He wore the trademark red beret for only a year and took it off long ago, but downtown Riverhead restaurant owner John Mantzopoulos vividly remembers his time as a member of the Guardian Angels.
It was the mid-1980s and the Greek-born Mantzopoulos was a teenager adrift in Astoria, Queens.
“When I was about 15 years old, a lot of my neighborhood friends started experimenting with cigarettes, weed and other things,” Mantzopoulos, now 46 and the married father of three recalls. “I didn’t want to get mixed up with that and I sort of detached myself from those guys. Then you find you have no friends.”
“A Puerto Rican kid I knew at school, a kid named Ronald, asked me to come join the Guardian Angels with him,” Mantzopoulos said. “I wasn’t even sure what that was, so I went to check it out and I did end up joining.”
His memories of the year he spent wearing the red beret are good ones. It gave him a sense of belonging and provided him with friends who weren’t doing things he knew he should avoid.
“It’s a good organization,” he said in an interview Friday afternoon, speaking inside the East Main Street restaurant he plans to reopen next month under a new name, Mazi. (The Athens Grill was gutted by fire in June 2013.) Mantzopoulos is a wiry man who practically twitches with his own nervous energy, often pacing around as he talks. His accented speech is rapid-fire. On Friday, he fidgeted with the things set out on the long bar he’s in the process of building inside his new restaurant.
“It really helped a lot of young people out, kids who needed structure in their lives, who needed guidance and something positive — kids who would otherwise maybe turn out to be sort of thugs,” Mantzopoulos said.
Mantzopoulos said he had no lack of structure in his life; actually that was one of the reasons he ended up quitting, he said.
“I had to be home for dinner and I had to be in by 11 at night,” he said, laughing a little. “I couldn’t stay out for late-night patrols till 1 or 2 in the morning, even on weekends.”
The structure of the organization was very strong, he said. “It was not just a bunch of guys riding the subways, let’s do whatever we want.”
Patrol leaders, who were a little older than most of the guys on the patrols, would call Guardian Angels headquarters to get a patrol route. They’d be told which trains to ride on. “It was very organized and disciplined,” Mantzopoulos said.
When they rode the subway trains, there would usually be one angel in each car. When the train pulled into a station, the angels would all look out at the platform and then give an “all clear” signal.
“You’d see all these red berets pop out of the doors,” he recalled and mimicked the all-clear hand signal thy used.
“It was cool. It was cool to belong to. Girls liked it,” Mantzopoulos said, breaking into a grin.
The group had a very strict code of conduct, he said. “You were not allowed to carry weapons of any kind. They used to do a body search at the beginning of each patrol. You were not allowed to use drugs or alcohol. They were very strict about those things.”
He remembered the difficulty the Angels often had with NYC transit police. “They did not like us,” he said. One night in particular stands out in his memory. The patrols were heading to Coney Island in Brooklyn, where two rival gangs were supposed to be having a rumble that night. All the patrols converged on the Times Square station.
“All of a sudden the whole platform was a sea of red berets,” Mantzopoulos recalled.
“The MTA cops were very agitated about our presence there that night. They stopped us from going to Brooklyn,” he said.
The restaurant owner said he never went to the organization’s uptown Manhattan headquarters and he’s never met Guardian Angel founder Curtis Sliwa. He’d like to meet him to talk about Sliwa’s conclusion that Riverhead is a conduit for Latino gangs on the East End.
“I think someone misguided him about that,” Mantzopoulos said.
The announcement last week that the Guardian Angels are going to start patrolling in Riverhead by the end of this month has sparked a lot of debate here, as the commencement of patrols in Greenport recently touched off debate there. Everyone has an opinion of the idea and Mantzopoulos is no different.
“I don’t think the Angels are needed here,” said Mantzopoulos, who has operated a restaurant on Main Street for 10 years.
“Curtis should go to restaurant owners and ask them about the Latino community, because they hire Latinos. I have more information about what goes on in this community because of my guys,” he said. “I know exactly who’s been beat up and robbed.” He said the violence against Latinos has not been perpetrated by other Latinos and with rare exception it’s not gang-related.
“I don’t think the working class Latinos here are going to become gangsters. You can’t go in for a while and then get out. Once you join you’re in it for life. I don’t think it’s something the vast majority of Latinos will turn to,” Mantzopoulos said.
“I don’t think we have a serious gang problem here and what gang activity we have I think is mostly black, not Latino,” he said.
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