A gang has to be more than tough to make it in New York these days — it’s gotta have a catchy name.
The mean streets today are filled with a constellation of youth gangs sporting crazy monikers — from the Cheese Block to the Oww Oww Gang to the Very Crispy Gangsters — creating a back-alley underworld that is weirder than the one in the cult film “The Warriors.”
The Post has obtained a copy of the NYPD’s official list of some 300 youth crews across the city. It shows that New York’s young guns are putting as much effort into picking their names as they put into protecting their turf.
“It took us about a month to come up with our name,” said Piff Montana, a member of the Get Touched Boyz of Jamaica, Queens, which is one of the hundreds of street gangs on the list.
“It just came out of the blue,” said Montana. “We wanted a name that would make an impact.”
The group — which Montana insists is just into producing rap music, not crime — is like a small business, with a “GT” logo, a Facebook presence and several YouTube videos.
“We wanted to touch people, so we just came up with Get Touched Boyz because our music is going to touch people in all kinds of ways,” Montana said.
The gangs on the NYPD list range from small cliques that are not particularly violent to large organizations responsible for robberies and shootings around the city.
One of the worst gangs is Brooklyn’s Very Crispy Gangsters.
It’s responsible for heinous crimes such as the October 2011 shooting of an off-duty cop in a McDonald’s parking lot. Their name, however, comes from their love of fashion.
“ ‘Crispy’ is just another way of saying fly clothes, very well dressed, like new-clothes clean,” said one East New York street source. “They dressed nice. They wore Guccis and Louis [Vuitton].”
When asked how they got the money for their finery, the gang associate just laughed, and claimed the gang no longer exists.
“They used to walk up and down the block. They had all the bitches,” he said wistfully. “They’re all dead or in jail now.”
In Highbridge in The Bronx, a gang called Young Fly Bridge said their name is wordplay on their neighborhood.
“We just took the ‘High’ from in front of the ‘Bridge’ and put a ‘fly’ in front of it . . . and we are young,” said a member named Malik, who insisted the group is not into crime but just likes to dress nice, or “fly.”
“We get money . . . and wear YSL [Yves Saint Laurent] and Louis [Vuitton] and True Religion. It’s crispy. Ice,” he said.
One of Manhattan’s most out-of-control new gangs is called From Da Zoo, with territory in Upper Manhattan on the West Side.
A source close to the gang said that its name is a commentary on the NYPD.
“They treat us like animals, so we ‘From Da Zoo,’ ” the source said.
Additional reporting by Todd Venezia, Josh Saul and Laura Italiano