Can't Stop Won't Stop by Jeff Chang

realized that gangs had divided up the Bronx from Morris Heights to Soundview. In time, they estimated that there were a hundred different gangs claiming 11,000 members, and that 70 percent were Puerto Rican, the rest Black. The gangs figured the member estimates were too low, and that the racial estimates revealed more about policing than reality. 6
    The Ghetto Brothers gang was one of the most powerful, with more than a thousand members in divisions as far away as New Jersey and Connecticut. 7 Suarez was their leader, a handsome twenty-one-year-old martial arts expert with dark curly locks and a coy, secretive smile. On the street, he was known as the short-tempered, street fighting “Karate Charlie,” but to women and outsiders, he conveyed a boyish curiosity and a shy charm. He had joined a gang called the Egyptians at the age of twelve, but left as its members all became strung out on heroin, joining other gangs until he befriended Benjamin Melendez.
    Melendez, the vice-president, was the skinny, whip-smart nineteen-year-oldwho had founded the gang. He was a teenage diplomat turned young revolutionary, a gifted organizer and orator. “Yellow Benjy,” as he was called, was known to give impromptu speeches to his followers, often laced with blood-and fire Old Testament scripture. They half-mockingly called him “The Preacher.” He could fight as well as anyone, but his real love was music. As children, he and his brothers had won a talent contest singing Beatles songs for Tito Puente. Now he led the Ghetto Brothers’ Latin-rock band and was at the center of any clubhouse party. When they broke out the guitars, he especially favored a Beatles tune called “This Boy,” a song whose sweet, close harmonies masked menace and foreboding. It began: “That boy took my love away. He’ll regret it someday . . .”
    If other gangs spoke of themselves as “families,” the Ghetto Brothers actually began as one. Benjy, Ulpiano, Victor, and Robert Melendez were brothers whose family was among thousands of Moses’s lower Manhattan refugees. In 1961, Moses began an “urban renewal” project to clear the slums of Greenwich Village, Little Italy, Soho, and Chinatown to make room for office and high-rise apartment buildings and the eight-lane Lower Manhattan Expressway. Although a citizen’s campaign to stop the Expressway succeeded by the end of 1962, the Melendezes joined Moses’s exodus into the Bronx.
    Settling near the Cross-Bronx Expressway, Benjy followed two of his friends, Huey and Raymond, into a small Tremont gang on Marmion Avenue called the Cofon Cats. When Benjy tired of hanging out with the Cats and his family moved south of Crotona Park, he formed a new clique with his brothers and friends, including Huey, Raymond and Karate Charlie. Benjy came up with a number of names—including the Savage Skulls, the Seven Immortals and the Savage Nomads—and they settled on the Ghetto Brothers.
    Suarez’s grandmother kicked him out of the house when he was eighteen, so he enrolled in the Marines and ran with the gang before shipping out for boot-camp. On Christmas break in 1970, he went AWOL and came back to the gang. So he went by many names: Charles Kariem Lei, Charles Rivera, Charles Magdaleno. He told reporters his first name was Charlie and his surname was Melendez.
    When Charlie returned, Benjy conspired to make him president. Suarez brought discipline and battle-readiness to the gang. He says, “I tried to teach them hand-to-hand combat. I tried to teach them how to throw a Molotov cocktail.”
    The two became a formidable core. Suarez says, “Benjy was my Yin and Iwas the Yang. Good cop, bad cop. I was the one that grabbed them by the throat and administered punishment. Benjy was the one that intervened.”
    Benjy had become a supporter of the Puerto Rican Socialist Party, and was pulling the group toward politics. “The