Savage Skulls from Esquire, June 1977

Savage Skulls
by Julian Allen
from the June, 1977 issue of Esquire magazine

Jon Bradshaw's article 'Savage Skulls' appeared in the June, 1977 issue of Esquire magazine. The above illustration, by Julian Allen, depicts the Skulls torturing Anthony Gibaldi before murdering him inside the basement of an abandoned South Bronx building during the night of July 20, 1974. It's creepy, unsettling, disturbing...... in short, an outstanding illustration.

The Esquire article serves epitomizes the reality of the decay of New York City in the 1970s.

Bradshaw's article was based on his (police-escorted) interviews and interactions with several Bronx gang members in the Winter of 1977. Most of the gangbangers he talked to were members of the Savage Skulls, a major Puerto Rican gang in the South Bronx

Whereas in the late 60s and early 70s the mainstream media had elected to portray New York City's street gangs as improvised families for youth abandoned and discarded by an uncaring, racist, classist society, by '77 the reality - that the gangs were comprised of sociopaths who routinely committed robbery, rape, and assault - could no longer be ignored, or explained away by pop sociology jargon.

As Bradshaw reveals, the Skulls hated whites "....without reservation," and they hated snitches. Anthony Gibaldi was both.....and that got him killed.

In 1973 the twenty-one year-old Gibaldi, who was mentally retarded, worked as a shoeshine boy at the intersection of Westchester Avenue and Southern Boulevard. While his family, immigrants from Italy, understood that the South Bronx was turning into a hellhole, they were reluctant to leave. Anthony was pathetically eager to make friends with others in the neighborhood, and some of the boys he consorted with were members of the Savage Skulls.

In January, 1973, while walking on Westchester Avenue, Gibaldi was robbed by two Savage Skulls, 'R. C.' and 'Popeye'. His father pressured Gibaldi to report the crime to the police. R. C. was arrested and sent to the Elmira reformatory, and Popeye, to Attica. Upon their release, both men were keen to retaliate against Gibaldi.

On the night of July 20, 1974, Gibaldi was walking through the South Bronx when he was approached by a group of Savage Skulls, who invited him to accompany them to a party nearby. Gibaldi trustingly followed the gang members into the basement of an abandoned building.

There, he was stripped naked, tied up with clotheslines, and tossed onto the floor. Then, over the ensuing hours, he was tortured by the stoned, boozing Skulls, including a vengeful Popeye, who tied a nylon cord around Gibaldi's penis and yanked so hard on it, that the cord / penis combination lifted Gibaldi's body off the floor.

After the gang spent some time stabbing the inert Gibaldi multiple times, Popeye shot him to death and burned the corpse.

According to Tom Walker in his 2011 book Return to Fort Apache: Memoir of an NYPD Captain, after the corpse was discovered, the medical examiner declared the cause of death as 'undetermined, no violence found'. Gibaldi's father denounced the Medical Examiner's declaration and over the course of the next two years pressed the police to solve the murder of his son. 

After a prolonged investigation (that revealed the corrupt and dysfunctional nature of the work done by the ME's office in the mid-70s), in October 1976, 'R. C.', aka Arce Santiago, was convicted of the murder of Anthony Gibaldi and sentenced to life in prison.

Julian Allen did illustrations for a variety of well-known magazines during the 70s, 80s, and 90s. He also illustrated the comic 'Wild Palms.' A biographical sketch is available here.