No 'West Side Story': College advisor writes on N.Y. gangs

Murder, racial tension, and gang warfare in New York City in the 1940s, '50s and '60s were the topics at hand Thursday when a dozen students and faculty members gathered in Kings Court/English College House for a Forum for Penn Authors. College of Arts and Sciences Assistant Dean for Advising Eric Schneider spoke about his new book, Vampires, Dragons, and Egyptian Kings: Youth Gangs in Postwar New York, during the forum, run by KC/EH's living-learning Perspectives in Humanities program. The Forum is held two to four times a year, according to PIH Program Manager Sara Nasuti, a College junior. "We invite a faculty member who has recently published a book to come and talk with us a little bit about the book [and] a little bit about the process of scholarly writing," she said. Schneider said he became interested in street gangs after reading about the the infamous "Cape Man killer" of 1959, a 16-year-old member of a Puerto Rican gang called the Vampires. The boy, Salvador Agron, had killed two white rival gang members. Because of its racial implications, the Cape Man case generated outrage among whites. "As the adolescents were being brought into the local precinct afterwards for interrogation, there were a thousand people gathered on the street outside the precinct chanting [racial slurs]," Schneider said. Some whites actually used the case as an excuse to call for immigration limits for Puerto Ricans. Agron was ultimately sentenced to death. But the case attracted national attention because of Agron's age and many people protested the death sentence. His sentence was ultimately lessened and he eventually earned a college degree while in prison. Schneider originally intended to do a biography of Agron but instead decided to write about postwar New York gangs in general. Upon researching the gangs, Schneider discovered what he at first believed to be a frightening underworld of ethnic and racial tensions. "I began to think of New York as a kind of mini-Bosnia," Schneider said. He later discovered, however, that the fiercest gang rivalries were between groups of the same race. Schneider also debunked another common conclusion about postwar New York gangs. "I was going to take [the book] through what everybody said was the decline of street gangs in the mid-1960s due to the spread of the heroin epidemic," Schneider said. However, once he began to research that presumption, he became convinced that it was actually the decline of gangs that led to the upsurge in heroin use, rather than vice versa. In the book, Schneider asserts that gangs exerted peer pressure on their members not to use hard drugs. Once the ranks of the gangs were thinned by the Vietnam War, many former members turned to heroin. The audience, although small in number, was enthusiastic and interested in the subject matter. College freshman Erica Frenkel, who takes a course relating to gangs, said, "In class, we discussed the dry historical theory. This gave it life."