to war and even got many gangs to move

against the seven immortals and the black spades.

Every gang in my neighborhood at least were so mad

that they killed this guy,

they were running through the streets.

They were burning everything. I mean, pandemonium hit.

Black spades wasn't gonna back down.

If they was gonna fully get attacked.

Then there was the time when the spade leaders,

all of them said hell with it, get ready for war.

How rumors spread. How news spread.

There was not a gang in the whole of New York

that was not aware what's happening.

I put out a bulletin,

and I started calling ghetto brothers,

all the ghetto brothers.

Charlie wanted to get the ghetto brothers

to mobilize for the biggest bloodbath

in the history of New York.

We lost a member, they viciously murdered him

out there in the street.

Now It's an eye for an eye

because another ghetto brother loses a life,

six of whoever, whether they his kids,

his mother, his father, they lose their lives.

Who was it that took the lives of two of your...

some dude out there.

At the time, I was... I was blind.

And I said, no, I'm gonna make everyone pay.

That's when I said I'm going to just start killing, you know?

Watch. The sword is sharp.

Look, razor-sharp.

And Benji kept saying, "but, Charlie,

that's not the way," I said, "I don't care.

At the moment, I don't care."

My business at the point

was to quell down the anger that was coming up.

He said, "let's go see Gwendolyn."

That's Cornell's mother.

Let's go see her, show respect.

I said, "when I walk in there and tell her"

I've called New Jersey, I've called Connecticut,

I've called all the boroughs, I've called everybody...

"I've got an army outside."

I walked in like a mother fucking cock

ready to fight, spurs gleaming.

I strutted over.

I kissed her.

I said, "mom," I said, "I've got an army outside."

And she said, "Charlie, my son died for peace."

Said, "God damn."

I looked at his mother.

She didn't want to see other children die.

It just confirmed what I said, you know?

So he understood after what she... "please."

You know, Charlie, that could be our moms, man.

That's an omen. It's your mother talking.

She's my Mami talking to you.

"My son died for peace, Charlie."

I walked back to the storefront.

Storefront was like this with media,

cameras waiting for me to say that the Bronx

was gonna be bathed in blood.

We could have gone in the chronicles of New York

to be the most notorious gang.

We even allowed our influence

to use all these gangs to do our bidding.

All they were waiting was this, like the Roman empire.

All the gangs were there at 174th.

They were waiting for the big war.

We said, no, we're not gonna do anything.

I said, "brothers, don't you know this?"

Look at these newspaper people. Look!

As soon as I said no, they stopped writing.

This is what they want to see.

They want to tell the world

that we're a bunch of savages, that we're killers!

We're not gonna give you the satisfaction.

"Send our message... hands down, no war!"

No, we ain't doing nobody.

Gotta figure out how we're gonna do this.

We're gonna have a peace treaty.

Word of the murder and fear of reprisal spread like wildfire.

At the insistence of the ghetto brothers,

representatives of over 40 of the city's

most notorious gangs met at the hoe Avenue

boys' club in the Bronx.

So I got them while they were still in revenge mode.

They wanted to see war and blood.

I said this is the time to do it, right now.

Said, "listen, this is what's going on."

They killed my brother Benji." "What you want me to do?"

I said, "I don't want you to do anything."

I want you to come to a peace treaty."

"I don't do peace."

I said, "well, you're gonna do peace now, bro."

I said, "you do peace or we're gonna take you out."

"Who's you?"

"I'm the spades. I'm the skulls. I'm the nomads."

And I to started running it off,

everyone that said that they'd stand behind me.

This is hoe Avenue.

This is the spot, Madison square boys' club,

here where history was made.

It was here that the gangs got together

to have the biggest peace treaty in the history of the Bronx.

President young sinners.

Vice president of the young sinners.

Vice president of young saints.

President of young cobras.

War council of young saints.

It was fantastic how it all happened,

and they just sent just their main leaders.

Come on, it was too many guys.

So it was all the leaders that were there.

At the treaty, I was a young person

sitting in the background listening to my head leaders

talking what needs to be done.

Basically it was just like the movie "the warriors."

Everybody was tense because nobody knew

when it was gonna jump off, but it went well, though.

After while, everybody started talking.

Everybody calmed down and just got into,

you know, what the purpose was, and it turned out good.

People were just bringing out atonement

to say, you know, come on, let's slow this thing down.

Let's bring this peace treaty into play.

One by one, gang leaders stated their grievances

with the intention of squashing prior beefs once and for all.

When we have static, man, we sell out among ourselves,

man, because, wow, we got to live in this district.

The whitey don't come down here, man,

and live in the fucked-up houses, man.

The whitey don't come down here, man, and have

all the fucked-up no heat in the fucking wintertime.

We do, Jack, so therefore, like, wow,

we got to make it a better place to live, you understand?

The idea of the meeting was to expose the ones

who murdered black Benji.

Now in those days, you can't say, "you do it."

We didn't say that, but If you saw that film,

you look at the guys that were sitting in front,

those are all the guys that murdered my boy.

And I'm looking at them.

I say, "yo, my brothers, man."

One of the guys, a president of the club, came up to me,

"Benjy, I don't want to die. Please, I don't want to die."

"You're not gonna die, my brother."

See, that's power.

You don't want us to become a gang again, right?

Because I know you. You was up in the meeting.

And you told me, "Benjy, I want to get out alive."

Didn't you tell me that?

"Benjy, I want to get out alive."

That's what's gonna happen. You're gonna get out alive.

Benji didn't get out alive.

The thing is we're not a gang anymore.

We're an organization.

We want to help black and Puerto Ricans

to live in a better environment.

At the end of this historic summit,

an inter-gang peace treaty was signed

by every attending leader.

This momentous turning point

gave the first real promise of the long needed peace

the system had failed to produce.

Peace after the treaty came instantaneous.

The following day, the day afterwards,

you didn't feel the hostility

you did prior to black Benji's death.

Things were just waning down.

It meant people was trying to bring

a different type of vibration, frequency to their community.

A definite attitude shift.

A lot of the people that were at the meeting,

they decided, hey, you know, we're just killing ourselves.

We're hurting our own neighborhoods.

We better put a stop to this.

Wars had stopped.

It was here and there, but wars had stopped.

It was definitely a different lifestyle

where when we gang busted, we stood in the same spot.

We stood in the same area.

We couldn't go that way. We couldn't go this way.

We couldn't go that way.

Once the peace treaty happened,

people was being invited in areas

where they used to never even stepped into that area.

People would go to certain parties

that you would never even step in that party

or you don't know what would happen.

We're having house jams.

We're having basement parties. It was different.

Now we're able to go here, go there,

meet more people, unite with people.

Peaceful block parties hosted by the ghetto brothers

and other local gangs began to multiply,

helping to dissolve the invisible turf boundaries

that had dominated for years prior.

Here's where the whole thing started to change.

We invited many gang members.

"Guys, If you guys haven't been to a party,"

why don't you come out? Gonna have a party.

"We're gonna play out there." And they would invite other gang members

to have jam sessions with them.

All over the city, you were invited

to come to these jam sessions and jam with them.

You can bring your instrument.

You could, you know, do whatever it is you do.

This is the famous 163rd St. This was ghetto brothers city.

All the people came down here to hear the ghetto brothers.

Every Friday and Saturday, we would gonna have a party.

You had gangs from different areas

to down come down and check us out.

This block was literally full with people.

They would call out big parties.

You'd see like 100 to 200 guys hanging out.

It was massive. Scary, too.

When the ghetto brothers had the parties,

they all mingled.

Everybody mingled...

savage skulls, black spades, the turbans,

everybody because we were having a good time.

People were dancing,

and you saw turbans, and you saw skulls.

What was the common thing?

I said, "look, I put the flags up there."

They'd see the Puerto Rican flag.

They'd see the black liberation flag.

"See, brothers? This is us, man."

It's about dropping the attitude.

"We're all one people here."

It's almost like a... A relief,

you know, 'cause the chaos in the streets and the mayhem

and everything that was going on,

this was kind of like a breather to say...

you know, finally, some peace.

You see, when you saw that friendly attitude there,

they brought that back to their club, you understand?

So every Friday, they were looking forward

to getting back together again.

One of the things the ghetto brothers

made us realize... I'll put it very simply...

self-worth.

When you... whether it be a guitar

or a saxophone or an instrument or a bongo,

whatever it is that you can do to add to the flavor

of what was going on, it kind of gave you a revelation

that, hey, I can actually do something besides,

you know, stomping somebody's brains out.

I can actually do something besides stabbing or shooting

or besides this other stuff we've been doing.

There's something inside of me that's positive.

In the years that followed, outlaw gangs

transformed into DJ crews.

A major shift in attitude made way

for this emerging culture

that was taking hold of the youth in the Bronx.

I always thought there was a connection

between gang culture and hip-hop

because from what I learned that either you was a DJ,

an MC, a break dancer, or a graffiti artist,

once upon a time,

one of them members was part of a gang.

Now you can express yourself and show what is it

that you have on the other side from what you used to be.

So we saw the translation between the violent attitude

to something positive, but at the same time,

you see the intimidation.

Competition is always and has always been there.

The battle when they battle on the mic,

when they compete against each other,

they're battling, when they're dancing

against each other, they're battling.

It was more like challenging to dance now

and not to fight,

and whoever could dance the best won the fight.

Colors were starting to come off, and little by little,

that's when the music started to come into the deal.

When the gang scene started fading down,

it was the DJs who started becoming the stars

in the community, the leaders in the community.

The Bronx's own DJ Kool Herc,

considered the founding father of hip-hop,

played a crucial role in redirecting gang energy

into this new and growing movement.

Herc had the right timing of presenting something.

The same people that was involved with gangs,

they felt that they want to be relieved.

They want to have some of this dance.

Herc took it upon himself to become their new pied Piper.

It was like, hey, this is what we want to hear,

and we don't want to hear what was being played on the radio,

what was being played in the clubs.

We were trying to reach out for the beats,

that raw essence, heavy drums.

Herc started something his enemies didn't want to stop.

It came in the form of music. They gravitate to this.

This is something that is theirs.

That hadn't come in a long time.

They didn't worry If you were black, you're white.

Got this common thing right here.

He was God. He didn't...

Herc didn't come out with no little tinker toy speakers.

Herc came out with the big boys.

See, I got some big boys behind me right now.

Herc came out with the big boys!

Later on, some of these people that was coming

to all his parties turn out to be DJs...

flash, grand master Caz,

mean gene, remember the I brothers,

started seeing Aj, the I brothers with Theodore,

breakout, baron, bam.

There was no closer connection between the gangs of the Bronx

and this budding hip-hop movement

than Afrika Bambaataa,

who had personally taken it upon himself

to convert the fearsome black spades

into the Zulu nation.

This was the first worldwide force

to promote positivity through music.

When I started the universal Zulu nation,

I already had an army of street gangs that was with me.

I had a lot of pull and power,

so If I was with the black spades,

I might go and hang with the nomads

and some of the javelins and some of the groups

that might not even like each other.

I had a type of persuasion

with many of the other leaders in groups.

Bambaataa had great influence amongst so many people.

They believed in him, and If you was a person

that come from Bronx river or within the soundview section,

everybody was coming to their parties.

And he accepted you. He didn't put you down.

It took a lot of work, took a lot of speaking,

a lot of teaching, a lot of organizing,

speaking to the brothers and sisters

to get away from that certain mentality.

The purpose of the Zulu nation at that time

was to show that we can turn ourself around

from negative to positive,

and we was doing that through music.

Our slogan became "peace, unity, love, and having fun."

Lot of Zulu nation running in Monroe now. Yeah.

A lot of Zulu nation in Monroe and Stevenson

and in all these housing development projects.

Soon, the Zulu nation gonna take over the world.

Is the Bronx in the house?!

Is everybody in the house?! Hit it!

Are we gonna get loose in here?!

Say z-u-l-u!

- That's the way to say... - Zulu!

Z-u-l-u!

- That's the way to say... - Zulu!

Another thing that is not mentioned

is a style change happened.

Like, it wasn't just break dancing, graffiti, MC, DJ.

A fifth thing included was style.

You had to now have style.

You didn't want to walk around with dirty clothes anymore

or, you know, the patches on their back

because that wasn't attracting

the type of girls that they wanted.

It was just a whole mindset change.

Well, let me talk about girls

because I think women played a big part in it

because there was always girls around.

Even the black spades had their girls.

Everybody had their girls, so basically,

once you could talk to the girls,

then you knew it was safe.

So it kind of like opened up a whole new area

of South Bronx for us when you can talk to girls

that you couldn't talk to before.

That's a big deal.

Oh, you can talk to this Puerto Rican girl now.

'Cause you couldn't talk to a Puerto Rican girl back then,

not and be black in the South Bronx and live.

It wasn't happening.

We didn't even know we was creating anything.

We just wanted to have something that was hours.

Music calms the savage beast.

We would be the pied pipers, just calm the storm.

Music had definitely calmed the savage beast

because how many times

you may be in the motion of something that feels so tense

and you just hit that one tune,

and it would relieve everybody.

I think It's important that whoever sees this

knows that we have grown, and, yes,

there was a lot of negative, and a lot of shit happened,

but a lot of us own homes, fancy cars,

two and three hikes, have good-paying jobs.

And I think It's important that whoever sees this

knows that there is hope, that we could do this,

and it could be positive.

They say history is not made by individuals.

I disagree.

I think It's a confluence of factors.

It's the social context of the time,

the economic context of the time,

and the individual dream.

What was so powerful about our generation

is we caused movement.

We had to take from nothing and make something.

I believe that we were making a statement to society,

so to speak, that had forgotten about us,

that we have worth because we did have big fun.

Even though we were poor and we didn't have a lot,

we had fun.

You know, we made a way to have fun,

and we made a way to feel like we counted,

and we made a way to show the world

that we actually existed.