Curtis Sliwa, founder of the Guardian Angels, will be headed to the North Fork on Tuesday for a community meeting to help reach out to educators, elected officials and community members and explain how his organization can bring an anti-gang program into local schools.
The meeting will take place on Tuesday at 7 p.m. at St. Agnes Church, located at 523 Front Street.
So far, school officials and educators have been contacted, with a number of teachers expressing interest in attending. David Gamberg, superintendent of Greenport and Southold schools, has not responded to a request for comment.
The next step, if the community expresses interest, would be to create and train a citizen-based patrol for the area.
On Monday ,the Guardian Angels came to the North Fork to assess the situation. They canvassed Greeport, spoke to some young people about possible recruitment, and also patrolled South Harbor Road, where the alleged gang attack took place last month.
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. Sliwa will come out to make a presentation to the Southold and Greenport school districts Tuesday, 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.
Sliwa said, however, that an intense, heated rivalry between the MS-13 and the 18th Street gangs is intensifying not only on the North Fork, but across the United States and Mexico.
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.’”
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.”
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.”
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.
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.
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.”
Greenport Mayor David Nyce has said he believes the recent alleged gang attack was an isolated incident, nd Southold Town Supervisor Scott Russell has said he feels local law enforcement can handle any potential gang activity.
