Harlem United CEO Patrick McGovern and Program Coordinator Jennifer Rodriguez (Photo by: Sam Petulla)

Mary sits calmly. Her jeans are clean and well-made, her hands compact — never fidgeting — and she’s telling anecdotes about all the men she’s dated. She has lots of advice for what to look for in a man, and she can tell you how to leave a man and confidently move on, independently, for yourself. The night before, she broke up with her boyfriend. She’s alert, can take a joke, and holds her ground, and she has lived with HIV for 16 years.

Mary, just by appearances, could be misperceived as uninfected. She goes shopping, meets friends for lunch — she’s even about to go to a recently opened “HIV Only” club downtown, where she can dance and meet other singles. “I haven’t experienced the things people experience,” she says. “I have never been to a hospital.”

She lives in Harlem, a neighborhood sometimes called the United States’ HIV/AIDS epicenter and bellwether. Local HIV/AIDS organizations constantly scramble to anticipate trends and statistics. In the ’90s, the focus was on needle-users and the MSM (men who have sex with men) community. Then there were the rumors. Sixteen years ago, when Mary became infected, she “thought that only gays could get it,” she said. Even today, some residents uptown believe HIV can be transmitted through doorknobs and house flies.

As HIV’s reputation has changed from an unknown virus to a treatable medical condition, Harlem United, Harlem’s leading HIV/AIDS organization, has radically revamped how it fights HIV. In the last two years, instead of targeting groups – even those experiencing startling rises in new infections — Harlem United has taken a more encompassing approach that could reach the whole community.

Harlem United maintains an extensive network. It runs two clinics and multiple housing facilities, and partners with smaller organizations focused more on local populations’ needs. It offers services from art therapy to health care for the homeless and runs the only entirely bilingual Spanish HIV/AIDS clinic in the United States.

In the last few years, HIV has spread in Harlem in various, often troubling, directions. In 2006, the average Harlem resident was six times more likely to receive a new HIV diagnosis than an average American, according to statistics released in 2008 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Most new infections were among Harlem’s Latinos, who were more than 12 times as likely to receive new HIV diagnoses than other New York City Latinos. In fact, “over the past five years, new HIV infections, and concurrent HIV/AIDS diagnoses have fallen among all race categories, except for Hispanic women,” according to New York City Department of Health evaluation coordinator Chris Williams, commenting on the 2006 statistics.  Health professionals believe that trends like these will eventually spread countrywide.

Harlem United, carefully monitoring the CDC and the NYC health department statistics and compiling its own, decided to retain its existing Latino support and testing programs, rather than launch new ones.

Instead, its Blocks Project, begun in January 2008, sets a broader goal of testing everyone in the area — from women discouraged by a partner to the unsuspecting elderly. For the organization, it’s a new way of thinking about HIV/AIDS testing.

Soraya Elcock, Harlem United’s vice president for policy and public affairs, sits in her office, surrounded by mementos from 20 years in HIV/AIDS work and explains the shift.

Although organizations have changed, one thing hasn’t. People still contract HIV in the same ways: through risky sex, intravenous drug use, or long-term partners who become infected.

“It’s not about whether you’re at risk. What is needed is a neighborhood taking care of its basic health,” Elcock says. Unlike programs that target specific groups, she explains the blocks project treats HIV as a basic community health problem, along with hepatitis C, diabetes and hypertension. That means it’s a treated as a disease no more spectacular than any other and no more applicable to one group than another. Women in particular, “respond to something targeting to a larger community health awareness,” Elcock says.

“You have to create a hothouse effect — or you miss all the small groups,” she explains. Targeting a group — like Latinos or small African immigrant populations — tells a sub-community: There’s a problem among people like you. That breeds fear, Elcock says, which can discourage testing by making people clam up in denial or driving them to disregard the risk.

In taking this approach, the Blocks Project also targets an elusive but crucial body of people: infected people unaware they carry HIV.  Harlem United consider them the most hazardous group.  Last year the rate of HIV transmissions originating from people unaware of their infection was 54 to 70 percent, Elcock points out.

“A lot of them don’t believe they are at risk,” she says. As a result, merely encouraging people to be tested for HIV has had limited success. But Harlem United says the Blocks Project, with its enlarged approach, led to 75 percent more testing its first year.

Since kicking off the Blocks Project’s 2008, it has gone through continual revision based on what has worked and hasn’t.

Jennifer Rodriguez, a Harlem United community outreach coordinator, explained that at first, “Harlem United would have meetings with tenant association presidents. We ask them what would be the best way,” she says. Then Harlem United’s outreach staff would head out to the large buildings in teams. “We would have messages that we would put on every door,” Rodriguez says. “They might say Tuesday or Thursday come to this corner,” where testing vans would be available.

But, “the whole ‘come-to-my-van’ approach doesn’t work,” Rodriguez says.  So this year’s strategies were totally different. “In the last month or two we started getting a more intense outreach focus. We’ll have a five-minute conversation like, ‘Oh, why won’t you use a condom?’” she says. “Now it’s not so concerned with tenants. It’s more zones. It’s wider.”

As Mary sits and talks about her experiences with relationships, she suggests that even as more effective HIV treatments have become widely available, the old rumors and stigmas about HIV still pervade uptown.  Although she feels well, facing the disease’s stigma can be the hardest part. She describes an incident she had one night at a bingo game, when she overheard some players talking.

“The older ladies would gather and say, ‘I don’t want him to get HIV out there,’” she says, referring to married women whose husbands may be having affairs. “I used to go out there and say: This could happen to anybody. Because you don’t know what your husband does when he walks out that door.”

Shoes and CDs sold in Little Senegal at Bakh Yaye (Photo by Sam Petulla)

Customers entering La Malienne La Mama de Momy Mame Gakou announce themselves loudly.

“Moussa!” shouts a tall man wearing jeans and a black puffy ski jacket, walking inside to give Moussou Kassoumou, the store’s thin, soft-spoken manager, a handshake and an embrace.

Clattering, lush highlife music booms from a stereo inside the small music store, inviting sidewalk traffic and prompting visitors digging through the CDs to speak up when talking to the staff.

Across the street, two other music stores, New Africa Music and Video and Bakh Yaye, are selling many of the same CDs: Senegalese, Nigerian, Ghanaian, and Ivory Coast music.

The stores form practically a West African music belt in Little Senegal, a largely immigrant neighborhood on 116th Street east of Frederick Douglass Boulevard wedged between Columbia University, where Afro-prep band Vampire Weekend crafted its trademark “Upper West Side Soweto” style, and Harlem, where major-label rappers like Mase and Cam’ron claim the streets as home.

By outward appearances, Little Senegal’s music stores resemble typical New York variety goods businesses, the kind found on many uptown blocks. But the stores are distinct. La Malienne’s music selection is curated by Jose Toure, who has spent more than 20 years in the music industry. Bakh Yaye sells much of the same music that Mrde Jop, who is managing the store while the owner, his brother, is away in Africa, sold at a store he owned in Senegal in the early 80s.

West African music long ago caught music listeners’ attention as a secret sauce in likeable pop music. Artists like The Talking Heads, Peter Gabriel, and Bela Fleck have cited its influence, as have new Brooklyn music acts like The Dirty Projectors and Animal Collective. Recently, though, the music hasn’t been so easy to find.

“Tower records isn’t selling the African music like they used to. HMV closed,” said Toure, a producer who sells his artists’ CDs at La Malienne and consults for Central Park Summerstage, advising the booking for its international performer lineup. Once Virgin Megastore pulled the plug on its Union Square store and vacated New York, music stores with a sizable African music selection became scarce, he explained. Little Senegal became one of its last surviving outposts.

Yet the stores mostly serve as local favorites, appealing to the area’s West African immigrants, who know them by word of mouth and bolster sales by buying CDs in person from their fellow Wolof- and French-speaking West Africans.

“We almost never advertise,” said Jop. The stores’ main overture to outsiders is the shattering drumming and melodic vocals that drift from the stores into the street.

Miscellaneous wares supplement the stores’ music sales, making them reminiscent of outdoor street market vendors where incongruous goods mix freely. Bakh Yaye sells gold jewelry and pump heels, La Malienne sells knock-off designer luggage and cell phone accessories, and New Africa Music and Video’s cell phone service puts money on its owners’ phones, so they can call overseas.

CDs in the stores are cheap: two for $5 or one for $3 in all three stores. Samba Top, New Africa Music and Video’s owner, said that the more CDs someone buys, the cheaper he will sell them individually. Jop said that neither Bakh Yaye or La Malienne have been profitable in the last few years. Top, though, said New Africa Music and Video has consistently made a small profit because of its prepaid cell phone service.

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

West African music’s influence on American rock and folk music has deep roots, critics say. Pitchfork Media’s African music critic, Joe Tangari, explained what he called his pet theory of West African music: “It’s one of the four proteins that make up modern American music’s DNA (the other three are European art music, European folk music, and electronics and the recording medium),” he said via e-mail.

Tangari outlined various influence streams. “You have a whole group of bands, the best known being Antibalas, that directly build their sound off of Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat. Then you have your Vampire Weekends, who use African elements in the service of indie rock. There are trans-Atlantic bands that pair American or European and African musicians—see the Kenyan-American benga-rock band Extra Golden, the Ghanaian-American highlife group Occidental Brothers Dance Band International, and the Malawian-British The Very Best, for some examples,” he said.

In fact, cross-pollination between West African and American music seems to be reaching new heights. Banning Eyre, Afropop.org’s senior editor, has followed the uptick. “West African music has a growing influence on American bands these days. Bonnie Raitt, Taj Mahal, Bela Fleck and Ry Cooder have all recorded with West African musicians,” he said.

Back in Little Senegal, conversations with Toure, who sips a cup of Lipton tea and wears a brown beanie, are interrupted by cell phone calls to artists, some of which escalate into heated arguments in heavily African-accented French. Toure disdains the other two shops on the street. “They’re not legit,” he said. “The other two do a lot of bootlegging … La Malienne’s CDs are made in Africa and France.”

But the fact is, music passes between Bakh Yaye and La Malienne all day as the owners partner up and transfer dozens of CDs, rearranging their shelves in the hopes of boosting sales. Staff from Bakh Yaye sometime walk over, carrying armfuls of CD cases, and stock La Mallienne by hand themselves.

Kassoumou said Bakh Yaye sells more Senegalese music than La Malienne, which specializes in CDs from Ghana, Mali and the Ivory Coast. Yet with the stores’s music in constant flux, any differences seem minimal, which explains why Bakh Yaye employee Mody Fill said the stores’ music is “all the same.”

Owners at all three stores agreed, though, that whatever the shops’ tastes, final judgment comes from the fans. “We sell Youssou N’Dour,” Fill said, “because all African people know him. I sell the music I like, and the people like. It’s the same music I sold in Senegal,” he said.

Youssou N’Dour, an artist whose name is repeated with chant-like reverence in Little Senegal’s stores, was a founding Senegalese mbalax singer in the 80s, Eyre explained. And he still records; Rolling Stone named his 2007 album, Rokku Mi Rokka (Give and Take), the 30th best album of the year .

N’Dour, who “in much of Africa … is perhaps the most famous singer alive,” according to Rolling Stone, occasionally visits the stores to wish the neighborhood well, said Top. Fans can take a photo with N’Dour or get an autograph.

The storeowners buy music from different distributors. At Bakh Yaye, employee Mody Fill, who stood in the backroom working at a computer, explained that African record stores ship him a single CD, which he duplicates. Then he sells the copies. “The stores in Africa don’t have the money to ship the CDs,” he explained. At New Africa Muisc and Video, Top said he buys from both Senegal record stores, who ship from overseas, and from American suppliers, who burn their discs stateside.

Customers trek uptown from Africa, France, and across the United States. Mamadou Kome, who was visiting New York for the weekend from Atlanta, made a point to visit La Malienne. “I’m buying two DVDs,” he said, deciding to pass on music. “But the people in Atlanta know this store. There isn’t a music store like this in Atlanta.”

Bronx resident Aicha Bamba, who was shuffling through a few CDs in the back of La Malienne, said she comes to the store three or four times a month. As she browsed, she walked between the CD rack and a boombox, where customers can sample music before making a purchase. “They’re the best,” she said, pointing to Moussa, whose recommendations have turned her onto obscure CDs like “coupe decale, Youssoun N’Dour, and Ishmael Isaac.”

Tangari expects that interest in African music will only rise. “There’s a Los Angeles-based band called Fool’s Gold that released an excellent debut album this year,” he explained. “It incorporates highlife and desert guitar and Tamashek influences very smoothly into an indie rock environment, and then includes lyrics sung partly in Hebrew.

“It’s hard to imagine something much more global than that. As the Internet and MP3s breed more musical omnivores, I think this trend will only accelerate.”

Filmmaker Albert Maysles behind his desk at the Maysles Institute (Photo by Sam Petulla)

An original movie poster the size of a door leans against one wall, with photos of the Rolling Stones breaking the words GIMME and SHELTER into two fat rows. On another wall, a large photo shows Edith Beale, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s aunt, a young girl at the time, holding her mother’s hand, seeming nothing like the 78-year-old living a life of squalor and eccentricity in the Hamptons in the film “Grey Gardens.” Behind his desk, 82-year-old Albert Maysles leafs through film catalogs, a colorful blanket draped over his shoulders, surrounded by photographers, posters, and paintings from these films and others — all of which he directed.  He’s choosing which films he’s decided to show next month in a film series.

It’s what he does nearly every month. Since 2005, he has helped run the Maysles Institute, an arts center. Tucked between the Black River Center for Performance Arts and an out-of-business fried chicken restaurant at 127th Street and Lenox Avenue, it’s the kind of tiny place that’s easy to miss but opens up like a wide-angle shot: there’s a film school with classrooms, a community center, a popcorn stand and a small (capacity: 60) but charming cinema. Rugs and cushions from around the world supplement its folding-chair seating. Some nights, a panel follows the screening, and the braver in the crowd can pick a director’s brain, clash with a journalist, or debate a U.N. representative from the country the movie depicts.

Maysles is a decorated documentarian seasoned by more than 45 years in Hollywood filmmaking. He directed the Rolling Stones’ 1969 tour documentary “Gimme Shelter”; “Salesman,” which in 1969 New York Times reviewer David Canby said he “can’t imagine its ever seeming irrelevant;” the Beatles documentary “What’s Happening! The Beatles in America”; the documentary “Grey Gardens,” which HBO recently remade as a drama; and many more.

Next year, two films which Maysles did cinematography for are set for release— a Keith Haring documentary and “Hollywood Renegade”, a film about Budd Schulberg, the screenwriter for “On the Waterfront” and “A Face in the Crowd.”

When Maysles came to Harlem in 2005, he didn’t just set up a cinema; he brought his life. He moved with his wife into a brownstone a few blocks from the institute and asked all of his children — he has four — to join him. From his old home — at the Dakota at Central Park West and 73rd Street — to his new home at 122nd and Lenox Avenue is at most a few miles, but culturally, Maysles understood uptown as practically another country, and he wanted in.

“We were looking at Brooklyn,” Maysles said. “I said to my wife that I would much prefer Harlem.”

Here, “everywhere you go you have conversations, and you feel welcome to join in,” he explained. “There’s a courtesy here you don’t feel elsewhere. We built that around the institute.”

Besides showing his handpicked dream film line-ups, mostly of documentaries, Maysles has tried to remake movie-going. Guided by the give-and-take of a conversation, and how it can deepen understanding of a film, the Maysles institute brings the audience almost into the movies by creating a live forum where the audience and filmmaker can interact.

Jason Fox, who helps coordinate film series, explained. “We’re trying to create a space for the people we reach out to, to garner participation, to push the idea that cinema is an active idea,” he said. The goal, Fox said, is to give viewers the chance to grapple with the questions a film poses by talking with artists, scholars, critics and international political representatives

The Maysles Institute Cinema (Photo by Sam Petulla)

Just as Maysles believes there’s better conversation in Harlem than anywhere in New York, no other film institute in New York puts as much emphasis on talking.

“We found a 20-year-old film about a South Bronx gang,” he recalled. “For the Q and A, we had the director and one of the gang members.”

Another night, local Dominican and Haitian immigrants tangled in a hot debate, with some in the audience going so far as to get out of their seats, point each other out across the aisle, and shout — even if it meant interrupting a visiting speaker. Bill Haney’s film “The Price of Sugar,” narrated by Paul Newman, had just shown, depicting a Spanish priest who tries to free thousands of forced Haitian laborers. At one point, freed Haitians cross the border to the Dominican Republic, but their escape backfires when a tide of bitter ethnic rejection swells into national protest.  In response, the Dominican Republic government deports the fleeing Haitians back home, annulling any shot at political asylum.

After the film, the panel started, and feelings that had been silent were given the floor. Different women rose from their seats, giving back different interpretation of the events to the panels and to each another, while other moviegoers called for things to cool down. Eventually, the discussion turned toward relations uptown, which everyone agreed are still troubled. The conversation stayed focused, and as the talk closed audience members agreed that to forget that tensions uptown will persist as long as problems back home are unresolved would be the most egregious mistake.

For Maysles, the institute represented a new start, a place where he could expand his approach to showing documentaries and extend his filmmaking gifts.  He occasionally lends his eye and hand to students, who can enroll in year-round classes or a six-week summer session

The Maysles Cinema is directed by co-directors Jessica Green and Albert Maysles’s son, Philip Maysles, who coordinate every series, and the films are picked by various staff members and guest curators.  The Maysles Institute is cooperatively run.

The institute relies on various funding sources. “We are supported by city and state funding, as well as private foundations and individual donors, in addition to the ticket revenue that we generate through our suggested-donation ticket model,” said Fox.

Maysles had fond memories of last summer.

“We took the graduating class of students, and we showed their films, and they did the Q and A,” he said. “I remember them standing in front of the audience, and one of the audience members asked the question, ‘Do any of you plan to continue your education in film and become filmmakers?’ And every one of their hands went up.”

Congressional Representative Charles Rangel (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

As the House ethics inquiry into Congressman Charles Rangel grinds on, political pundits, pollsters, 15th District residents, and other Representatives have been scrambling to assess the Representative’s future.

The House opened its inquiry in 2007 after the New York Times reported Rangel, first elected to Congress in 1970, rented four rent-controlled apartments for below market value; in response, Rangel himself called for a full investigation. The ethics committee has expanded its scope well beyond housing, and is now considering other questions: Did Rangel fail to disclose $500,000 of income in 2007? Did he pay the necessary property taxes on a home in the Dominican Republic? And as of last week, as new reporting emerged from the New York Times, did he have assets and income not included in his financial disclosure forms from 2002 through 2006?

The committee, including six Democrats and six Republicans, will wait until the investigation is completed before presenting its findings to the full House, which ultimately decides whether to take action against Rangel, who chairs the Ways and Means Committee.

Meanwhile, no two political observers seem to share the same opinion about Rangel’s future.

“My guess is it’s ‘rally around the local guy’,” said Maurice “Mickey” Carroll, director of the Quinnipiac Polling Institute. “That’s what usually happens.”

Carroll added that Rangel’s influence in uptown politics extends beyond populist appeal. “He’s part of the Harlem Mafia-cabal—Paterson’s father, Dinkins—they’ve dominated a long time. So far, no one else has been able to get him yet,” Carroll said.

Daily News reporter Juan Gonzalez, who has covered Spanish Harlem extensively, sees Rangel’s fate as part of a longer history of uptown politicians.

Between Rangel and his predecessor Adam Clayton Powell Jr., uptown has seen only two representatives in 65 years.  So voters, Gonzalez explained, “will look on the basis of whole careers,” not just at this moment’s dilemma.

It’s how voters behaved before, Gonzalez explained. “Remember: Charlie Rangel replaced someone kicked out of office, then let back in,” he said, referring to February, 1967, when the House of Representatives ejected Powell from the House after he was accused of misusing funds designated for the committee he chaired. By special election, Powell was allowed to regain his seat two months later. In the 1970 Democratic primary, voters, however, sought a new candidate who promised to clean up the political dirt and pay more attention locally and rallied to elect Charles Rangel, then a politically inexperienced 40-year-old.

This time, Gonzalez said it’s possible that State Senator Bill Perkins or Assemblyman Adam Clayton Powell IV will try to seize the moment and take Rangel’s seat.

Wayne Barnett, a senior editor at the Village Voice who has covered local politics for close to 30 years, sees a clear window of political opportunity—for the governor. “I’m sure Paterson can function as a congressman but he can’t function as a governor. He’s the son of the Harlem gang, and he’s the byproduct of it,” Barrett said.

Barrett added he thinks it’s unlikely that Rangel will run again if the House votes to strip away his chairmanship of ways and means. “Why run if you don’t carry the weight that you carry with that chairmanship?” Barrett said. “I can’t see him going to election with all that hanging over his shoulder.”

Uptown, mixed opinions reign among residents.

Julia Lysaith, waiting for a M15 bus on 125th Street, said she sees no need for an investigation or a penalty. “When a man works as long as he’s worked, he’s obligated to get whatever he wants,” Lysaith said, unimpressed by a possible scandal. “If you dig deep into other people’s lives. You’ll be shocked to find out what they have,” she said. “There’s a limit to how much we should look into private lives.”

Heather Rodriguez, walking to her home on Morningside Drive, disagreed. “They need to investigate it,“ Rodriguez said. “I don’t think it’s really fair to use taxpayer funds like that,” she said, discussing Rangel’s alleged abuse of his congressional power to illegally rent apartments.

Other residents, looking at Rangel’s past political record, saw reason for a new congressman from Harlem.

Outside an Amsterdam Avenue bodega, John Horton said, “He’s not helping the small businesses anymore — he’s helping the big businesses.” Rangel had backed Columbia University’s plans to expand into West Harlem, forcing out a gas station, a storage place, and numerous residents, he explained. “He’s not for the community anymore. He’s sold out,” he said.

Mark Reyes, talking to the bodega’s owner, added his voice to the critics’. “He’s a flip flopper—he says one thing, and goes in exact opposite direction,” he said. But he doubted that Rangel would lose his seat, explaining that the congressman is a hometown hero, immune to anything other challengers can throw his way. “That’s going to keep him in office,” Reyes said.

But in recent weeks, Rangel’s precarious political position has fostered opportunities for political power grabs from Democrats and Republicans alike.

In early October, the House voted 246 to 153 against a GOP resolution calling for Rangel to relinquish his ways and means chairmanship. The resolution would have bypassed the U.S. House Ethics Committee inquiry, ousting the Congressman from the committee immediately.

At home, Rangel faced new trouble from old friends. His former campaign director Vincent Morgan announced that he will run for Rangel’s seat next year. ”I’ve been preparing for this for the last few years,” Morgan said in an interview, adding that he will need time to mount a full fundraising campaign. “I couldn’t wait until this was concluded,” he said of the Rangel investigation.

Morgan said he will campaign on restoring trust. Although congressional representatives are required by law to disclose earnings and expenses, Morgan said he intends to make his finances even more accessible and easier for a layperson to understand. What is needed, he said, is clearer information that explains, “exactly who you hire, and how much they’re paid.”

At Rangel’s office, a spokesperson dismissed the GOP resolution as politicking and called for due process. “Let’s look at this resolution for what it really is–a highly partisan effort designed to undermine the important work in Congress on health care reform,” said the spokesperson, who declined to be identified. “It’s also an attempt to circumvent House rules, which provide for a comprehensive, bipartisan ethics committee process for reviewing matters such as these. The Congressman himself initiated the request for the committee to review the issues and the members should let the process work as established by the rules of the House.”

Hundreds of people filtered in and out of St. John Pentecostal Church at West 132nd Street and Lenox Avenue in remembrance of Jamel Brown, a Harlem resident slain two weeks earlier in an unsolved shooting.

Some friends wore T-shirts reading “In Loving Memory: Jamel ‘Whip’ Brown” above photos showing him having fun with friends and family. Other mourners wore necklaces strung with a single square photo of a smiling Brown, his arms around a bunch of relatives–he stood 6 feet 5 inches and could hug quite a few at a time.

Brown’s casket was set before the altar surrounded by bright blue, yellow and pink flowers.

Outside the church, some stood in circles solemnly reflecting, or embraced in tears, though others insisted Brown would not have wanted anyone to be sad.

An unidentified gunman shot Brown outside Benito’s nightclub on East 126th Street on Sept. 26 at around 10 p.m., police said. Paramedics found him lying in the street with multiple wounds to his head, thigh and torso; they rushed him to North General Hospital, where he was pronounced dead on arrival, according to police. He was 36.

Police currently have no suspects, but the North Manhattan Homicide Squad is continuing its investigation. Of 35 homicides in Manhattan North so far this year, 15 remain unsolved, detectives say.

Brown had multiple prior arrests, according to police and family members, though neither would provide details. Unemployed, Brown lived on Frederick Douglass Boulevard and West 134th Street with his sister, Tanisha Brown, another sister, and two nephews.

Accounts of what happened outside Benito’s differ among Jamel Brown’s friends and family. Tanisha Brown said he was out with friends for the night when the gunman—a man she said Jamel had never met or known–followed him and opened fire. Brown’s friend Earl Graham, who goes by BooBoo, suggested a more complicated incident. “From what I was told, there was another guy being bullied, and he went to Jamel for help. Jamel confronted the guy in the bar,” Graham said. “They went outside, and Jamel stood there. That’s when the shooter let out his clip, shooting Jamel 15 times.”

Friends remembered Brown as someone welcomed and respected in the neighborhood. “He was beautiful,” said Jesus Vales, who called Brown “a best friend.”

“All the kids whose lives he entered, loved him,” said Tanisha Brown. Jamel enjoyed making kids laugh and showing off his basketball tricks–his nickname, “Whip,” came from a flashy through-the-legs move he pulled on opponents. He was more than an uncle to his nephews, she said; he was a great friend.

Graham, who had known Brown since childhood, remembered him as someone who stood up for the little guy. He’d once needed Jamel’s help himself after he was shot on West 132nd Street in 1991. “I was shot in the back five times,” he recalled. “I ran through the projects and came out on Madison Avenue, and the guys I was with ran off and left me. I was lying on the ground, five bullets in my back.”

“Jamel heard me screaming,” Graham continued. “He carried me to Harlem Hospital and stayed with me. He gave me a second chance at life.”

Harlem dirt bike riders "Free" and Elliot Brown cruise Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard. (Photo by Sam Petulla)

Stand on a block in Harlem and wait for a loud buzz—building to a roar, interrupted by pops. Eventually one will rip past, its rider howling—a dirt bike speeding and diving through city traffic. The bike wheelies further down the street and slides out the tail. The rider’s wearing athletic shoulder pads, a mesh chest guard, and underneath his helmet, flying behind like a flag of independence, a black do-rag.

Harlem has become home to a booming dirt bike scene—from renegades on illegal bikes to stunt jockeys who practice in abandoned lots. The bikes come in more colors than an iPod: classic red, hunter green, combinations like blue and yellow, checkered variations, and straight jet-black. Some bikes aren’t registered, and the police try to impound them and ticket the drivers. Residents either applaud their efforts or say despite city ordinances and police enforcement, they’re here to stay.

McKilo Williams, 33, known better by his alias “Ki-Lo The Dread,” helped start the dirt bike trend in Harlem a decade ago, when he starred as lead rider in hip-hop artist DMX’s video for the classic rap song “The Ruff Ryders Anthem.” As DMX raps, hundreds of dirt bikers, ATV and motorcycle riders swarm him—some in block-long wheelies, others burning-out their back tires into smoke clouds. Together, they became a bike team—the “Ruff Ryders.”  Their influence in the hip-hop scene remains strong; dirt bikers still idolize them for their speed and their beat-up, ride-anywhere style.

Williams stands over 6 feet tall, has a lean but muscular frame and wears long shaggy dreadlocks. He turned dirt biking through Harlem’s streets into a profession. “I met another guy, Wink1100, while I was riding down the street practicing tricks. He eventually asked me to be in the hip-hop videos,” he said, hanging out on 134th Street with his family, who looked on pridefully. “But I take care of my family with this,” he added. “I went to Miami, South Carolina—all on tour with the Ruff Ryders.”

Russell Houston, 28, standing on the corner of 135th Street and Frederick Douglass Boulevard, said he sees urban dirt biking only gaining popularity. “My friends, basically everybody, is getting a bike. I decided I should try and get one myself and start a bike club.”

So Houston has been saving. “I gotta do my research,” he said. “If you want a used bike it will probably be like eight hundred dollars. A new bike is closer to fifteen hundred, two thousand.”

Frederick Douglass Boulevard and 135th Street is a hub for riders and their fans. “When you see a crowd, they’ll be out,” said Darnell Jackson, sitting on a ledge on the 135th Street block corner, beside the public housing apartments towering behind him. From here, bikes cruise up and down Frederick Douglass, or move cross-town, over to First Avenue and back.

And the bikes are quick.

“They can get up to 75, 80, 90,” said Blue Rico, a casual rider in baggy jeans reluctant to supply his name for fear of the police. “We’ll ride Frederick Douglass, Lenox—all over.”

They travel in teams—entire packs flying down Frederick Douglass Boulevard, bike after bike up pointed skyward in a wheelie. “40 of us—maybe. 50 on a good day—all riding,” said Elliot Brown, who rides a brown KLR 650. Some bikes have busted license plates dangling from the rear; others riders go without registration or helmets at all. Often, nubby tires are worn almost past the rubber from spending too many miles on asphalt street instead of on the soft dirt tracks they’re designed for. Stickers plaster the bikes like murals devoted to everything popular in dirt biking, fashion, music, and any other decals that can stylize them.

Dirt biker "Free" rides a wheelie down Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard. (Photo by Sam Petulla)

A dirt biker’s arch nemesis is a police cruiser.

Police in the 32nd Precinct, however, say that they can try to pull over dirt bikers, but they cannot chase. “We can’t catch them because they’ll take the sidewalk,” said Officer Keith Lee, visibly angered, “We can’t pursue.” Another officer, standing beside him but declining to be named, added, “They all disappear. If we continue to chase it’s even more of a hazard to pedestrians.”

At the 32nd Precinct, disagreement reigned over such basic facts as dirt bike-pedestrian collisions. Some officers said they had heard about several pedestrian injuries in the last few months—none as a result of police pursuit—while other officers hadn’t heard of any. Currently, the department has no strategies for curbing the rise in illegal dirt biking or for catching fleeing riders, said officers at the 32nd Precinct. A Police Department Press Spokesman would not respond to phone calls and emails.

When issuing out tickets, police look for bikers not meeting the legal requirements for owning any motorcycle: periodic exhaust inspections from the Department of Motor Vehicles, and registration for the bike, considered a motorcycle. The rider must also have a motorcycle license, according to the Department of Motor Vehicles.

Yet Williams says the police’s unfriendliness towards dirt bikers is unfounded. “They stop us and they give us lots of tickets and they try to take your bike,” he said.   “I even have cop friends that ride them, and they’ll still try to stop us, looking for anything that can give us a ticket.”

At Cycle Therapy—Harlem’s largest motorcycle shop—salesman Tomar Sho said sales of dirt bikes have skyrocketed—“easily doubling”—in recent years, and that he sees as many legal as illegal bikes on the street. But, he added, once a bike is sold, he can’t control how a customer will use it—that’s on the police.

Eyal Deep, another Cycle Therapy salesman, noted that mini-dirt bikes—for riders up to four feet tall—have become a particularly hot seller, with kids from the same apartment building sometimes pooling money to buy one.

But Sho added that while dirt bike sales have risen, they still only account for 1 percent of motorcycle sales and cause their share of headaches. Riders rarely bring bikes in for maintenance, preferring a beat-up style—a major revenue loss.

A few months ago, Deep said he heard some dirt bikes down the street and assumed they were coming to buy parts. Instead, the pack of riders, mostly in their early 20s, hopped the steps leading to the shop, roared through the door and started hiding their bikes from pursuing police officers among the showroom bikes and gear.

Residents have mixed opinions. Bea Harris, who has lived in Harlem since 1954, wants to see the dirt bike trend end. “They’re loud and they’re in the wrong place,” she said, walking along Frederick Douglass Boulevard shortly after some bikes passed, “The riders don’t use them the way they should. They’re not careful. They’re just reckless.”

But Malik Cupid, another lifelong resident, considered the police and biker urban cat-and-mouse games a permanent Harlem culture fixture. “They’re kind of fun to watch,” he said, looking around the neighborhood. “It’s not going anywhere. So just give it up,” he laughed.

A promotional video for the Harlem Legendz motorcycle club, features narration from a rider named “Buster,” who explains that illegal bikes are a popular emblem of street life. “All the rappers, all the movie stars—they emulate the streets. They emulate us. They emulate Harlem.”