{"id":3448,"date":"2020-08-25T13:10:30","date_gmt":"2020-08-25T17:10:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/newyorkcitygangs.com\/?page_id=3448"},"modified":"2020-08-25T13:10:30","modified_gmt":"2020-08-25T17:10:30","slug":"joseph-and-the-fish-sandwich","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/newyorkcitygangs.com\/?page_id=3448","title":{"rendered":"Joseph and the Fish Sandwich"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\u201cThe Gowanus Houses were continually raided by Fort Greene gangs bent on violence and destruction.\u201d<\/p>\n

– Brooklyn Rumble page 193<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It\u2019s only one sentence from one paragraph in the middle of a book.\u00a0 You can be forgiven for moving quickly onto the rest of the book, maybe without thinking about it too much.\u00a0 This page will pause for a moment to see that the background behind that one sentence has it’s own very interesting history.<\/p>\n

Joseph “Mickey” Lewis, a teenager who lived in Gowanus in the late 1950s was tortured with heavy acne, was 5\u201911\u201d tall, weighed 140 pounds and had brown eyes. Joseph was born on July 2, 1941.\u00a0 He said he didn\u2019t belong to a gang and I believe him too.\u00a0 He was a loner, didn\u2019t have a best friend, and when he hung out with someone it was mostly with one of his brothers.<\/p>\n

Even though Joseph wasn’t in a gang, he had his run-ins with the law.\u00a0 His first encounter was on February 25, 1955, when he and another teen were caught with a hammer which they used to try to break into a store.\u00a0 He was 13 years old.<\/p>\n

\"Joseph<\/a>

Joseph “Micky” Lewis<\/p><\/div>\n

He managed to stay out of trouble – or depending on how you look at it, too smart to get caught – for two and a half years.\u00a0 On August 7, 1957, he came to the attention of the Juvenile Aid Bureau, an organization that helped kids with minor crimes to be routed away from the court system.\u00a0 Joseph had been involved in a fight in a local park.\u00a0 He said that he and some friends were attacked by a gang of Spanish teenagers and they had fought back.\u00a0 The report doesn’t say who these Spanish teenagers were, but I can make a reasonable guess as to who they were.<\/p>\n

Joseph lived in Gowanus; his building was 417 Baltic Avenue which was the Gowanus Projects.\u00a0 Sometimes he would live with his grandma at 277 Halsey Street.\u00a0 This reason for living with his grandma was because he was always getting into trouble with the teenagers who lived on Baltic Street.\u00a0 Joseph had a reputation in the neighborhood for being a ladies man and would talk to any girl he met.\u00a0 This was the cause of the continuous fights that he had with other youths in the Gowanus Projects.\u00a0 Joseph didn’t seem to have much insight into why he would talk to every girl he met causing fights with their boyfriends, saying, “I just walk right into it I guess.”<\/p>\n

Maybe Joseph picked up his interest in ladies from his father who ran around with women cheating on his wife which caused their breakup when Joseph was six years old (his father was also an alcoholic and his face bore the scars of many street and barroom fights).<\/p>\n

With this knowledge of Joseph’s penchant for the ladies, my guess is that the Spanish youths were either Apaches from the neighborhood or war parties from the Mau Maus, a gang that had sprung up in the Fort Greene Projects in the spring of 1957 and were brother clubs with the Fort Greene Chaplains.<\/p>\n

Joseph was in a bad position.\u00a0 Not only did he have a run-in with these Spanish youths, but the Fort Greene Chaplains would often raid the Gowanus Projects to fight against the Soviet Lords, a black gang.\u00a0 In the course of my research for Brooklyn Rumble<\/em>, I discovered that the Mau Maus would also travel to Gowanus to fight against the Soviet Lords, sometimes with the Fort Greene Chaplains.\u00a0 Joseph was black, so it was very likely that outsiders like the Mau Maus and Fort Greene Chaplains would have mistook him for the enemy.\u00a0 If Joseph was a child of the streets and merely hung out with the Soviet Lords – even if it wasn’t as an official member – for all intents and purposes he was<\/em> a Soviet Lord.\u00a0 I’m reminded of the adage, “You are who you hang out with.”\u00a0 In fact, it appears this was the case.\u00a0 A report about Joseph written in October 1959, reveals more information about these raids:<\/p>\n

“Although not denying formerly being a member of any gang, the defendant as well as his mother claims that the Gowanus Project was continually being raided by gangs of the Fort Greene Project and the Presidents of the former project ban (sic) together in an informal grouping to repulse these attacks, the defendant has had a number of altercations in this manner.”<\/p>\n

In addition to the altercations mentioned in the above quote, Joseph sustained serious injuries in other fights:<\/p>\n