The Ballad of ‘La Madrina’: A Once-Feared Gang Leader Cleaning Up New York City

Two years ago, filmmaker Raquel Cepeda started looking for tapes. Specifically, she was searching for leftover footage from 80 Blocks from Tiffany’s, a 1979 documentary about two gangs in the South Bronx: the Savage Nomads and the Savage Skulls. Cepeda was researching the life of the Skulls’ former “First Lady” Lorine Padilla. But the movie had long been MIA—never released commercially, it wasn’t available on DVD until 2010—and the footage was even more