The Return of the Gang

Among the phenomena of the 1950s was the rise of the violent urban gangs with their freewheeling, sometimes lethal "rumbles" in protection of their "turf." By the mid-'60s, gangs seemed to be on the wane, their vital energies either drawn into the protest movements of that era or sapped by the burgeoning drug culture.

Now in several of America's largest cities, the gangs are back--and with some ominous differences. Older, better armed, more sophisticated, the gangs today operate in all too deadly earnest. New York City has had 27 gang-related murders reported this year--ten of them in the seething South Bronx, where 877 gang arrests have taken place in 1973. In Chicago the gangs have largely graduated to big-time crime as profiteers in guns, extortion and gambling. Los Angeles has nearly 200 gangs, more than 40 of which are black or Chicano. Their clashes have caused 16 deaths this year.

Nowhere are the new gangs more virulently active than in Philadelphia, where over half of all violent crime in the city is committed by juveniles; in the past five years 191 youngsters have died in gang wars and gang-related assassinations. TIME Correspondent Barrett Seaman spent some time on the streets of the City of Brotherly Love and sent this report:

In Philadelphia, a gang is called a "corner," and a gang leader is a "runner" or a "checkholder." Smokey, aged 19, dressed in a flaming red shirt and matching narrow-brimmed hat, is the runner of the Montgomery corner, and he is expecting trouble from the Norris Avenue corner, whose turf is just across Berks Street. "I keep everybody together, plan any action we might take," he explains coolly. Just then a corner member, who looks to be no more than nine or ten, points a finger and yells: "Three dudes coming up. Looks like warrin' time." As the three enemy youngsters cross into no man's land, twelve of Smokey's gang set off at a run to intercept them. No weapons are visible yet, but the mood is ugly. Fortunately, a cruising police car happens by before the two groups collide, and the antagonists melt into studied casual poses. "They know there's gonna be trouble," observes a Montgomery. "Norris is gonna move on us tonight, and the Man's got the word."

The Montgomerys and the Norrises are among the estimated 100 to 200 gangs that roam the black neighborhoods of West and North Philadelphia. Most of the gangs have memberships of no more than 30 or 40 teenagers, and in some cases their territory is quite literally no more than a corner or a block at best. The rules of sovereignty--and survival--are strict. The difference between life and death can often depend on whether a boy walks on one side of a street or the other. Forays by an individual or a group into the territory of another gang are a justifiable cause for all out combat. The slightest provocation--a little back talk in a school corridor, a random surreptitious glance at the "sister" of another corner, a taunting gesture from a block's distance--can plunge corners into a war that may last for two or three years.

Some gangs, like the Twelfth and Wallace corner and the Twelfth and Poplar, are perpetual enemies simply because they are immediate neighbors. Other gangs "pull with" each other, living in peace side by side and making common cause against more distant gangs. North Philadelphia's Valley gang is in fact a giant entente of corners boasting nearly 1,000 members.

Some gangs are simply natural aggressors. The Norris Avenue corner is such a group of "crazies." Though the gang is small in number, each Norris is reputed to have two or three "bodies" under his belt. "Getting a body"--shooting someone in another gang--is the surest way a younger member has of "getting a rep" and climbing in the corner hierarchy. If he survives, by age 17 he is already an elder in the gang world and can gracefully step down from active combat in order to permit those coming up to do the corner's fighting and earn, in turn, their "reps." Serving a term in jail also boosts a member's reputation, and many gangs exploit that fact as a means of getting the youngest members to take the blame for the crimes of older boys--knowing a 14-year-old is likely to be treated more leniently in courts.

Gangs are an old, established ghetto institution in Philadelphia; indeed some of them claim an identity that goes back 40 years, and some have been at war with the same opponent for as long as 30 years. But the advent of guns in large quantities in the late '60s changed the character of corner warfare and sent the hazards and the casualties zooming. Oddly enough, the guns have also served to reduce the scale of the actual combat, and all out melees between two gangs--West Side Story style--are now rare.

Modern Corners. A car with two or three gang members might come cruising down a street past a group of rivals and suddenly a shot is fired into the cluster. The car speeds off, leaving a 16-year-old lying on the sidewalk. Or a sniper's bullet from a rooftop a block away may have the same result. Plans for revenge are made, and a single assassin is often sent out to get a body in return. Such guerrilla-style warfare is, of course, far more difficult for the police to anticipate and stop than the old-style, large-scale rumbles.

To cope with the modern corners, the police have set up a special force, known as Gang Control, that is composed of 71 men and women. They work in two-officer teams, each team concentrating on a particularly active gang and trying to get close enough to the gang's leaders to sense when real trouble is brewing. "We turn the block every half-hour," explained one Gang Control officer, but "it only takes a few seconds to start a flare-up." The city has made one attempt to rid the gangs of their guns by offering a moratorium on weapons' arrests--but the attempt failed dismally. The teen-agers simply did not believe the offer was honest. "As soon as you walk in the door," said one leader, "they'll bust you."

Some of the new gangs in New York are animated by antidrug vigilantism; often they were formed specifically to run drug pushers out of their neighborhoods, and most of them severely punish members caught using heroin or cocaine. There is little evidence of this in the Philadelphia gangs. That is partly because drugs seem to be less prevalent there. As one young member explained succinctly, "You can't nod and gang-war at the same time." When not warring, drinking wine and listening to records appear to be the gangs' principal definition of a good time.

The city's efforts to ameliorate the brutality of gang life and the gang neighborhoods have had mixed results. Of the nearly 200 Youth Conservation Workers that the city assigns to the gangs, few have been markedly successful in weaning youngsters away from their corners. Civic volunteers have established a leaders' council for settling gang disputes nonviolently. The meetings, however--scheduled for at least once a week--are so far taking place less than once a month. A North Philadelphia communications center called The Network tries to correct dangerous false rumors and get gang members into job-training programs. "The problem is solvable," says Mayor Frank Rizzo, "but it won't be done in my lifetime. I'd like to go out and raze every building out there and rebuild it all--schools, pools, parks, everything. But we don't have the money to do that."

Getting out of a gang can be difficult. Big Bosco would like to retire; he was the leader of the Montgomerys before red-shirted Smokey took over the running of the war with the Norris Avenues. "I'm trying to get out of it," he says, "but Norris says they're gonna kill me, so I might as well stay in for the self-protection." Big Bosco, elder statesman in search of retirement, is 18 years old.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.