I was 13 or 14 when I started. We hung around Aberdeen Park. In the back of the park there was a cemetery, and in the cemetery there was a hill. Underneath the hill, there were the train tracks. It’s where the old freight trains used to run out of Long Island City. We did most of our dirty business on the railroad tracks, so we got the name The Railroad Boys.
That was when the neighborhood was mostly German, Irish, and Italian. It was a gangster neighborhood. Murder Inc. came out of that neighborhood. John Gotti, too. When I was growing up, stealing old ladies’ pocketbooks was the big thing. I remember the older guys coming around and passing the word that if any white kid in the neighborhood stole an old lady’s pocketbook, they would have their hands and legs broken. That wasn’t allowed in that neighborhood because that old lady may be some big shot gangster’s relative.
We had colors—blue sweaters. They had high collars, buttoned down, and on the back you had “RR.” But we didn’t really go out of our way too much with the sweaters and the costumes. Everybody knew who we were. We were trying to hide, actually, because the NYPD Youth Squad was always down here, asking us questions like who was who, and who was our leader.
There were no drugs then. That was right before the Kennedy assassination. After the Kennedy assassination, somebody opened up the door and let the drugs in. Our big thing was buying cough medicine. At that time you could buy the Robitussin AC, with codeine. If you drank that, it was like... forget about it. You were whacked out of your face. Also, we used to have a lot of gay guys come around and they’d get us a couple pills, some marijuana, and bullets for our zip guns. There was a guy called the Baron and a guy called Bob the Queer, and they’d get us whatever we wanted. They loved us, you know, because they were fags and they loved young kids. They’d hang around. I guess some guys, you know, went with them. I never did, but I know there were guys in the gang that did.
Mostly we drank wine. We were big wine drinkers. We’d drink Night Train. It was like 50 cents a bottle. Or we’d buy a 40-ounce bottle of Budweiser, a quart of Ballantine, sit up on the hill and drink that.
On a warm Saturday night, we’d all be up on the hill. A lot of the guys would be with their girlfriends. We’d cut a hole in the fence, go in the cemetery, and have make-out sessions. If you looked down the hill toward Evergreen Avenue, there was a schoolyard, and that’s where all the black kids used to hang out. Their gang was the Comanchero Chaplains. We could see them from the hill. We’d look down on them and they’d look up at us. Sometimes we’d say, “Come on up. You wanna have a game of football?” or sometimes we’d say, “F youse, we’re gonna come down and kick your asses.” When we were drinking, we’d scream down at them, “Hey, you fuckin’ black bastards!” We’d say something racial, you know? And that would touch it off right away, because they’d start yelling back at us, and before you knew it, we’d be running down on the railroad tracks, they’d be running up. There would be 20 or 25 of them and 20 or 25 of us. We’d have sticks, bats, clubs, and bottles, and we’d just beat the heck out of each other until the cops came or until we got tired of it. A lot of times, people would come back all beat up and bruised. In them days, it was no big thing. You went home, you needed a couple of stitches, you know, you went to the neighborhood drugstore, you got butterfly stitches. That was a typical night.
But you gotta remember one thing: When we were kids, we didn’t have to kill anybody. I mean, we liked to have a good old-fashioned fight and beat the hell outta each other, but we never had no intentions of, “Let’s go down there and kill a few of ’em.” We all lived in the same neighborhood—that was another reason why we weren’t out to kill each other. The parents always got along, and we always respected their parents and they respected our parents. Everyone had a little more respect in them days. Like if we were walking down the street and we saw one of the Spanish guys with his girlfriend, we wouldn’t beat him up. We would let him go because he was with his girl. Or if he was with his mother, we wouldn’t say nothing to him. If he was alone, he got his ass kicked. It worked the same way for us when we were in their neighborhood.
One summer, we got into it with the Spanish gang. They were called the Flaming Satans. The Spanish guys were different. When we’d fight with the black guys, it was more or less hit and run. But when we’d fight the Spanish guys, they’d stand there. I’ll be honest with you, the Spanish guys had a little more guts than the black guys. We’d see them coming, walking up Bushwick Avenue in a line of like 20 abreast. So we’d form a line, walk right down and stop. All of a sudden we’d start hitting each other. They were knife-happy. When they started with the knives, we started with the zip guns.
To make a zip gun you buy a cap gun. You stick a car antenna in it and file down the part that you cock back—the hammer. Then you tie the hammer up with rubber bands, pull it back, and let it go. The force would cause the rubber band to shoot a .22 bullet. We used to wrap the gun up with a lot of tape, because those things had a tendency to blow up in your hands. They weren’t very accurate, either. We’d fire at a guy standing three feet away, and we’d miss. But it made a big noise and a flash of light. It would scare people. But that didn’t last too long once they got used to it. Plus, if you had a leather jacket on and I shot you, chances are the bullet wouldn’t even go through the jacket. They weren’t really that strong of a weapon.
One of our guys got stabbed 20 times by the Flaming Satans. They punctured his lung and he almost died. About a month later, when he got out of the hospital, they invaded us again. This time we were up on the roofs throwing things down on them: Bricks, bottles, cans… you could kill somebody if you hit ’em with a garbage can of rocks from 50 feet up. But still, they found the same guy who got stabbed before. He was out on the street. They cornered him, stabbed him three times, and shot him in the ass.
That was the year when it started getting real serious. Life magazine ran a big story on us. Then of course the cops picked up on it, and it got to be really tough. We were in the papers more than the president. Finally the Youth Squad—the special police squad they set up just to deal with the gang problem—got involved. They made us have a big meeting in Junior High School 73. Us, the Chaplains, and the Spanish guys all got together and they gave us an ultimatum: Either we made peace or we were gonna start going to jail.
In the 60s, the Puerto Ricans and blacks were coming in like there was no tomorrow. One of us would move out of a place, and ten families would move in. Over the course of one or two summers, they outnumbered us. We went down one night, had a fight with them, and I’ll never forget it: We chased them all the way down Evergreen Avenue, and all of a sudden about 60 or 70 of them came out of a house. There were like 20 of us. That’s when we started realizing that we had lost the numbers. It wasn’t too hard to see the handwriting on the wall.
A lot of the guys started moving out of the neighborhood or going off to Vietnam. Little by little the white gang broke up. We had nobody left, so we said, “What’s the use in fighting?” We got to the point where we got older, we had girlfriends, we started getting cars, and we left the neighborhood. We were able to do that, whereas the newcomers weren’t. So they kept the neighborhood. From time to time, we’d bump into them and they’d make fun of us like, “Hey, we got your park. We got your neighborhood.” And we’d turn around and say, “Yeah, yeah, you got so much. You won. Big deal.”
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