Word: ganges
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Search of Defense. Last week the New York Times took a long, authoritative look at the city around it, reported its findings in a seven-part analysis of the street-gang cancer and the damage that it produces. The series, written by Harrison E. Salisbury, for five years the Times's Moscow correspondent, dramatized by understatement the grim, everyday facts of warfare on the streets of the big city...
Typical of the 75 to 100 gangs in the city are the Cobras, half of whose 40 to 50 members live in a Brooklyn housing project. All but a few of them are Negro; there are separate Puerto Rican gangs, and thoroughly integrated ones. The members are, in their own language, all "shook up" and cling together for defense against others as well as for the comradeship they can find nowhere else. They range in age from eleven to 20, occupy themselves chiefly with the protection of their own "turf" (territory). Trespassing on one gang's turf by another...
Heart Above All. Most gang members cannot envision a time when there will be no warfare. The only way to stop it, says one leader, would be "for you to be free to go anywhere in the city and nobody would touch you." Throughout the flock of boys he interviewed, Reporter Salisbury found the same theme: hatred for the life they lead, bitter frustration at being unable to cope with it. In Salisbury's gallery...
...CHIMP, 18, nephew of a "famous Brooklyn gangster," belongs to a gang that is largely Italian and Irish, was expelled from parochial school for bad conduct, was arrested once for larceny, will probably gravitate to the Brooklyn docks where, as he well knows, bigtime crime is rampant. "Sometimes guys come to work on the docks," he says. "They hope to make money, save it and get away and go into business. But they never make it. How can they? Where else can you earn that kind of dough...
PEPITO, 14, valued in his gang for "heart" (courage), lives with his grandmother, who is on relief. He is on probation for shoplifting, smokes marijuana cigarettes. His world, beyond his gang's turf: comic books, gunplay movies...