People

In the '70s, Benjamin Melendez was invited to the United Nations. Nowadays, music nerds pay upward of $400 for the first record of his group, the Ghetto Brothers. As founder of the band and the gang of the same name, Melendez, 54, is a living legend.

But he still can't get his landlord to fix the leak that's destroying the kitchen ceiling of his two-bedroom apartment on Park Avenue in Tremont. Melendez covered the ceiling with plastic garbage bags so that plaster wouldn't fall on any of the apartment's seven residents.

Despite the respect Melendez gets from academics and the aging gang members who stop him on the street, he deals with housing problems like many other Bronx residents. In the past four decades, he has lived in eight apartments in the borough, from Morrisania, where he made his reputation, to Bedford Park, where he became a family man.

When Melendez and his second wife Wanda moved to Park Avenue in 1982, flowers bloomed on the block. "Nowadays, the building is full of litter and drugs," he says. A man was stabbed to death there last November.

His sweatsuit hides battle scars, but Melendez doesn't look like a hardened ex-gang member. He is a solid 5-foot-8 ­­ he watches his weight because he has diabetes -- and keeps his graying mustache and beard trimmed. Beneath his Yankees cap, Melendez is balding, perhaps from using Mr. Clean instead of pomade during his gang days.

"I wanted to make my hair look completely crazy," he says.

Melendez, who was born in San Juan, often wears a black jacket bearing a Puerto Rican flag. He moved to Manhattan as a baby, then to Morrisania with his eight brothers and sisters when he was 11. His father, Juan, led a secret Shabbat service every Friday because no one knew they were Jewish.

Melendez became a leader early, founding the Ghetto Brothers with his brothers Victor and Robert in 1967, when he was 14. "He's captivating, like the Pied Piper," says the photographer Joe Conzo, 44, who has known Melendez since he was a child.

The gang started as kid's stuff, but matured quickly as the neighborhood deteriorated. When Juan Melendez found out his son was in a gang, he went to the clubhouse, grabbed Benjamin, mid-lecture, by the ear and marched him home. But despite his father's disapproval, Melendez stayed with the Ghetto Brothers for another seven years.

He reminisces about those years often, frequently riding his bicycle 30 blocks from his apartment to Horseshoe Park, where his friend Cornell Benjamin (a.k.a. Black Benjie) was killed in 1971, while trying to resolve a gang conflict. That death spurred Melendez to convert the Ghetto Brothers into a community organization that gave out lunches and cleaned buildings. Melendez drew the attention of Puerto Rican independence activists, who invited him to the U.N.

"Benjamin Melendez was one of the people who brought an end to an era of gang violence in the Bronx," says Jeff Chang, who wrote about the 1971 truce Melendez brokered in his book "Can't Stop Won't Stop."

In 1973, when Melendez was 21, he married May Lin Jung, who had helped him design the Ghetto Brothers' logo and sew it on jackets. But after their daughter, Malina, was born, May Lin worried about Melendez's safety. "She said to me, 'I want a husband, not a legend,' " he says.

After he resigned as the gang's president in 1975, some members threatened May Lin. The family moved to Highbridge in the middle of the night.

That was the beginning of a new life. Melendez worked as a youth counselor and the couple had a son, Joshua, then moved to a two-bedroom with mahogany banisters in Bedford Park.

"It was a Mr. Rogers neighborhood," says Joshua Melendez, now 30. "It was like Papi was trying to take us away from what he had lived through."

But after a few years, the Melendezes' marriage crumbled, and Benjamin left. May Lin moved to Tennessee with the children, who remained close with their father.

Melendez began focusing on music again with a new band of brothers, Street the Beat. At their practice space, he met Wanda Rivera. "He kissed my hand instead of shaking it," she says, laughing. He says, "It took me a year to get a kiss on her cheek."

The couple married in 1981 and soon moved to Park Avenue. They have six children who range in age from 11 to 23 -- four live with them along with one grandson.

The apartment is crowded, but Melendez entertains the family with Beatles songs and corny jokes. "He's a ham," Joshua Melendez says. "He told me to walk in five minutes late wherever I'm going because that way everybody would notice me." On Saturdays, when the proudly Jewish family celebrates Shabbat, lunch is often gefilte fish with rice and beans.

Melendez says he recently bumped into a woman who told him, "Bring the Ghetto Brothers back, so you can clean up the block. We need you." He replied, "Gracias señora, but I don't do that anymore."

Melendez doesn't have time to fix the neighborhood. He has a ceiling, and a family, to take care of.