Gang Leader for a Day (16 page)

“Okay, T-Bone,” J.T. said, “you’re up, nigger. Talk to me. What’s happening today?”

“Whoa, whoa!” I said. “I’m in charge here, no? I should call this meeting to order, no?”

“Okay, nigger,” J.T. said, again glancing around. He still seemed concerned that I was talking too loud. “Just be cool.”

I tried to calm down. “T-Bone, you’re up. Talk to me, nigger.”

J.T. collapsed on the table, laughing hard. T-Bone and Price laughed along with him.

“If he calls me ‘nigger’ again, I’m giving him an ass whupping,” T-Bone said. “I don’t
care
if he’s my leader.”

J.T. told T-Bone to go ahead and start listing the day’s tasks.

“Ms. Bailey needs about a dozen guys to clean up the building today,” T-Bone said. “Last night Josie and them partied all night long, and there’s shit everywhere. We need to send guys to her by eleven or she
will
be pissed. And I do not want to be dealing with her when she’s pissed. Not me.”

“Okay, Sudhir,” J.T. said, “what do we do?” He folded his arms and sat back, as if he’d just set up a checkmate.

“What? Are you kidding me? Is this a joke?”

“Ain’t no joke,” said T-Bone flatly. “What do I do?” He looked at J.T., who pointed his finger at me. “C’mon, chief,” T-Bone said to me. “I got about ten things I need to go over. Let’s do this.”

J.T. explained that he had to keep Ms. Bailey happy, since the gang sold crack in the lobby of her building and as building president she had the power to make things difficult. To appease her, J.T. regularly assigned his members to clean up her building and do other menial jobs. The young drug dealers hated these assignments not only because they were humiliating but because every hour of community service was one less hour earning money. Josie was a teenage member of J.T.’s gang who’d apparently thrown a party with some prostitutes and left the stairwells and gallery strewn with broken glass, trash, and used condoms.

“All right, who hasn’t done cleanup in a while?” I asked.

“Well, you have Moochie’s group and Kalia’s group,” T-Bone said. “Both of them ain’t cleaned up for about three months.” Moochie and Kalia were each in charge of a six-member sales force.

“Okay, how do we make a decision between the two?” I asked.

“Well, it depends on what you think is important,” J.T. said. “Moochie’s been making tall money, so you may not want to pull him off the streets. Kalia ain’t been doing so hot lately, so maybe you want him to clean up, ’cause he isn’t bringing in money anyway.”

T-Bone countered by saying that maybe I should give the cleanup job to Moochie
because
he was making so much money lately. A little community service, T-Bone said, might ensure that “Moochie’s head doesn’t get too big.” One of a leader’s constant struggles was to keep younger members from feeling too powerful or independent.

Then Price threw in the fact that Moochie, who was in his early twenties, had been sleeping with Ms. Bailey, who was about fifty-five. This news shocked me: Was Moochie really attracted to a heavyset woman in her fifties? Price explained that younger guys often slept with older women, especially in winter, because otherwise they might not have a warm, safe place to spend the night. Also, a lease-holding woman might let her younger boyfriend stash drugs and cash in her apartment and maybe even use it as a freelance sales spot.

“Maybe Ms. Bailey gets to liking Moochie and she tells everyone not to buy shit from anyone but his boys,” Price said. “You can’t have that, because Moochie feels like he owns the building, and he doesn’t.”

“What if I flip a coin?” I asked, frustrated that I was spending so much time delegating janitorial duties. “I mean, you can’t win one way or the other.”

“Giving up already?” J.T. asked.

“Okay, let’s send Moochie over there,” I said. “It’s better that his head doesn’t get too big. Short run, you lose a little money.”

“You got it,” T-Bone said, and stepped away to make a phone call.

Price brought up the next item. The BKs had been trying to find a large space—a church or school or youth center—where they could hold meetings. There were several occasions, J.T. explained, when the gang needed to gather all its members. If a member violated a major gang rule, J.T. liked to mete out punishment in front of the entire membership in order to encourage solidarity and, just as important, provide deterrence. If a member was caught stealing drugs, for instance, he might be brutally beaten in front of the whole gang.

J.T. might also call a large meeting to go over practical matters like sales strategies or suspicions about who might be snitching to the police. A big meeting also gave J.T. a captive audience for his oratory. I had already been to a few meetings in which the only content was a two-hour speech by J.T. on the virtues of loyalty and bravery.

He often called the gang together on a street corner or in a park.

But this was far from ideal. There were about 250 young men in J.T.’s gang; summoning even 50 of them to the same street corner was sure to bring out the police, especially if a beating was on the agenda.

I was curious about the gang’s relationship with the police, but it was very hard to fathom. Gang members brazenly sold drugs in public; why, I wondered, didn’t the cops just shut down these open-air markets? But I couldn’t get any solid answers to this question. J.T. was always evasive on the issue, and most people in the neighborhood were scared to talk about the cops at all—even more scared, it seemed to me, than to talk about the gang. As someone who grew up in a suburb where the police were a welcome presence, I found this bizarre. But there was plainly a lot that I didn’t yet understand.

The Black Kings also needed to meet en masse if they were preparing for war with another gang. Once in a while, a war began when teenage members of different gangs got into a fight that then escalated. But leaders like J.T. had a strong incentive to thwart this sort of conflict, since it jeopardized moneymaking for no good reason. More typically, a war broke out when one gang tried to take over a sales location that belonged to another gang. Or one gang might do a drive-by shooting in another gang’s territory, hoping to scare off its customers—perhaps right into the territory of the gang that did the shooting.

When this kind of spark occurred, J.T. might pick up the phone and call his counterpart in the other gang to arrange a compromise. But, more often, gang leaders ordered a retaliation in order to save face. One drive-by shooting begat a retaliatory drive-by; if a Black Kings dealer got robbed of his drugs or cash by someone from another gang, then the Black Kings would do at least the same.

The retaliation was what signaled the start of a war. In J.T.’s gang it was the security officer, Price, who oversaw the details of the war: posting sentries, hiring mercenary gunmen if need be, planning the drive-bys. Price enjoyed this work, and was often happiest during gang wars.

I had never seen a war last beyond a few weeks; the higher-ups in each gang understood that public violence was, at the very least, bad for business. Usually, after a week or ten days of fighting, the leaders would find a mediator, someone like Autry, to help forge a truce.

“Pastor Wilkins says we can meet once a week at the church, at night,” Price said. “I spoke to him yesterday. He says he would like a donation.”

Price started to chuckle. So did T-Bone, who had returned from his phone call, and J.T.

“What’s so funny?” I asked.

“Pastor Wilkins is a faggot, man,” J.T. said. “That nigger sucks dick all night long!”

I had no idea whether Pastor Wilkins really did have sex with men, but I didn’t think it much mattered. Price and the others enjoyed making fun of him, and that was that.

“I still don’t see what’s so funny,” I said.

“Nigger,
you
have to meet with him,” T-Bone said. “Alone!”

“Oh, I get it. Very funny. Well, how about this? Since I’m leader, then that meeting is now scheduled for tomorrow. Ha!”

“No, the pastor wants to meet today,” J.T. said, suddenly stern. “And I need to find out today if we have a place to meet on Friday. So you’re up, brown man. Get ready.”

“All right, then. I’m delegating T-Bone to visit Pastor Wilkins. Now, you can’t tell me that I can’t delegate!”

“Actually, I can,” J.T. said. “It says in the gang’s rules that only the leader can make these kinds of meetings.”

“Now you guys are making shit up. But fine, I’ll do it. I say we give him fifty bucks for the use of the church.”

“What!” Price said. “Are you crazy?”

“Fifty will just make sure the cops arrive on time,” T-Bone said. “You better think a little higher.”

“Well, what did we pay last time?” I asked.

“It depends,” J.T. said, explaining that it was not uncommon for the less well-established clergy to rent out their storefront spaces to the gangs for business meetings. “Five hundred gets you the back room or the basement, but that’s just one time. And the pastor stays in the building. Seven hundred fifty gets you the place to yourself. And sometimes you want to
be
by yourself, depending on what you’re going to discuss.”

“Yeah,” Price chimed in. “If you have to beat somebody’s ass, you might want to be alone.”

I asked for a little time to think things over.

 
 
 

The four of us left the restaurant and got into J.T.’s Malibu for our next task: a meeting with Johnny, a man who owned a convenience store and no longer allowed members of the Black Kings inside. I already knew Johnny. He was a local historian of sorts who liked to regale me with stories of the 1960s and 1970s, when he was a gang leader himself. But he stressed how the gangs of that period were totally different. They were political organizations, he said, fighting police harassment and standing up for the community’s right to a fair share of city services. In his view, today’s gangs were mostly moneymaking outfits with little understanding of, or commitment to, the needs of Chicago’s poor black population.

Johnny’s store was on Forty-seventh Street, a busy commercial strip that bisected Robert Taylor. The strip was lined with liquor stores, check-cashing shops, party-supply and hardware stores, a few burned-out buildings and empty lots, a public-assistance center, two beauty salons, and a barbershop.

I wasn’t very worried about meeting with Johnny until Price spoke up. “We’ve also got a problem with this nigger,” he said, “because he’s been charging us more than he charges other niggers.”

“You mean he rips off only people in the Black Kings?” I asked.

“That’s right,” said J.T. “And this one is hard, because Johnny is T-Bone’s uncle. He’s also a dangerous motherfucker. He’ll use a gun just like that. So you got to be careful.”

“No,
you
have to be careful,” I said. “I told you I won’t use a gun.”

“No one said
you
have to,” Price offered, laughing from the backseat. “But
he
might!”

“What exactly is it that I’m supposed to do?” I asked. “You want me to make him charge you fair prices?”

“Well, this is a tough one,” J.T. said, “because we can’t have people taking advantage of us, you dig? But the thing is, we provide this nigger protection.”

“Protection?”

“Yeah, say somebody steals something. Then we find out who did it and we deal with it.”

“So he can’t tell us that we can’t come in his store,” Price said. “Not if we’re providing him a service.”

“Right,” said J.T. “We have to try and remind him that he’s paying us to help him, and it doesn’t look good if he doesn’t let us come in his store. See, what he’s doing is trying to make back the money that he’s paying us for protection.”

Johnny was out front when we pulled up, smoking a cigarette. “What’s up, Sudhir?” he said. “I see you wasting your time again, hanging around these niggers.”

Johnny looked like a caricature of a disco-era hustler: bright orange pants, a polyester shirt that appeared to be highly flammable, cowboy boots with fake diamond trim, and lots of ghetto glitter— fake rubies and other stones—on his fingers. A tattoo on his arm read BLACK BITCH, and another on his chest said PENTHOUSE KINGS, which was the name of his long-ago street gang.

J.T., Price, and I followed Johnny into the back of the store while T-Bone peeled off to attend to some other business. The back room was musty and unswept. The walls were plastered with pictures of naked black women and a big poster of Walter Payton, the beloved Chicago Bears running back. The sturdy shelves and even the floor were crammed with used TV sets, stereo components, and microwaves that Johnny fixed and sold. A big wooden table held the remnants of last night’s poker game: cards and chips, cigar butts, some brandy, and a ledger tallying debts. Through the open back door, a small homeless encampment was visible. J.T. had told me that Johnny paid a homeless couple fifty dollars a week to sleep outside and watch over the store.

We all sat down around the table. Johnny seemed impatient. “All right,” he said, “what are we going to do?”

“Well, we were thinking more like what
you
were going to do, nigger,” Price said.

“Listen, big black,” Johnny said, cigarette dancing in his lips, “you can take that mouth outside if you can’t say something useful.”

J.T. told Price to go back to the car, leaving just me, J.T., and Johnny.

“You’re paying us, Johnny,” J.T. said, “and now you’re
charging
us. You trying to make your money back? Is that it?”

Johnny replied in a calm monotone. “You niggers charge me two hundred and fifty dollars a month, and that shit has to stop,” he said. “A man can’t run a business if he has to pay that kind of money.

And your boys keep coming in here demanding free shit. I told Moochie and the rest of them that if they come in here anymore, this .22 is going to find their back.” He gestured to a rifle hanging behind him on the wall.