Gang Leader for a Day (15 page)

As J.T., Mayne, and Pastor Wilkins sat down to work out the details of the deal, I walked out front. There was Autry, smoking a cigarette on the sidewalk. He shook his head; he looked fatigued.

“This stuff is hard, isn’t it?” I asked.

“Yeah, I try to block out the fact that they could get pissed at me and kill me if I say something they don’t like. You never know if they’ll go home and think you’re working for the other side.”

“You ever get hurt before?”

“I got my ass kicked a few times—one time real bad—’cause they thought I wasn’t being fair. I’m not sure I want to have that happen again.”

“You don’t get paid enough,” I said.

J.T. came out of the club and stopped beside me. His head was lowered. Autry moved away.

“You wanted this, right?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said, “this is what I’m looking for.” He knew I’d been eager to see how the community and the gang worked out their differences. But he’d also made it clear that I could do so only if I had a patron, and I had to choose between J.T. and Autry. I chose J.T.

“Just remember,
you
wanted this,” he said. “I didn’t make you come here today. I didn’t tell you about this.
You
wanted this.” He pressed his finger into my chest every time he said “you.” I sensed that despite our last conversation J.T. felt I was slipping from his grasp.

“I know,” I said. “Don’t worry.”

“
I’m
not worried.” He let out a sinister laugh. “But you should really think about this. Just remember, I didn’t bring you here. I can’t protect you. Not all the time anyway. You did this on your own.”

“I get it, I’m on my own.”

J.T. smiled, pressed his finger into my chest one last time, with force, and walked away.

FOUR

After nearly three years of hanging out with J.T., I began talking to several of my professors about my dissertation topic. As it happened, they weren’t as enthusiastic as I was about an in-depth study of the Black Kings crack gang and its compelling leader. They were more interested in the standard sociological issues in the community: entrenched poverty, domestic violence, the prevalence of guns, residents’ charged relations with the government—and, to a lesser extent, how the community dealt with the gang.

If I explored these subjects well, my professors said, I could explain how the Robert Taylor tenants really behaved, rather than simply arguing that they didn’t act like middle-class people.

Bill Wilson in particular was adamant that I adopt a wider lens on the gang and its role in Robert Taylor. Because sociology had such a strong tradition of “community studies,” he wanted me to write the definitive report on everyday life in high-rise housing projects.

He also said he’d started worrying about my safety in the projects.By this point I had taken up golf as a way to spend more time with Wilson, an avid golfer. “I’m having nightmares, Sudhir,” he said once in the middle of the fairway, staring out blankly. “You’re worrying me, and I really want you to think about spending some time with others.” He drifted off, never instructing me about which “others” I should be observing, but I knew this was code for
anyone
besides the gang.

I knew he had my best interests in mind, but it still came as a shock to me that I would have to widen my focus if I still planned to base my dissertation on this community. It meant that J.T. wouldn’t be the sole target of my attention, and perhaps not even the primary target. A few of my professors were seasoned ethnographers, experts in the methodology of firsthand observation. They were insistent that I avoid getting so close to any one source that I would be beholden to him.

Easier said than done. I hadn’t forgotten how agitated J.T. became when he saw me branching out into the community. I really didn’t feel I could tell him that my project was moving away from a focus on his leadership. By now J.T. wasn’t my only access to the community, but he was certainly my best access. He was the one who had brought me in, and he was the one who could open—or shut—any door. But beyond all that lay one simple fact: J.T. was a charismatic man who led a fascinating life that I wanted to keep learning about.

 
 
 

J.T. seemed to appreciate having the ear of an outsider who would listen for hours to his tales of bravado and managerial prowess. He often expressed how hard it was to oversee the gang, to keep the drug economy running smoothly, and to deal with the law-abiding tenants who saw him as an adversary. Sometimes he spoke of his job with dispassion, as if he were the CEO of some widget manufacturer—an attitude that I found not only jarring but, given the violence and destruction his enterprise caused, irresponsible.

He fancied himself a philanthropist as much as a leader. He spoke proudly of quitting his mainstream sales job in downtown Chicago to return to the projects and use his drug profits “to help others.” How did he help? He mandated that all his gang members get a high-school diploma and stay off drugs. He gave money to some local youth centers for sports equipment and computers. He willingly loaned out his gang members to Robert Taylor tenant leaders, who deployed them on such tasks as escorting the elderly on errands or beating up a domestic abuser. J.T. could even put a positive spin on the fact that he made money by selling drugs. A drug economy, he told me, was “useful for the community,” since it redistributed the drug addicts’ money back into the community via the gang’s philanthropy.

I have to admit that J.T.’s rhetoric could be persuasive, even when I tried to play the skeptic. The fact was, I didn’t yet have a good grip on how his gang really affected the broader community. On an even more basic level, I wondered if I really had a complete sense of what J.T. did on a daily level. What kind of gang activities
wasn’t
he showing me?

One cold February morning, I stood with him on a street corner as he met with one of his drug-selling crews. I was shivering, still unaccustomed to the chilling lake winds, and trying hard to focus on what J.T. was saying. He spoke to his men about the need to take pride in their work. He was also trying to motivate the younger members to brave the cold and sell as much crack as they could. In weather like this, the youngest members had to stand outside and sell while the ones with more seniority hung out in a building lobby.

After addressing his troops, J.T. said he was going off to play basketball.He climbed into his Malibu and I climbed in with him. We were parked near a busy intersection at State Street, within view of a Robert Taylor high-rise, some low-rise stores, and the Boys & Girls Club. Before he even turned the key, I mentioned, half joking, that I thought he was seriously overpaid.

“I don’t see what’s so difficult about your job,” I said. “I mean, you
say
how hard it is to do what you do, but I just can’t see it being that difficult.” All I ever saw him do, I said, was walk around and shake hands with people, spend money, drive nice cars—he owned at least three that I knew of—and party with his friends. J.T. just sat for a moment, making no move to drive off. “Okay, well, you want to give it a try? If you think it’s so easy, you try it.”

“I don’t think that would be possible. I don’t think graduate school is really training me to lead a gang.”

“Yeah, but you don’t think I need any skills at all to do this. So you should have no problem doing it, right?”

It was true that
sometimes
his job looked hard. When his gang was warring with another gang, for instance, J.T. had to coordinate his troops and motivate fifteen-year-old kids to stand out in the open and sell drugs despite the heightened risk of being shot, beaten up, or arrested. And it wasn’t as though these kids were getting rich for their trouble. The BKs, like most other street gangs, had a small leadership class. J.T. kept only a few officers on his payroll: a treasurer, a couple of “enforcers,” a security coordinator, and then a set of lesser-paid “directors” who managed the six-person teams that did the actual street-level selling of crack.

But for the most part, it seemed that J.T.’s gang members spent their time hanging around on street corners, selling drugs, shooting dice, playing sports, and talking about women. Did it really take a self-styled CEO to manage
that
?

I expressed this sentiment to J.T. “I could do it,” I said. “Probably.I mean, I don’t think I could handle a war and I’ve never shot a gun, so it depends what you mean when you say ‘try it.’ ”

“Just that—try it. There’s no war on right now, no fighting. So you don’t even have to touch a gun. But I can’t promise that you won’t have to do something you may not like.”

“Such as?”

“I’m not telling you. You said you think it’s easy, so you do it, and you’ll see what I mean.”

“Is this an offer?”

“Nigger, this is the offer of a lifetime. Guaranteed that if you do this, you’ll have a story for all your college friends.”

He suggested that I try it for a day. This made me laugh: how could I possibly learn anything worthwhile in a single day?

From inside the car, I watched as parents gingerly stepped out of the high-rise lobby, kids in tow, trying to get to school and out of the unforgiving lake wind. A crossing guard motioned them to hurry up and cross the street, for there were a couple of eighteen-wheelers idling impatiently at a green light. As they passed his car, J.T. waved. Our breath was fogging up the windshield. He turned on the defroster, jacked the music a bit louder. “One day,” he said. “Take it or leave it. That’s all I’m saying. One day.”

 
 

I met J.T. at seven-thirty the next morning at Kevin’s Hamburger Heaven in Bridgeport, a predominantly Irish-American neighborhood across the expressway from the projects. This was his regular morning spot. “None of these white folks here know me,” he said, “so I don’t get any funny looks.”

His steak and eggs arrived just as I sat down. He always ate alone, he said. Soon enough he’d be joined by two of his officers, Price and T-Bone. Even though J.T.’s gang was nearly twice as large as most others on the South Side, he kept his officer class small, because he trusted very few people. All of his officers were friends he’d known since high school.

“All right,” he began, “let’s talk a little about—”

“Listen,” I blurted out, “I can’t kill anybody, I can’t sell shit to anybody.” I had been awake much of the night worrying. “Or even
plan
any of that stuff! Not me!”

“Okay, nigger, first of all you need to stop shouting.” He looked about the room. “And stop worrying. But let me tell you what
I’m
worried about, chief.”

He twirled a piece of steak on his fork as he dabbed his mouth with a napkin.

“I can’t let you do
everything,
right, because I’ll get into trouble, you dig? So there’s just going to be some stuff you
can’t
do. And you already told me some of the other stuff you don’t
want
to be doing. But all that doesn’t matter, because I got plenty of stuff to keep you busy for the day. And only the cats coming for breakfast know what you’ll be doing. So don’t be acting like you run the place in front of everybody. Don’t embarrass me.”

It was his own bosses, J.T. explained, that he was worried about, the Black Kings’ board of directors. The board, roughly two dozen men who controlled all the neighborhood BK gangs in Chicago, kept a close eye on drug revenues, since their generous skim came off the top. They were always concerned that local leaders like J.T. keep their troops in line. Young gang members who made trouble drew unwanted police attention, which made it harder to sell drugs; the fewer drugs that were sold, the less money the board collected. So the board was constantly reminding J.T. to minimize the friction of his operation.

As J.T. was explaining all this, he repeated that only his senior officers knew that I was gang leader for a day. It wouldn’t do, he said, for the gang’s rank and file to learn of our experiment, nor the community at large. I was excited at the thought of spending the day with J.T. I felt he might not be able to censor what I saw if I was with him for a full day. It was also an obvious sign that he trusted me. And I think he was flattered that I was interested in knowing what actually went into his work.

Impatient, I asked him what my first assignment was.

“You’ll find out in a minute, as soon as I do. Eat up, you’re going to need it.”

I was nervous, to be sure, but not because I was implicating myself in an illegal enterprise. In fact, I hadn’t even really thought about that angle. I probably should have. At most universities, faculty members solicit approval for their research from institutional review boards, which act as the main insurance against exploitative or unethical research. But the work of graduate students is largely overlooked. Only later, when I began sharing my experiences with my advisers and showing them my field notes, did I begin to understand—and adhere to—the reporting requirements for researchers who are privy to criminal conduct. But at the time, with little understanding of these protocols, I simply relied on my own moral compass.

This compass wasn’t necessarily reliable. To be honest, I was a bit overwhelmed by the thrill of further entering J.T.’s world. I hoped he would someday introduce me to the powerful Black Kings leadership, the reputedly ruthless inner-city gang lords who had since transplanted themselves to the Chicago suburbs. I wondered if they were some kind of revolutionary vanguard, debating the theories of Karl Marx and W. E. B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon and Kwame Nkrumah. (Probably not.) I also hoped that J.T. would bring me to some dark downtown tavern where large Italian men in large Italian suits met with black hustlers like J.T. to dream up a multiethnic, multigenerational,multimillion-dollar criminal plan. My mind, it was safe to say, was racing out of control.

Price and T-Bone soon arrived and sat down at our table. By now I knew these two pretty well—T-Bone, the gang’s bookish and chatty treasurer (which meant he handled most of the gang’s fiscal and organizational issues), and Price, the thuggish and hard-living security chief (a job that included the allocation of particular street corners to particular BK dealers). They were the two men most responsible for helping J.T. with day-to-day affairs. They both nodded in my direction as they sat down, then looked toward J.T.