My father had this mythological sense of the old New York, and he used to tell me stories about these old gangs, particularly the Forty Thieves in the Fourth Ward.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
One of the things is that the good intentions of Prohibition, from reading over the years and from becoming obsessed with the research of gangs in New York City, seems to have allowed crime figures at the time, like Luciano, Capone, Torrio and Rothstein, to organize to become more powerful, which pulled all the way through until the '70s.
The fact is that in too many communities in cities in Britain gangs now have become completely rooted into these communities and they destroy them around them.
New York is kind of a mythological city in may ways.
I am writing about people who are alive in the city of New York during mid-20th-century America. And these people are like a character in a play or they are figures in a short story or a novel.
My grandparents told endless stories about the town they were from. It became an almost mythic place.
I know people in gangs; I could have went down that route.
My mom and dad are New Yorkers who left the tenement streets of the Bronx and came to Los Angeles when 'West Side Story' was real. They have the scars to prove it.
My dad wasn't a gangster, and he wasn't a criminal, but he sure liked to rub padded shoulders with them.
I was not addicted to stealing in my youth, nor have ever been; yet such was the confidence of the Negroes in the neighborhood, even at this early period of my life, in my superior judgment, that they would often carry me with them when they were going on any roguery, to plan for them.
As I got older, I got into all kinds of things in the streets - but for some reason, I never got caught up with the gangs growing up. Everybody dug me, man. I never had problems.