Nowhere in America is poverty and wealth so closely linked as in New York City. Even in the darkest corners of Brooklyn, one only has to look across the East River to see the great temple of wealth on Wall Street looming in the night. Since the city’s birth, New York’s poorest residents, whether Irish, Jewish, black or Puerto Rican, have mined their own gold mines in the city’s streets. Sometimes it takes criminals to harvest the gold.
But as the violence slowly spreads to the rich and powerful, the control agencies, the police and the government kick in, a miracle of miracles, New York, the bad apple, becomes the safest big city in America…or so is the official story. In New York City, heroin was king in 1970. Teenage gangs terrorize the streets of Brooklyn and the Bronx, and mafia leader Joe Colombo decides to fight the government on TV rather than in the streets. Colombo’s crime family is embroiled in a war against the deranged Joey Gallo. While in prison, Gallo allies himself with Brooklyn’s gangsters.
Speculation that Joey Gallo was behind the black killer of Joe Colombo has never been confirmed, but it does show how crime and drugs unite New York’s gangster tribes across racial lines . Thanks to the Italian Mafia, waves of cheap heroines swept through the city, and police corruption was so notorious that the Knapp Commission was created to investigate widespread bribery to keep organized crime out of the law .
Puerto Ricans, who received U.S. citizenship in 1917, were the largest group to come to New York after the war. In the mid-1960s, the economy of the South Bronx was in free fall. Every study conducted shows that Puerto Ricans live in the worst slums, have the worst jobs, have the lowest levels of education, and suffer more than any other group on any index of health and poverty. Heroin ravaged the population, and hordes of unemployed, impoverished teenagers ruled the streets.
