Brooklyn Gangs of the 50s

After the food bank on Saturday I went home to put my stuff away, take a pee and warm up, then I rode down to No Frills to see if they had any fruit on sale. I got four bags of grapes, two mangoes, a tomato, yogourt, a pack of Swiss Rolls and a bag of Miss Vickie’s chips.

When I got home I went back out to buy a couple of cans of beer.

Although it stopped raining and cleared up in the afternoon, I didn’t take a bike ride because the streets were still wet and because I had lots of writing to do.

That night I watched an Alfred Hitchcock Hour teleplay that had a funny intro but the subject was so serious they deliberately chose not to be funny in closing. The beginning shows Hitchcock holding a hockey stick in front of a goal. He says, “The game of hockey seems to combine all the best elements of ice skating, polo and World War II. However, we have found a method for reducing the fighting and speeding up the game. We play over ten feet of water on melting ice. It keeps the players quite lively. There are dangers of course. Occasionally a bobbing head is mistaken for the puck. This is most unfortunate because goals scored in this way are not counted.

The story was called “Memo from Purgatory” and it was written by Harlan Ellison, based on his own experiences of infiltrating a youth gang while researching his first novel, “Web of the City”. The TV play is fictionalized and James Caan, doing his best Marlon Brando impersonation plays a Midwesterner named Jay Shaw who, like Ellison, comes New York from Ohio to try to write a first novel about youth gangs. Shaw changes his name to Phil Beldone and enters the gang hangout, immediately getting into a fight with the war counsellor of The Barons and defeating him with ease, thus catching the attention of the gang leader, Tiger, who is played by Walter Koenig (Chekov from Star Trek) which is a poor bit of casting because he’s the least tough looking member of the gang (he also looks a lot more like Ellison in looks and size than James Caan). Phil immediately gets approved for the gang’s initiation tests. In Ellison’s biographical account it doesn’t all happen so fast. He hangs around their hangout for a while and over time shows himself to be tough enough to be invited for initiation. The first part of the initiation consisted of running a gauntlet of other gang members as they whip him with the buckle ends of their belts. This is supposedly what really happened to Ellison. In the teleplay though, Phil picks up one of the gang members and uses him as a shield. Somehow I doubt if that’s in the real story. One of the requirements in the real story is that gang members must disavow any Jewish or African ancestry or association with Communism. The word “disavow” means to sever connections so I wonder what that meant within the gang. How does one disavow Jewish or African ancestry? Maybe it means one is not allowed to identify as either Jewish or Black.
            The second phase of the initiation was to have sex with one of the “Debs”, or female gang members. In the teleplay, Filene becomes Phil’s Deb but they lie to the gang that they are having sex because he wants to get to know her first. In the real gang, a Deb was property and her boyfriend’s initials were cut or burned into her skin. I’m not sure why having sex with someone is part of an initiation challenge, since it doesn’t sound very difficult, but maybe it’s a way of proving one isn’t Gay.
            In the third part of the initiation one is supposed to survive a rumble with a rival gang but in the TV story, Candle, the second in command, who hates Phil, says they are going to roll an old drunk on a bench and when he doesn’t have a cent on him, Candle wants to kill him. Phil stops him and then Tiger arrives. Phil tells Tiger that killing people with no profit is just something that a psycho would do because it just leaves bodies for the cops to find. Tiger makes Phil his war counsellor then and there and demotes Candle. According to Ellison original story, he became the war counsellor of the Barons. I wonder if he’s stretching the truth. The two versions deviate at this point because Candle and a couple of other Barons break into Phil’s room and find the preliminary notes for his novel. Phil is placed on trial before Tiger. Tiger is almost ready to give Phil a pass until Candle points out to Tiger a passage in which Phil suggests that Tiger might be afraid of women. Phil is set up to be in a rumble with the rival gang The Flyers and he will be the point man but with an empty gun, so that he will be the first person to take a bullet, a shotgun blast or a knife when the Flyers attack. When the time comes though Phil jumps onto the hitch of a passing trailer truck and off the other side, then he goes into a store to hold it up so the owner will call the police and then he’ll have protection. He goes to jail but Filene pays his bail. It turns out though that she has been given the money by the Barons so they can ambush him when he meets her. Candle and Tiger are there. Tiger is about to knife Phil when Filene tries to stop him. Phil is struggling with Candle and she gets pushed against Tiger’s knife.
            In the original story Ellison is not found out. He participates in a rumble with the Puerto Rican gang, The Flyers and he sustains a lot of cuts, after which he quits the gang.

The Barons and the Flyers were Ellison’s made up names though. He seems to have kept the real name of the gang he’d joined as a secret. The real Brooklyn gangs of that era though were the Mau Maus and the Sand Street Angels. A Puerto Rican gang were the Jesters, there were The Phantom Lords, The Hellburners, The Roman Lords (which I assume were Italian), The Buccaneers, The Bishops, The Garfield Boys, The South Brooklyn Boys, The Dragons, The Tigers, The South Hook Stompers, The Gowanus Boys, The Green Avenue Stompers, The Nits, The El Quintos, The Outlaws, The Jackson Project Gang, The El Saints, The Jackson Jents, The Immortal Sinners (A Black gang), The Imperial Lords, The Medallion Lords, The Halsey Bops and the Marcy Chaplains. 

According to Ellison the members of the barons, if they were still alive when they turned 21 would try to join the Merchant Marine.