It took Shan Nicholson seven long years to create and complete Rubble Kings. Seven years to convince the leaders and core members of New York’s deadliest gangs to sit down and tell their stories. To talk about the lawless, dog eat dog district of the 1970s Bronx, where gangs ruled with drugs and violence, and how the murder of a man who went into the fray to bring peace changed them forever.
Until this documentary, the personal stories of these notorious gangs had remained relatively untouched, destined to fade into the fabric of America’s history. But thanks to a successful Kickstarter campaign which raised $50,000 to get the film made, director Nicholson is able to exhume the testimonies of past gang leaders and bring them back to life. Archive footage, old photographs and even vibrant cartoons breathe life into the past, while the vivid stories of charismatic former gang members – now social workers, lawyers and doctors – take us back to where it all went wrong.
In the 1970s, a series of socio-economic catastrophes literally turned the Bronx into a mound of rubble and transformed it almost overnight into a 20th century Wild West, where looking at someone the wrong way might be the last thing that you do. With their homes and jobs destroyed and future prospects evaporating, the people of the Bronx turned to crime and violence. Even the police stayed away, entering only to drag away the dead bodies.
But one event stunned the endless rampage into silence. It was the moment Black Benjy, a peacekeeper sent into the fight by Ghetto Brothers founder Benjamin (Yellow Benjy) Melendez, was brutally murdered. Through his story, it becomes achingly clear that the formation of such gangs as the Savage Skulls and Grim Reapers was motivated out of nothing more than a collective and desperate need to belong to something.
In this film, we see the overarching narrative of history contained in a microcosm of time: from the base primal instincts of kill or be killed, to the ultimate democratic act of signing a peace treaty. Black Benjy’s brutal death was the catalyst the Bronx needed. The reunion of peace extinguished the fires of war. The anger and energy of gang culture was refocused. The gangs became creative. Guns were swapped for gigs. Violence was replaced with music and hip-hop was born.
There was a reason Nicholson was able to raise the mammoth $50,000 he needed to get this project off the ground. It could take seven, or ten, or twenty years, but this film needed to be made and it is essential that it is watched.