Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa sheds insider’s light on gang life; talks solutions on North Fork

After a recent alleged gang attack in Southold, Guardian Angels are heading to the North Fork, and founder Curtis Sliwa spoke to RiverheadLOCAL about the insidious spread of gangs into sleepy communities and bustling towns on the East End — offering an inside look into the workings of the gang mentality and how to combat the war against crime.

No town, including Riverhead or Southold, he said, is safe.

According to Sliwa, who has fought gangs for over 35 years, his approach to tackling the gang issue on the North Fork is to take the program in two phases. First, Guardian Angels will come to Greenport and Southold this week to assess the situation. Next, Sliwa will come out to make a presentation to the Southold and Greenport school districts, outlining a Guardian Angel anti-gang in-school program that can help educate both students and administrators on the inner workings of how deadly gangs are recruiting new members as young as first and second grade.

“We want to mentor the children and steer them away from the romanticized images of the MS-13 and the 18th Street gangs,” Sliwa said.

Sliwa first collaborated with former Greenport Village Mayor David Kapell in 2005, when he came to Greenport and organized a citizen-based group that helped patrol village streets. The Guardian Angels is a volunteer-based organization made up of citizen volunteers who help protect communities around the world.

“In 2005 the village had an acute drug problem. In response, a committed group of local volunteers formed the Greenport chapter of the Guardian Angels to provide the support of a neighborhood watch to the police. Their efforts, in combination with the work of the Southold police working with the District Attorney’s East End Drug Task Force, solved the problem. This type of collaboration between the police and the people they protect should be ongoing,” Kapell said Monday.

Last month’s brutal gun and machete attack, which took place in Southold on Route 25 and South Harbor Road, is believed to have stemmed from a dispute between some of the four alleged MS-13 defendants and the victims that occurred at the Third Street Park in Greenport — and it is believed that the victims are members of Mara-18 or 18th Street, a rival street gang.

One of the defendants charged is an Aquebogue resident.

Robert DeSena, founder of Council for Unity, an organization that has seen tremendous success at eradicating gang activity in Riverhead and other areas including New York City, said recently that any community, in any part of the country, whether upscale or poverty-ridden, can be seen as fertile for gang members to flourish — and residents should continue to be aware of the dangers.

“The ultimate measurement of gang activity in anywhere stems from the conditions that promote and support gang activity,” he said. “When there is no opportunity for upward mobility, no positive role models, rampant materialism that defines your worth, indifference on the part of society, isolation and so on, gangs are going to swell. They thrive when youth are disenfranchised and hopeless.”

Sliwa said currently that an intense, heated rivalry between the MS-13 and the 18th Street gangs is intensifying not only on the North Fork and Riverhead, but across the United States and Mexico.

That rivalry, he said, has been witnessed in other neighboring areas, including Huntington Station and Elizabeth, New Jersey.

The gangs, he said, “have undertaken  a tremendous recruitment drive.”

With the flood of “unaccompanied children”, kids who have been entering the U.S. illegally from Central America, fleeing violence and poverty in their homeland to stay with family and friends, gangs already deeply entrenched in Suffolk County are waiting.

“These kids are disenfranchised. They’re leaving gang-ravaged Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador. Their mothers are sending them ahead to save them. They arrive here, and gang members look at them and know they’re from the country. Many are staying with friends of the family. And if there are 3,000 in Suffolk County, and they get 100 to join a gang, that’s an army,” Sliwa said.

Many of the young people are not quite 17 or 18, with some as young as 12, 13, and 14, Sliwa said. “Gangs look at them as ripe recruits and say, ‘We’re going to get them.'”

MS-13 and 18th Street gang members, he said, are engaged in fierce rivalry to recruit the newcomers. “They say, ‘Whose side you going to be on? You have to pick a side,'” he said. “These are competing gangs. You always need two competitors to stir up the pot.”

Nowhere is the recruitment more rampant and insidious, Sliwa said, than in local school districts. “If you are new in town, or just entering the school system, you are ripe. If you say ‘no’, there are lingering ramifications. And, because these are very insular, parochial communities, it’s very easy to do without anyone knowing about it.”

Organized gangs, Sliwa explained, have structure, with underlings taking orders from “generals”, who, he said, see the influx of potential new members, both male and female, and are “licking their chops. They’re like vultures.”

Recruitment starts young: Pee wee divisions begin recruiting children in elementary schools as young as six years old, he said. “There are generations — a grandfather, father and then, the son. The son goes in and he’s assimilated in the gang. He’s cool, he’s hip, he shows the gang signs and pictures to mesmerize” young new members. “People will be shocked to know that it starts in elementary schools,” he said.

For kids whose parents are struggling to put food on the table, the drugs, booze and wads of cash can be attractive, Sliwa said. “It’s very enticing.’

It starts, Sliwa said, with simple “throwing of the hand signs. To young people, that’s very attractive.” Most kids who imitate the hand signs, Sliwa said, will be “posers or wannabes, not legitimate gangsters. But a small, solid few will be so mesmerized, so titillated, they they will become the most aggressive and interested in proving their worth.”

Starry-eyed with the excitement, young, vulnerable, impressionable and idealistic children are fertile for recruitment, Sliwa said. The youngest “conscripts” need to prove themselves, or “earn their bones,” Sliwa said, and often are used as mules, to carry guns and drugs; if arrested, they are charged as juveniles and don’t face the stiffer penalties that an adult gang member would.

And, he said, being arrested earns young recruits a “stripe” or badge of honor. “It shows they’ve got street cred,” he said. With the Internet, kids can go to websites to see MS-13 or 18th Street gang member with tattoos or colors. There’s no stigma. It’s like, ‘I’ll put another tattoo on my neck to show I was arrested for armed robbery.’ These kids are glorifying this.” And, he said, with children as young as three able to operate an iPad or a smartphone, or a throwaway phone, the assimilation into gang culture starts early. “It’s like gang candy,” Sliwa said.

The new pride in being arrested indicates a shifting mentality, Sliwa said: In the past, older generations saw being arrested as a “Scarlet Letter”, with those gang members ostracized by their community, family and friends and subsequently “forced” to join the gang, which became a surrogate family.

New gang members, he said, still see gangs as families, especially as refugees in a foreign land seeking familiarity of their homelands. In Suffolk County, he said, there is a greater number of young men and women per capita from Central America and Mexico than anywhere else in the Northeast. “Just because they have a sponsor family member or friend speaking on their behalf, it doesn’t mean the gang will leave them alone. They see a recruit, fresh meat. They’ll show them around, make them even more dependent upon them.”

Gangs have “shot callers”, gang leaders who issue directives, Sliwa said. And they can be found on the North Fork or in any community, as short order cooks, as day laborers,  landscapers — and even in jails.

“Most of us that live in the community are blind to this,” Sliwa said. “You’re going in for eggs over easy and there’s a short order cook who could be a shot caller for MS-13. You wouldn’t know unless you could recognize the tattoos, and they’re not always obvious. Or, the guy doing your lawn, and doing a good job, a hard worker, could be a shot caller for the 18th Street gang. They’re not all illegals, or waiting for deportation.”

A second generation of gang members,  born in the United States, has emerged, Sliwa said. “Some are home grown, following in the footsteps of their fathers and mothers. Their homes are a shrine to MS-13 or the 18th Street gangs, with screen savers on the computers with gang signs. These kids know more about the history of the gang than the history of the country they came from, or the history of the United States.”

The gang members, Sliwa said, come in two gradations: Soldiers, or “the ones busting their shoes on the street,” and “affiliates,” who are gang members “when it’s convenient.” They congregate at social events, at bodegas, at remittance centers, where they can send money home and Skype relatives, and at volleyball and soccer games.

And, he said, gang members live under the threat of being physically maimed, or “marked,” if they reach out to authorities. “If they think you are ratting on them, the message will go out — it’s all based on the Mafia.”

The 18th Street gang, he said, has its roots in Los Angeles in the 1980s, when they were the most powerful Latino gang on the street; neither the MS-13 or 18th Street gang “trusts anyone in a uniform.” Those who dare to try and speak out can lose a finger or find themselves in a cast, a very real symbol to the world that they’ve dared to rat and will pay the price.

The only way to counteract the deep and insidious presence of gangs in a community is through education, Sliwa said. “You have to get into the schools at a very early age and counteract the propaganda these young kids receive about the romanticization of gangs.”

Also critical, he said, is enlightening educators and administrators, and teaching them to recognize the tattoos, colors and gang signs. “If everyone wants to walk around with window shades on their eyes, cotton balls in their ears, and zippers on their mouths, the problem will incubate and continue to grow. Schools will continue to be the recruitment ground — there’s a captive audience.”

Even children who might try to stay away from gang kingpins in the community can’t avoid them in school, Sliwa said, where they’ll be “spinning them like a top and muscling them” in the schoolyard and cafeteria. “There’s no escape.” And kids, he said, can’t complain without fear of retribution.

And for kids who find themselves ensnared by the gangs, the very fabric of their family’s patriarchal society is forever torn.

“The old country was very paternal,” Sliwa said. “The father rules, and at time is brutal. But in  America, kids can get away with things they could never have gotten away with back home. They’re more brazen, more defiant. Gangs won’t hesitate to say, ‘Jefe, he’s ours. You mess with him, you’re messing with us. He may sleep and eat there, but he’s in our family now. You may be the kid’s nest but that little bald eagle is ours.’ It completely emasculates the father.”

However, Sliwa firmly believes the gang infiltration in the United States, and on the North Fork, is still “young enough in terms of its development that you can definitely impact it, slow it down, isolate and begin to disintegrate it.”

To that end, Sliwa hopes to bring his presentation to both the Greenport and Southold school districts. Guardian Angels, he said, are “boots on the ground,” with Spanish speaking members who can interact with the Spanish-speaking community in a way that other groups might not be able to. “They talk their lingo,” he said, adding the Guardian Angels leave their contact information behind. “If community members see something, drug dealing, gang intimidation, they can let us know and we’ll bring it to the proper authorities and maintain their anonymity,” without fear of law enforcement, being fingerprinted— or of retaliation by gang members.

“So many are paralyzed by fear. These gangs won’t hesitate to mark you or brand you, break a bone. If a gang banger even sees someone talking to law enforcement, they’re seen as ‘dropping a dime on us’ and they might beat them up just for the hell of it, to get the message across,” Sliwa said.

This week, Sliwa plans to send a patrol of some of his most highly trained Guardian Angels out to the North Fork to assess the situation, some of whom were involved with an earlier effort organized in 2005 to help  combat drugs in Greenport. The Guardian Angels, he said, can be a visible, constant presence in the street so gangs know there is a group afoot that knows how to identify their signs, markings, and illicit activities.

The next step, Sliwa said, could possibly involve a new community-based patrol comprised of volunteers.

Sliwa would also like to see a junior Guardian Angels program instituted in area schools, for kids ages six to 15. “You can be doing a yeoman’s job to protect your kid, but when you send them to school, the gangs will be there. If you don’t replace that with something, there’s always going to be that attraction. You have to give them an alternative, the excitement of fighting gangs and doing good things — not being drawn into their evil web.”

Community members cannot continue to say it can’t happen in their own backyards, Sliwa said. “There’s a new generation now, and there’s no getting away from it. Last time I was in Greenport, some residents said it was like crying ‘Shark’ at the beach. But guess what? The sharks are not the Guardian Angels. The sharks are the MS-13 and 18th Street gang members —and they’re ready to eat up everything. They’re the enemy, not the Guardian Angels.”