Gang Leader for a Day (10 page)

Then he began flailing about on the ground in convulsion, his spindly arms flapping like wings. By now his body lay just a few feet from us. I g roaned, a nd J .T. pulled me away. Still no one came to help Brass; it was as if we were all fishermen watching a fish die a slow death on the floor of a boat.

I leaned on J.T.’s car, quivering from the shock. He took hold of me firmly and tried to calm me down. “It’s just the way it is around here,” he whispered, a discernible tone of sympathy in his voice. “Sometimes you have to beat a nigger to teach him a lesson. Don’t worry, you’ll get used to it after a while.”

I thought,
No, I don’t want to get used to it.
If I did, what kind of person would that make me? I wanted to ask J.T. to stop the beating and take Brass to the hospital, but my ears were ringing, and I couldn’t even focus on what he was telling me. My eyes were fixed on Brass, and I felt like throwing up.

Then J.T. grabbed me by the shoulders and turned me away so I couldn’t watch. But out of the corner of my eye, I could see that a few tenants finally came over to help Brass, while the gang membersjust stood over him doing nothing. J.T. held me up, as if to comfort me. I tried instead to support my weight on his car.

That’s when C-Note slipped into my thoughts.

“I understand that Brass didn’t pay you the money he owed, but you guys beat up C-Note and he wasn’t doing anything,” I said impatiently. “I just don’t get it.”

“C-Note was challenging my authority,” J.T. answered calmly. “I had told him months before he couldn’t do his work out there, and he told me he understood. He went back on his word, and I had to do what I had to do.”

I pushed a little harder. “Couldn’t you just punish them with a tax?”

“Everyone wants to kill the leader, so you got to get them first.” This was one of J.T.’s trademark sayings. “I had niggers watching me,” he said. “I had to do what I had to do.”

I recalled that on the day C-Note challenged him, J.T. had driven up to the building with a few Black Kings leaders from other neighborhoods. J.T. was constantly worried—practically to the point of paranoia, it seemed to me—that his own members and fellow leaders wanted to dethrone him and claim his territory. So he may have felt he couldn’t afford to have his authority challenged in their presence, even by a senior citizen whose legs probably couldn’t buy him one lap around a high-school track. Still, J.T.’s explanation seemed so alien to me that I felt I was watching a scene from
The Godfather.

 
 

By now it was nearly a year since I’d started hanging out with J.T.’s gang. It was 1990, which was roughly the peak of the crack epidemic in Chicago and other big U.S. cities. Black and Latino gangs including the Kings, the Cobras, the Disciples, the Vice Lords, the MCs (Mickey Cobras), and even the Stones, which had been temporarily dismantled a few years earlier, were capitalizing on a huge demand for crack and making a lot of money.

In the old days, a teenager with an appetite for trouble might have gotten involved in vandalism or shoplifting; now he was more likely to be involved in the drug trade. And the neighbor who might have yelled at that misbehaving teenager in the old days was less likely to do so, since that kid might well be carrying a gun.

Politicians, academics, and law-enforcement officials all offered policy solutions, to little avail. The liberal-minded deployed their traditional strategies—getting young people back into school and finding them entry-level jobs—but few gang members were willing to trade in their status and the prospect of big money for menial work. Conservatives attacked the crack epidemic by supporting mass arrests and hefty prison sentences. This certainly took some dealers off the streets, but there was always a surplus of willing and eager replacements.

The national mood had grown increasingly desperate—and punitive. Prosecutors won the right to treat gangs as organized criminal groups, which produced longer prison sentences. Judges gave the police permission to conduct warrantless searches and to round up suspected gang members who were hanging out in public spaces. In schools, mayors ruled out the wearing of bandannas and other clothing that might signal gang affiliation. With each day’s newspaper bringing a fresh story about gang violence, these efforts met little political resistance, even if they weren’t all that effective.

From J.T.’s perspective the real crisis was that all these measures conspired to make it harder to earn as much money as he would have liked.

Because crack was sold on street corners, with profits dependent on high volume and quick turnover, J.T. had to monitor a round-the-clockeconomic operation. He loved the challenge of running a business and making money. From all indications his transition to the Robert Taylor Homes was an unqualified success. This had won the attention of his superiors, a group of several dozen people in prison and on the streets known collectively as the Black Kings’ board of directors. They had begun inviting J.T. to high-level meetings to discuss the big picture of their enterprise. Pleased with his managerial prowess and attention to detail, they rewarded J.T. with extra responsibilities. He had just been asked, for instance, to help the gang with its foray into Chicago politics.

“Even the gang needs friends with connections,” J.T. told me. “And we’re getting more successful, so we need more friends.”

“I don’t see why a gang wants to deal with politicians,” I said. “I don’t see what they get out of it. It seems they’d have a greater chance of getting caught if they started hanging out with politicos, no?”

He reminded me that his Black Kings gang was just one of about two hundred BK gangs around the city that were making money selling crack. With that much money, the citywide BK leadership needed to think about investing and laundering.

“Let’s say, Sudhir, that you’re making only a hundred bucks,” he explained. “You probably don’t have a lot of real headaches. You don’t need to worry about niggers stealing it from you. You don’t need to worry that when you go into a store, they’ll ask you where you got the money. But let’s say you got a thousand bucks. Well, you can’t really carry it around, and you’re a street nigger so you don’t have a bank account. You need to keep it somewhere. So you start to have things to think about.

“Now let’s say it’s ten thousand. Okay, now you got niggers who are watching you buy a few things: a new TV, a new car. They say, ‘Oh, Sudhir, he’s got a new necklace. And he’s a student. He don’t work? So where’d he get the money? Maybe he has cash in his house.’ So now you have more things to worry about.

“Now let’s say it’s a hundred thousand. You want to buy a car, but the car dealer has to report to the government when people pay for a car with thirty thousand dollars in cash. So what are you going to do? You may have to pay him a thousand bucks to keep his mouth shut. Then maybe you need to hire security, ’cause there’s always some nigger that’s going to take the chance and rob you. That’s another few thousand, and you got to trust the security you hired, ’cause they know where you keep the money.

“Now let’s say you got five hundred thousand or a million. Or more. That’s what these niggers above me are worrying about. They need to find ways to clean the money. Maybe they hide it in a friend’s business. Maybe they tell their sisters to open up bank accounts. Or they get their church to take a donation. They have to constantly be thinking about the money: keeping it safe, investing it, protecting themselves from other niggers.”

“But I still don’t understand why you need to deal with politicians.”

“Well, see, an alderman can take the heat off of us,” J.T. said with a smile. “An alderman can keep the police away. He can make sure residents don’t get too pissed off at us. Let’s say we need to meet in the park. The alderman makes sure the cops don’t come. And the only thing they want from us is a donation—ten thousand dollars gets you an alderman for a year. Like I keep telling you, our organization is about helping our community, so we’re trying to get involved in what’s happening.”

J.T.’s monologue surprised me on two fronts. Although I’d heard about corrupt aldermen in the old days—denying building permits to political enemies, for instance, or protecting a gang’s gambling racket—I had a hard time believing that J.T. could buy off a politician as easily as he described. Even more surprising was J.T.’s claim about “helping our community.” Was this a joke, I wondered, or did he really believe that selling drugs and bribing politicians would somehow help a down-and-out neighborhood pick itself up?

Besides the Black Kings’ relationships with various aldermen, J.T. told me, the gang also worked with several community-based organizations, or CBOs. These groups, many of them created with federal funding during the 1960s, worked to bring jobs and housing to the neighborhood, tried to keep kids off the street with recreation programs, and, in places like the South Side, even enacted truces between warring gangs.

Toward the end of the 1980s, several CBOs tried instilling civic consciousness in the gangs themselves. They hired outreach workers (most of whom were former gangsters) to persuade young gang members to reject the thug life and choose a more productive path. These reformers held life-skills workshops that addressed such issues as “how to act when you go downtown” or “what to do when a lady yells at you for drinking beer in the park.” They also preached the gospel of voting, arguing that a vote represented the first step toward reentry into the social mainstream. J.T. and some other gang leaders not only required their young members to attend these workshops but also made them participate in voter-registration drives. Their motives were by no means purely altruistic or educational: they knew that if their rank-and-file members had good relationships with local residents, the locals were less likely to call the police and disrupt the drug trade.

J.T.’s ambitions ran even higher. What he wanted, he told me, was to return the gang to its glory days of the 1960s, when South Side gangs worked together with residents to agitate for improvements in their neighborhoods. But he seemed to conveniently ignore a big difference: Gangs back then didn’t traffic in drugs, extort money from businesses, and terrorize the neighborhood with violence. They were not innocent kids, to be sure. But their worst transgressions tended to be street fighting or intimidating passersby. Because J.T.’s gang
was
involved in drugs and extortion (and more), I was skeptical that he could enjoy much more support from the local residents than he currently had.

 
 
 

One cold November night, J.T. invited me to a meeting at a small storefront Baptist church. An ex-gangster named Lenny Duster would be teaching young people about the rights, responsibilities, and power of voting. The next election, while a full year away, would place in office a great many state legislators as well as city aldermen.

Lenny ran a small organization called Pride, which helped mediate gang wars. About a hundred young Black Kings attended the meeting, held in a small room at the rear of the church. They were quiet and respectful, although they had the look of teenagers who’d been told that attendance was mandatory.

Lenny was about six foot four, built lean and muscular. He was about forty years old, with streaks of blond hair, and he walked with a limp. “You-all need to see where the power is!” Lenny shouted to the assembly, striding about like a Caesar. “J.T. went to college, I earned a degree in prison. You-all are dropping out of school, and you’re ignorant. You can’t read, you can’t think, you can’t understand where the power comes from. It don’t come from that gun you got—it comes from what’s in your head. And it comes from the vote. You can change the world if you get the niggers that are coming down on you out of power. Think about it: No more police stopping you, no more abandoned buildings. You control your destiny!”

He talked to the young men about how to “work” responsibly. It was understood among gang members that “work” meant selling drugs—a tragic irony in that they referred to working in the legitimate economy as “getting a job,” not “work.”

“You-all are outside, so you need to respect who else is around you,” he said. “If you’re in a park working, leave the ladies alone. Don’t be working around the children. That just gets the mamas mad. If you see kids playing, take a break and then get back to work. Remember, what you do says a lot about the Black Kings. You have to watch your image, take pride in yourself.

“You are not just foot soldiers in the Black Kings,” he continued. “You are foot soldiers in the
community.
You will register to vote today, but then you must all go out and register the people in your buildings. And when elections come around, we’ll tell you who to vote for and you’ll tell them. That’s an important duty you have when you belong to this organization.”

For my classes at the U of C, I’d been reading about the history of the Chicago political machine, whose leaders—white and black alike—were famous for practicing the dark arts of ballot stuffing, bribery, and yes, predelivered voting blocs. Like his predecessors, Lenny did give these young men a partial understanding of the right to vote, and why it was important, but it seemed that the main point of the meetings was to tell them how to be cogs in a political machine. He held up a small placard with the names of candidates whom the gang was supporting for alderman and state legislator. There was no discussion of a platform, no list of vital issues. Just an insistence that the young men round up tenants in the projects and tell them how to vote.

When Lenny finished, J.T. told his young members they could leave. I sat for a while with J.T. and Lenny. Lenny looked drained. As he drank a Coke, he said he’d been speaking to at least four or five groups every day.

Lenny was careful to explain that his fees came from personal donations from gang members or their leaders. He wanted to distinguish these monies from the profits the gang made from selling drugs. In theory, I understood that Lenny was trying to convince me that he didn’t accept drug money, but I found the distinction almost meaningless. Moreover, the gang leaders had a lot of incentive to pay Lenny to keep their gangs from fighting one another. After all, it was hard to conduct commerce in the midst of a gang war. Younger gang members, however, often wanted to stir things up, mostly to distinguish themselves as fighters. That’s why some gang leaders even paid Lenny to discipline their own members. “
Disciplination
is an art form,” Lenny said. “One thing I like is to hang a nigger upside down over the freeway as the cars come. Ain’t never had a nigger misbehave after I try that one.”