In New York: The Magnificent 13

By James Wilde

The New York City subway is cold, and spooky with shadows. Water drips from the vaulted ceiling into small pools beside the tracks below. At one end the platform a rusting steel bridge leads to the street elevator. It is past midnight. A well-dressed man walks nervously up and down, a few steps at a time, waiting for a train. He knows he is a target and is plainly scared. The elevator descends. The man sees six teen-age blacks sweeping toward him like a pack of wolves. First they literally sniff him up and down, then they urinate in a circle around him. They reek of the peppermint smell of angel dust, and they are looking for somebody to blow away, like this turkey.

Suddenly four more teen-agers in red berets emerge from the shadows at the other end of the dark platform. They are silent. But at the sight of them the wolves leave their victim, disappearing at a run down the track toward the next station, their shouted obscenities echoing back through the tunnel. As the Curtis rescued man tries to say thanks, his words are drowned in the roar of an oncoming train. He gets aboard, shakily waving one hand at his young rescuers in a half salute.

The rescuers, one black, one Hispanic and two Chinese, are on patrol for a vigilante group that calls itself the Magnificent 13. But for their presence at the 149th Street-Grand Concourse IRT station in The Bronx, the traveler might well have become one more grim ripple in the current wave of terror beneath New York's streets. Nobody is sure exactly how many people have been robbed and beaten in recent months by teen-age gangs, often while fellow passengers and even train conductors did nothing. Already this year there have been eight subway murders. On one particularly bad night two token-booth operators in Queens were burned to death after some teen-agers poured gasoline through the change window and set it afire.

The situation got so bad that in March Mayor Edward Koch sent additional police underground to patrol subway trains between 6 p.m. and 2 a.m. But the Magnificent 13 took up its underground patrols well before the mayor acted. The group's founder and leader is Curtis ("The Rock") Sliwa, 23, a night manager of the McDonald's restaurant at the corner of Broadway and 236th Street in The Bronx. Neatly turned out and ruggedly handsome, Sliwa became known as The Rock for his high school skill at brawling and an ability to go for days without sleep. He also has some notable experience with civil action. In 1977 he formed something called the Rock Brigade, 63 high school kids, all volunteers, who are still providing and servicing 440 garbage cans in the ghettos of the South Bronx to set an example of how to keep a neighborhood clean. Considering crime on the subways, Sliwa came to a conclusion. "Volunteer patrols," he recalls, "seemed the only way to show those bums the public's had enough."

Wearing red berets as a badge of office, the original 13 went into action last Feb. 13, with three teams patrolling what is known as the Muggers' Express, the No. 4 IRT train from Woodlawn in The Bronx to Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn "We stopped a mugging the first night a 167th and River Avenue," one patroller remembers. "We asked the conductor to signal ahead to the next station, where we handed the mugger over to the transit police." A week later, they suffered their first casualty.

During a routine inspection, a team captain, Karl Smucker, 20, a cook at McDonald's, was knocked down by a thief lurking behind a garbage container. The rest of the patrol grabbed the attacker, but Smucker had already been slammed to the floor hard enough to break his jaw in two places.

After a few weeks of patrolling by the Red Berets (which the 13 are sometimes called), robberies and violence dropped on the Muggers' Express. Since then Sliwa has branched out. Every night the teams meet at Sliwa's McDonald's at 9 p.m., then head out in patrols of four. Though most members accepted into the Magnificent 13 have had some training in the martial arts, and some admit to carrying knives for protection when journeying alone at night, on patrol they have no weapons and even refused the walkie-talkie radios that the Transit Authority urged them to use. They do not want to seem part of the police. Patrolling, they check out the stations first, particularly those of elevated trains, which are always badly lit. Once aboard a train they split up, striding through the cars looking for potential targets such as drunks or women alone, and for potential troublemakers, usually small groups of watchful kids also on the lookout for victims. At each stop the Red Berets all stick their heads out the doors of whatever cars they are in to check up on each other. If anyone is missing, they know the guy is in trouble. "Our main weapon is our presence," Sliwa notes. "We don't want to tangle with anyone if we can help it, but just being around puts the muggers off."

Sliwa began recruiting in the jungles of the South Bronx among ghetto kids who, in the eyes of the world, are more likely to be criminals than crime fighters. Among the original 13 is Tony Mayo, 18, a black who never knew his father, lost his mother when he was still a toddler, was then raised by relatives in one of the grimmest sections in any American city. "I'm nearly a black belt," says Mayo. "I can disarm a man carrying a knife. I've developed a spiritual eye. I can feel you behind me, I can feel your vibes." Arnaldo Salinas, 18, another ghetto child, wants to be an FBI man. "There's not so many Puerto Ricans in the FBI, I think," he says, with a grin gleaming from under a straggly mustache. Carlos Lopez, another Puerto Rican, has just graduated rom Cardinal Hayes High School, where he was president of the computer club and editor of the school paper. He has just been admitted to M.I.T. His father is a janitor in a New York hospital.

With volunteers flowing in, the 13 have now become 48. "You've got to have a job or be going to school," says Sliwa. "And your motivation can't be one of revenge. I've turned down over 30 people who wanted in for the same reason as Charles Bronson in Death Wish--because somebody in their family has been attacked." Recruits are first tested for reflexes and ability to go without sleep, then for tolerance of verbal abuse, as Sliwa calls them "nigger" or "spik," the least of the taunts they may get in the subway. Nearly every volunteer has been excited by The Warriors, a film in which street gangs plot to take over New York. Among the fired-up who have been accepted are ten whites, six blacks, twelve Hispanics and, just lately, 20 Chinese--after the Magnificent 13 was written up in Chinese newspapers. Before taking any of them, Sliwa had to hold consultations with the Ghost Shadows, the most powerful gang in Chinatown, explaining he was not out to control turf, just police the subways.

The police do not take the Red Berets very seriously, partly because they distrust vigilantes and have come to feel that active help from "civilians" is more trouble than it is worth. But Sliwa intends to continue the patrols. "It didn't take the muggers long to change their schedule," he notes. Six major subway thefts with violence have lately been committed after special police patrols knocked off work at 2 a.m. Fortnight ago, as Sliwa and two other Red Berets drove off six men trying to rape a woman on a Brooklyn elevated platform, Sliwa disarmed a man with a sawed-off shotgun by using a Kung Fu kick to the head. But he himself spun over the guardrail and fell 18 feet into a freight yard. He suffered only heavy bruises and strained muscles.

One Saturday night on the Muggers' Express, with some of the cars awash in vomit, Lopez's patrol picked up a drunk who was hardly able to stand. He recognized them: "Hey, man, I seen you guys.

Man, I'm outta my head. Please take me home." They did. Back on the line, they met an old woman who said simply, "You boys, you make me feel safe again."

Such compliments in ghetto slang are known as "zooping you up." The 13 are zooped up a good deal these days. Says Sliwa: "This is partly why the guys do this. They really get a kick out of being recognized." It is nearly 4 a.m. Sunday and the Berets are so tired they can barely see. Doing this night after night is pretty monotonous, Lopez points out. "You wait and you wait and just when you feel like dozing off something happens."

Sure enough. Entering a new car, they find a pickpocket rolling a drunk. When he sees the patrol, the nimble-fingered dude just smiles and slips away emptyhanded.

--James Wilde

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