New York house stars' gang banger roots
Author: Jonty Skrufff
Friday, September 8, 2006
Sandy Rivera and Roger Sanchez chatted to Skrufff this week about their childhoods growing up in the ghettoes of New York and both revealed they’d been immersed in the City’s notoriously violent gang culture of the early ‘80s.
Kings Of Tomorrow star Sandy Rivera admitted he served time in jail as a youth, after getting caught up in the street life of his Spanish Harlem neighbourhood.
“I was a really bad kid but you don’t know any better when you’re that young and I got put away when I was 13 for three years in a juvenile facility,” said Sandy. “I’d started out doing graffiti then I just happened to get caught with a gun in the school,” he confessed.
“You never know what’s going to happen to you in life, whether you make a right or left turn, you choose one way and you never know where the other path might have led. But I was pretty bad, and if it wasn’t for me getting locked away then I probably wouldn’t have changed,” he mused.
Roger Sanchez, who grew up in the notorious Queens housing project Lefrak City, also started out as a graffiti writer though admitted he was luckier than Sandy in never getting seriously caught.
“I was fortunate not to have gone to jail, at least not for any length of time. I got locked up once for writing graffiti and was charged with juvenile delinquency but I was never a stick-up kid,” Roger told Skrufff.
“Living in New York then it was difficult to avoid gang culture. There were gang wars in my area around Queens and at one point I was hanging out with the cats from Zulu Nation,” he recalled.
“I’ve been held up myself and had to fight quite a lot when I was growing up. It was a fact of life, but the gang thing then was just one of those situations you grew up with, survived and became stronger,” said Roger.
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