Editor’s note: Earlier this month the controversial hip-hop legend Afrika Bambaataa died from complications related to prostate cancer. He faced highly-credible accusations that he molested many young boys. But, as shown in this long form investigation, Bambaataa’s atrocities run much deeper. He was closely associated with a Georgia-based cult leader accused of running a vast pedophilia ring, and Bambaataa similarly positioned himself as a “God” to suppress his crimes.
Lance Taylor was a young warlord. The doughy Bronx River Projects teenager wore a hand-sewn denim jacket that bore the insignia of his clique, called the Black Spades, one of the South Bronx’s most fearsome gangs.
Before he was known as Afrika Bambaataa, he was a young boy growing up in the Throgs Neck neighborhood, hunting rabbits along the Bronx River waterway with a bow and arrow. But by the early 1970s he was taking his duties within the Black Spades seriously. Tasked with expanding the gang’s reach and influence, he helped them gain new territory in the borough, where almost every block was claimed by one gang or another.
“Little wars could start if you just looked at another person or woman wrong, or you stepped on somebody’s sneaker,” Taylor said in the book Yes, Yes, Y’all.
Having studied the battle plans of tacticians like Napoleon and Shaka Zulu, Taylor marched groups of young men into new territory in the Bronx and beyond. “I could rally up 3-400 at one time and move on you,” he said in Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop.
Were the Black Spades a force for good or evil? Depends on whom you asked. Taylor noted that they kept the peace in their neighborhoods, organized voter drives, and even held bake sales to benefit locals whose homes had burned down.
But the Spades could be brutal, like the time they hunted down a trans prostitute called Miss Jocelyn, raped her with a broom, and beat her to death. According to a New York Times profile in 1972, other street gangs considered the Black Spades to be “ultraviolent.” “The Spades just want to fight, but we want to make peace,” said Ted Gonzalez of the Seven Immortals.