Slowly, the lawlessness that gripped the area evolved into more stable working-class immigrant neighborhoods -- places like Little Italy, Chinatown, and the Lower East Side.

He catches the attention of a detective chief inspector of the Royal Irish Constabulary, who is sent by Winston Churchill to free the city of street criminals. Over the years, Johnson expanded to the narcotics trade and was eventually crowned the kingpin of Harlem. See more of New York City's most notorious street gangs in the gallery above and discover more about their shocking stories below. The gang intervention programs began to bear fruit in the 1960s as the city saw a decline in gang activity.Bambaataa saw the potential in the gang members and decided to channel their energy into more positive endeavors. The Short Tail Gang, a violent group of thugs and one of the most feared of New York's Five Points gangs. Animal Kingdom’ depicts a 17-year-old Joshua Cody, who moves in with his grandmother’s family after his mother’s death from a drug overdose. Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images Former Bloods gang leader Shanduke McPhatter joins other anti-gun violence activists to celebrate the opening of a new community center in Brooklyn. After Shultz was killed in a hit by infamous gangster Charles “Lucky” Luciano, Johnson teamed up with the Italian mafia and formed an alliance that would last for decades.

After two centuries, in fact, perhaps New York City gangs as we once knew them are slowly becoming a thing of the past -- for now. Responsible for much of this bloodshed were the Bowery Boys and the Dead Rabbits, fierce rivals because the former's nativists hated no one more than the latter's newly-arrived Irish immigrants. The 116th Street Crew, [2] also known as the Uptown Crew, [3] is a group of Italian-American mobsters within the Genovese crime family. The types of gangs that used to run these streets slowly dissolved throughout the first decades of the 20th century as new types of outlaws began to dominate the city's streets. In the century's first few decades, waves of Italian and Jewish immigrants across Brooklyn and Queens, to pick just two examples, settled into ethnic enclaves that gave rise to territorial gangs of youths set on protecting their turf.By the 1960s, Barnes had become a major player in the city’s drug trade, and he quickly rose to the top of the Harlem underworld.

Members of the gang were known for their extravagant lifestyles, and their wealth and power allowed them to live a life of excess and indulgence. In his book Vampires, Dragons, and Egyptian Kings, Eric Schneider describes the New York City gangs of this period as "violent, short-lived, disorganized collections of misfits whose main purpose was thrill-seeking and immediate gratification. Criminal organizations such as street gangs are responsible for a significant portion of crime, particularly violent crime. These gangs thieved and killed while controlling the Five Points, which received little attention from authorities because its residents were the poorest and most vulnerable population in the city. Legal battles regarding slander ensued and Powell avoided court dates and spent more time living in Florida.Lebanese leads the gang with his cohorts Freddo and Dandi, who get involved in all kinds of illegal activities prevalent in Italy from the 1970s to 1990s. With more economic stability and much less crime, gang life in New York simply isn't what it once was. In Harlem, the Bloods were known for their aggressive tactics and their involvement in violent crimes. The group was able to maintain its control over the drug trade in Harlem through a combination of intimidation, violence, and corruption. NAACP Image Awards: Lizzo Named Entertainer of the Year; 'Just Mercy,' 'Black-ish' Among Top Winners".