Southeast Side Story

West Side Story, the 1957 Broadway musical about two warring teenage gangs, ends in a hopeful hymn to togetherness: "We'll find a new way of forgiving, somewhere." In the years following, that magical somewhere became in reality a sad nowhere of hard drugs and forgotten loyalties. Now, however, the gangs are back on the streets with a vengeance born of a decade of upheaval. The battleground is no longer Manhattan's West Side but the Southeast Bronx, a predominantly Puerto Rican ghetto where more than 70 "cliques" or "organizations" have formed in the past year. The members --mostly dropouts, reformed junkies, displaced Viet Nam veterans--are older, angrier, better armed and more socially aware. Their avowed enemy is not a rival gang but society. "In essence," says Benjamin Ward, deputy police commissioner for community affairs, "what the kids are saying is: 'Dammit, you've failed us. And if you're not responsible, who the hell is?' "

The conditions that produced the rumbles of the 1950s have, if anything, worsened. The population density of the Southeast Bronx--500,000 people crammed into 5 sq. mi.--is among the nation's highest. Housing, health care, employment and education are woefully substandard. Fifty percent of the children under six have never been immunized against polio. Forty percent of the area's families are on welfare. More than 10% of residents between 15 and 44 are heroin addicts. Says one of Mayor John Lindsay's minority specialists: "The Puerto Rican experience in New York has been a total disaster."

In the Southeast Bronx, the unrest has spawned gangs with such sinistersounding names as the Savage Skulls, Young Sinners, Savage Nomads, Mongols and Reapers. Each clique has from 20 to 50 members ruled by a president, vice president and warlord. Their "colors," elaborate coats-of-arms stitched to the backs of their denim jackets, depict bloody skeletons and skulls, fire and lightning. Their arsenals include not only clubs, chains, knives and zip guns but also Molotov cocktails, rifles, shotguns and, say youth workers, hand grenades and machine guns.

Although centered in the Southeast Bronx, the gang subculture exists in Brooklyn, Queens and even Chinatown: pitched battles between immigrant Taiwanese and U.S.-born Chinese youths recently resulted in two homicides. In Castle Hill, a lower middle-class neighborhood in the East Bronx, teachers at Adlai Stevenson High School say that a gang of black girls called the Black Persuaders is one reason for a rash of student transfers. The Persuaders' initiation rite requires the new member to beat up a white girl.

Rooftop Rifles. Frank Gracia, head of a drug-rehabilitation program in the Southeast Bronx, became aware of the gangs six months ago. He told TIME Correspondent Leonard Levitt: "We had this street fair, selling sausages for a dime, sodas for a nickel. Well, these kids got in an argument with one of our people, broke his arm and all his fingers. Then they sent their girls over to tell us they wanted to fight us. Now, hell, I've been around. I was in gangs in the '50s. I was a junkie for 15 years before I kicked the habit. So we went over there with bats and clubs. But Jesus Christ, these kids were armed. They had 17 rifles staring down from the rooftops. They're organized. It's a whole new thing."

Gracia says that he eventually achieved an armistice with the gangs because he shared their abhorrence of drugs. "What you got to understand," he explains, "is that these kids now have like a holy war against the pushers. And the reason they hate cops is that the cops are always busting them, never the pushers." That frustration, he claims, caused the rape and murder of an alleged woman pusher three months ago. "The week before," says Gracia, "some of her junkies had stabbed some of the Immortals. The kids went to the 41st Precinct and told the cops: 'You've got 72 hours to get them junkies out of there or we will.' When no arrests were made, they did it themselves."

The police later charged nine gang members with the murder; it is one of nine homicides for which gang members have been arrested in the past year. "The danger," says Ward, "is that there is a fundamental difference between the rhetoric of the leadership and the action of the periphery. The ten to 15 hard-core members in each group just can't control their own people."

That was tragically true of Black Benjie, 25, an ex-junkie respected as a peacemaker between black and Puerto Rican gangs. A member of the Ghetto Brothers, he tried to ward off a rumble four months ago, and was stabbed to death by members of the Immortals and Spades. The next day, through the intercession of the Javelins and Peacemakers, Ghetto Brother President Charlie Melendez met with the Immortals and Spades. After hearing their apology for the "misunderstanding," he decided against a war of revenge. In an extraordinary summit meeting of most of the gangs in the Southeast Bronx, the peace treaty was extended to include the entire "family."

Though a tenuous peace within the family still prevails, the gangs have become increasingly aggressive in their demands for change. Says Ted Gross, head of the city's youth services agency: "The thing is, you could b.s. the gangs of the '50s. Take 'em to a movie, give 'em a basketball, put 'em on a bus for the beach. But these kids today are not the 13-to 18-year-old punks of 15 years ago. They've been around. Now they're in their mid-20s and some even in their 30s. You tell me, how do you b.s. a guy who's been to Viet Nam? If nothing is done to help them, they will become more and more of a police problem. The tragedy is that they are out there virtually crying for help, pleading for someone to listen to them."

Self-Respeet. The most encouraging aspect of the gangs is that they are largely drug-free. City Council President Sanford Garelik, among others, feels that their all-out war on drugs may help diminish one of the ghetto's most insidious problems. The Ghetto Brothers, for instance, have developed a reputation as a drug rehabilitation group.

A gang member named Sly, 22, a tall black who lost a college basketball scholarship because of his habit, put it this way: "I was arrested three times for robbery and larceny. Drugs were ruining my life. But then the Brothers got hold of me and wouldn't let me out of their sight. You get a guy on the Jones [drug withdrawal] and that's what you have to do. They watched TV with me, drank wine with me, took me downtown with them, out to eat. They laugh with you, fight with you, but they won't leave you. I've been here six months now and I'd die for these guys. They gave me back my self-respect."

Such feeling among some gang members is genuine, but the conditions that have produced it make the gangs a new kind of menace. Says YSA Commissioner Gross: "The prospects for the coming summer are frightening."

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