The Majestics started in the early 70s. It didn’t begin as a crime thing. It started as a dance club, and as things happened in the club—arguments and fights—it became a gang.
You could see how things escalated. First, five guys would go into a club and do a dance routine. Then another five would do another dance routine, and it became like a fucking dance-off. If you made someone look bad, they’d wanna retaliate. Next thing you knew, you’d be fighting. And then it got built up even more. The next time you went to the club, they’d be there and it would be like, “Oh, we had a fight with these guys last time. We gotta watch our back.” You’d bring a girl with you so she could hold the gun.
Eventually everybody said, “We’re not going to dance no more. Now we’re going to wear these denim jackets with patches on them.” And then all of a sudden, you’d find yourself claiming a piece of Brooklyn as your fuckin’ real estate. Everything was about turf. This was way before anybody was selling drugs. It was just: “This is your part of Brooklyn, this is my part of Brooklyn.” It got to the point where you couldn’t walk outside of a radius of five or ten blocks. Our turf was Lee Avenue and Lynch Street.
In Williamsburg, where we were, it was the Majestics, the Dukes, the Unknown Bikers, South 9 Bikers, Spanish Kings, Devil Rebels, Dirty Ones, and a bunch more. Not every club was friendly. Basically, the Dirty Ones was the only gang that was friendly with us. They were a very big club. At our peak, we were only about 100 strong, but the Dirty Ones had chapters in Bay Ridge and the Bronx. Unknown Bikers were just big in Williamsburg, South 9 Bikers the same. All of us went to school together. In that neighborhood, if you weren’t in a gang, you just went to school and you were fine, but if you were in a gang your chances of survival were 50/50. Your chances of going to jail were even worse.
If you walked by somebody’s block, they would chase you, shoot at you, and beat you down if they caught you. The rivalry was like what you see in movies and worse, because gangs back then, the people they hung out with meant more to them than their family. They were with them most of the day.
I’d get up, go to my friend’s house at eight in the morning, and knock on his door. Wake him up, hustle. Hustle to get money for breakfast, eat, get high. Walk all the way back to where we live, just to get high, then hustle again to get lunch. Our drug of choice then was heroin. We weren’t selling, we were just using. I never shot up. I always sniffed. One of my friends who I wanted to get high with said, “You wanna get high, you gotta watch this.” And he shot up and he said, “I’m doing this so you can see what I do,” and I said, “I don’t want nothing to do with that.” And I never did it. I was satisfied with sniffing.
Robbing and stealing wasn’t a big thing. People hustled their money. Mostly it was breaking into factories in Brooklyn. Factories close up at night, you break in, get what you want, and sell it. We’d break into cars, stuff like that. We were never really into robbing people. A car can sit on the street two or three days today. Back then, if a car sat for a day, we’d strip it. We spent a night one time stripping a whole car completely down to the chassis. We had everything sold by sunrise. We had a buyer for every piece—not even from garages. We sold it right on the street.
During the day we’d just be hanging out, walking the streets of Brooklyn, meeting people, going to parties. Then we’d be getting high all night till the sun came up, going to the beach, listening to music. We would hang out in these abandoned buildings that we had electricity running into. Later on we had a clubhouse where we’d hang out all the time. It was all music and sex and everybody getting high. Before we started getting high on dope, we were sniffing glue. That was the big thing. After that it was acid—Purple Haze. We’d get high and go into the city.
42nd Street was like Mecca, where all the gangs would hang out on Friday night. If the cops wanted to see who was who, they just had to look there on Friday and Saturday night because everybody wore their patches, all dressed up down to their boots. Any gear you could put on, no matter how hot or cold it was, you went to 42nd and wore your colors proudly. The biggest place we would go was the Starship. It was on 42nd between Eighth and Ninth in the back of a parking lot. Not many fights broke out there. 42nd Street was like a neutral area, unless you ran into clubs from different boroughs. The Brooklyn clubs were OK, but the clubs from the Bronx and Queens—the Savage Skulls, the Nomads—they could cause some problems. We’d get harassed by the cops all the time, but then again, that was a time when if you had a fight on the street, the cops would grab you, kick you in the ass, and send you on your way like, “Get outta here. Go home.”
Nowadays, everybody’s got a gun or a knife. Nobody fights to hurt anymore. Everybody fights to kill. Everybody wants to make a name for themselves, a reputation. Back then you just hung out with the right people. That’s all you needed, was to have on the back of your jacket: “The Majestics.”
We had like one pistol, and that was for everybody, because every now and then you had a confrontation that would require it. It was something for show. You know, you pull it out or you just display it, and people say, “OK, we’re not gonna mess around.” Most of the time when you would shoot, you did it not to hurt somebody, but to scare them. You’d fire a round in the air, and they’d say, “Oh shit, they’re shooting,” and they’d run.
Violence back then, if you put it on a scale, I’d say it was about a seven. If you were out to get a guy, you wanted to put him in the hospital. You wanted to teach him a lesson. Sometimes people got hit by cars. You push a guy up against a wall with a car, just push him till he hits the wall. That happened a lot. It was also common for someone to be walking down the street, and a car would stop, and a bunch of guys would jump out and beat on him. Because if you were in the wrong place at the wrong time, you took an ass whupping. There was nothing you could do about it. It was because of who you were. Everybody knew who was who.
The bond between people who were in gangs was amazing. For instance, my friend Dusty got stabbed, and he came back from the Bronx really late, and I hung out with him the whole night at the hospital. He got stitched up, and we hung out and got high afterward. When we were done I carried him up four flights of stairs on my shoulders to his house, stoned out of my head. Because we were like brothers. To this day, we still hang out, and we’d do anything for each other. You know, if somebody needed to get high, you made sure they got high; if someone got locked up, you make sure when they got out, you threw a party.
But as things started to change and people started with the drugs, making money off of it, a lot of violence erupted. It wasn’t about, “This is where we’re hanging out,” anymore. It became, “This is where we’re selling drugs.” People were having shootouts left and right. Some people were robbing other gangs for their drugs. They said, “Why should I buy drugs to sell when I can steal his and sell them?” It happened all the time. I saw a lot of people get killed and a lot of people go to jail. The gangs started separating. People started making money on their own and they forgot about their buddies. Heroin was the drug of choice. Coke was popular when it first came out, but heroin was the drug of choice because it was a better high. It made more money. It was easier to sell. I lived down the block from an armory, and there was a sergeant who would come every morning and buy seven bags of dope. That’s how popular heroin was.
Right now, the Majestics is a motorcycle club. All those clubs that were fighting back then hang out together now. We buried each other’s brothers too much. So we all hang out now, go to parties, things like that. I don’t want to glorify it, because for today’s youth there’s nothing to glorify in gangs, but back then it was what we did to survive. I buried three of my brothers because of being in gangs and being involved in drugs and living in the ghetto. If you want to talk about family members alone, I’ve lost five. I go to a funeral now and I don’t even cry. I don’t have any emotions anymore.
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