FOCUS:NEIGHBORHOOD GANGS
Among Buffalo's gangs a code of blood and 'honor'
Curtis has been shot three times, and he’s only 22. A gang leader who has bossed the boys in the Box-Kehr streets area, Curtis is described by some as a “brutal young man.” Maybe seeing his 17-year-old brother Carl—a random victim—get shot in the face and watching him die in his arms had something to do with the molding of his brutish personality. Andrew “stayed on the block” as a teenager, hanging with the 31 Gang, a local posse of neighborhood toughs in the Broadway area.
“There was some drugs, some guns and stuff [involved],” says the 20-year-old, who does not admit to carrying or shooting a gun himself.
Nineteen-year-old Jamod has been shot in the neck, but “it’s no big deal,” he says. After all, just about everyone he knows has been shot or stabbed at least once. Some are dead. Some are in prison.
That’s the gangsta life, the hustla life. That’s how it is for a lot of young kids on Buffalo’s streets—kids who are in search of a peculiar kind of honor and respect.
Local sources count more than 6,100 members in more than 40 “posses”— or gangs—scattered throughout the East and West sides and in South Buffalo. Most of the groups are “local and unorganized.”
A spate of gang-related killings, shootings and arrests prompted a Buffalo News reporter to spend the last four months reaching out to members to learn what motivates them and discover what makes them choose a path that puts them in life-threatening circumstances on a daily basis.
The names of the gang members have been changed to provide them anonymity that they requested out of fear of police or gang retribution. However, because youths often exaggerate their experiences, The News also sought to verify through police and courts the stories the gang members related.
The lives of the young men interviewed and others like them resemble those depicted in Hollywood movies or HBO gangsta series. Only this is not a dramatization. For these young men, the danger doesn’t end when the television is turned off.
The guns. The drugs. The violence. The beatings.
It’s all real for them, as real as bullets and blood.
Some—like Curtis, Andrew and Jamod—try to get out, with varying degrees of success.
Others, like 14-year-old Christian Portes, run out of time. Christian was shot to death just after midnight June 13 while riding his bike home from a party in his Lower West Side neighborhood.
About a year ago, he started down a path that involved gangs and run-ins with police, his family said. The night he was shot, he had snuck out of their Niagara Street house to attend a party.
“He made some mistakes; a lot of kids make mistakes. But [recently] he was doing better,” said his mother, Ruth Burgos.
In the gang life, though, “mistakes” can have deadly consequences.
“This game is real serious. We kill people. We sell drugs. We recruit young people to get in,” said 20-year-old Cosme, describing a lifestyle he says he has lived since he was 13. He said he is trying to get out.
Others glory in it. Buffalo police recently found on YouTube a video in which many of the young people in the video are masked and wave what appear to police to be assault rifles and pistols as they rap about the “cash chase.” It looks like something off of BET or MTV—but it was set in the Langfield public housing complex.
Chief of Detectives Dennis Richards would not comment on whether any of those in the brazen YouTube video are known to police.
“They obviously seem to be using gang symbolism, and all of this would be disturbing,” Richards said. While some might view the YouTube clip as “just a video,” he said this recording is “carrying it to another level.”
Deputy Police Commissioner Daniel Derenda says crime in every major category is down in the city since 2005, but that police still try to be proactive.
“There are a lot of things we start putting in place [in summer] to start dealing with what comes,” Derenda said, citing the addition of police details and strict enforcement of the curfew “to keep younger kids in the house.”
A sense of belonging
Christian Portes was violating curfew when he was killed.
For teens and young men in gangs, the way of life is not really a choice; it’s what they know—the way other teens know to go to school or adults know to go to work. They find a sense of belonging in places the rest of us don’t understand.
“They was doin’ robberies of other drug dealers, breaking and entering, and selling drugs, but they showed a young brother love,” said 22-year-old Anthony, explaining why he was drawn to the life. He’s had run-ins with the police but does not have a record.
J. Luis Acosta runs Urban Community Corporation for at-risk young adults. He knows firsthand the allure of the street because he was a gang leader when he lived on the Lower West Side and while he was in federal prison for shooting an FBI informant.
“We got into it looking for a father figure. Our friends embraced each other, we all came from broken homes,” Acosta said. “We were each others’ fathers, big brothers and mentors.”
Death is no deterrent because these kids don’t see the long view.
Even in mentoring sessions, some can be overheard planning to “hit the corner” and “make that paper”— earn drug money—as soon as the session is over.
The guns they carry—many brought in from states with lax gun laws—are easy to get if one has the right connections.
In many cases, the “OGs” (older or original gangstas) provide guns to the “YGs” (young gangstas). That’s so the older ones can avoid getting caught packing by police, and because juveniles don’t usually get prison time if caught with a weapon.
For Cosme, a connection to the Latin Kings was his birthright: His dad had been a Latin King, his mom a Latin Queen. One day when Cosme was hanging out on the West Side, a guy driving a nice car stopped him on the street and approached him about joining.
“He said he knew my dad and he could bless me [into the gang],” said Cosme.
Short of being blessed into a gang, there are other, less pleasant ways of joining.
Looking for respect
Sometimes they send a recruit on a mission with a gun, he and others said. Other times, they subject a potential member to a “jump.” That’s when a group surrounds the recruit and he must fight his way out. If the recruit survives, he’s in. If he doesn’t, they drape a flag over him.
“They still show you respect,” Cosme said.
Respect is one of the five jewels on the Latin Kings’ symbolic crown. The four other jewels represent honor, knowledge, obedience and sacrifice.
The gang lifestyle comes with its own rules, rituals and symbolism, including athletic or business logos that take on new meaning.
Gang experts say the Latin Kings adopted the logo of hockey’s Los Angeles Kings. The Crips adopted the logos of British Knights sneakers and Burger King fast food, but, for the gang, the initials “B” and “K” stand for Blood Killers.
The handshakes are also significant, especially when one is greeting a drug customer on the street in broad daylight: Welcome the customer with the drug in your palm, slap hands and give him a hearty handshake while transferring the product. “Slap ’em up,” is what it’s called.
No excuses, just facts
This is not the kind of life many of the young men would have chosen for themselves, but it’s what they know. They don’t make excuses. They simply tell the facts.
“Next door, we didn’t have doctors, lawyers, and in some cases, no parents,” said Acosta, whose Seventh Street nonprofit agency teaches at-risk clients marketable skills like construction and demolition.
Bob Kuebler runs the Youth With a Purpose program out of the Holy Cross Church Youth Center on Seventh Street. On his office wall, amid hundreds of pictures, poems and essays, are photos of Christian Portes in happier times.
“The kids say things like, ‘They have money to light up the Peace Bridge but no money to buy textbooks,’ ” Kuebler said. “It’s driven by economics. We send a message that building character and relationships is not important.”
Cosme is in Kuebler’s mentoring program. He says he does not want to be a gangbanger anymore, saying he’s seen “too many people getting hurt or killed over drugs or money.”
City Judge James A. W. McLeod has seen too many kids in court who “just need . . . someone they can sit and talk to”; someone “that has lived their life experience.” So he began a “youth court” in January, working with community groups and educators to provide services that can help teens escape the street life.
So far, about 200 kids have been steered into the youth court. McLeod said it’s too soon to assess the impact, but “if we can just save 10 to 15 percent, as opposed to losing 100 percent, that’s a ‘win’ for me.”
A lot to overcome
Curtis, Jamod, Andrew and Anthony are in mentoring and GED programs run by the Stop the Violence Coalition in the Ellicott-Masten YMCA. Andrew has landed a hotel job while working on his GED.
The program is in its fourth year, has graduated about 22 students and has a 90 percent success rate, said Arlee “Joop” Daniels Jr., a former gang leader who runs the program.
But when the young men walk out the doors of that—or any—program, they face the same poverty and joblessness, the same hopelessness, the same drug deals, the same guns that ensnared them in the first place.
That can be a lot to overcome.
Jamod, for example, slipped back in with the wrong crowd and now faces a drug possession charge.
“It doesn’t take much to get a young man riled up . . . and back into some of the things that got him in trouble in the first place,” Daniels said.
That’s also what happened to 18- year-old Fred Harris, who is in jail now on $100,000 bail for his part in two armed stickups, including a gunpoint robbery of a cab driver three months ago.
“He had two jobs, had enrolled in college. And then some part of the streets, peer pressure, sort of got the best of him,” Daniels said.
“I don’t feel good about it, but I understand it wholeheartedly because the system has not provided a lot of opportunities for young men who live in areas where the poverty is a lot more severe than in other areas.
“It’s heartbreaking, but we know that you can only do so much. You’re not going to be able to save them all.”
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