Gang Leader for a Day (32 page)

Pootchie, a smart thirty-year-old leader who’d recently been promoted along with J.T., one night asked me to sit with him in his car to talk. “I’m not going to do this forever,” he said. “I’m here to make my money and get the fuck out.”

“What will you do next?” I asked.

“I’m a dancer—tap, jazz, all of it. I’d like to get my own place and teach.”

I couldn’t help laughing. Pootchie looked sheepish. “Sorry!” I said. “I don’t mean to laugh, but it’s just surprising.”

“Yeah, my father used to dance, and my mother was a singer. I dropped out of school—stupidest thing I ever did—but I got a business sense about me. I probably saved a few hundred grand. And I
ain’t
getting arrested. No way. I got bigger things I’m into. Not like some of these jailhouse niggers. I ain’t one of them. I’m an operator.”

I learned that Pootchie’s distinction between “jailhouse niggers” and “operators” was an essential one. These were the two kinds of leaders within the Black Kings. The first was devoted to building solidarity and staying together during difficult times, like the present threat of widespread arrests. These leaders were known as “jailhouse niggers,” since they had learned from prison that you didn’t survive unless you formed alliances and loyalties. These men tended to be the older leaders, in their late thirties or forties, and they tended to speak more of the BK “family” as opposed to the BK “business.” The “operators,” meanwhile, were a more entrepreneurial breed, like Pootchie and J.T. They were usually younger—J.T. was about thirty by now—and saw the gang primarily as a commercial enterprise. J.T. wanted to be a respected “community man,” to be sure, but that was more of a practical gambit than an ideological one.

Riding back to the South Side one night with J.T. from a suburban poker game, I sat quietly in the dark. J.T. was in a somber mood. As we pulled up to my apartment building, he admitted that the federal indictments were driving everyone a bit mad. “No one trusts nobody,” he said. “They’ll shoot you for looking funny.” J.T. shook his head. “I never realized how easy life was when it was
just
the projects. If they think I’m talking with the cops, I’ll be killed right away. Sometimes I think I should get my money and get out.”

As he said this, I immediately thought,
I’d better get my data and get out!
But I didn’t. I kept going back to the BK meetings. With the gang’s most senior officers talking to me, I figured I’d better be careful about how I chose to exit the group. As paranoid as everyone was these days, now was not the time for sudden movements.

 
 
 

J.T.’s life had also become complicated by the possible demolition of the Robert Taylor Homes. He was smart enough to know that his success was due in considerable part to geography: The concentration of people around Robert Taylor and its great location, near traffic corridors and expressways, guaranteed a huge customer base. J.T. might have been a good business-man, but every drug dealer in Chicago knew that Robert Taylor was among the best sales locations in the city.

So if the projects were torn down, J.T. would lose his customer base as well as much of his gang membership, since most of his young members lived in Robert Taylor.

Accordingly, J.T. was far less sanguine about the demolition than some tenants were. He thought it was folly to think that poor families could alter the buildings’ fate. Sometimes he’d just sit detachedly when we were together, muttering to himself, “Man, I need a plan. I need a plan. I
have
to think what I’m going to do. . . .”

He also had to worry about retaining his senior leaders, Price and T-Bone. They, too, were getting anxious, since their best shot at success—and their biggest incentive to stay in the gang—was the opportunity to become a leader. If Robert Taylor was torn down, then J.T.’s stock would probably fall, and so would theirs.

When I asked T-Bone how he felt about the future, he soberly described his vulnerability as a lieutenant to J.T. “I’m not protected, that’s my main problem,” he said. “I got nothing, so I have to be real careful. I mean, I save my money and give it to my mom. Like I told you, I want to get my degree and do something else with my life, start a business maybe. But with all the police coming around, I got to be careful. It’s people like me who go to prison. The ones up on the mountain always strike a deal.”

But if he left the gang suddenly, I asked him, wouldn’t his bosses suspect he was collaborating with the police?

“Yeah,” he said with a laugh. “If I leave the gang, these niggers will come after me and kill me. If I stay in the gang, the police will throw me in jail for thirty years. But that’s the life. . . .”

As his voice trailed off, I wanted to cry. I liked T-Bone, so much so that sometimes I almost forgot he was a gang member. At the moment he seemed like a bookish kid, working hard and worrying about passing his classes.

Not long afterward T-Bone’s girlfriend left a message instructing me to meet him at dusk in a parking lot near the expressway. I did as I was told. “You were always interested in how we do things,” T-Bone said, “so here you go.” He handed me a set of spiral-bound ledgers that detailed the gang’s finances. He seemed remorseful—and anxious. He wondered aloud what his life would have been like if he’d “stayed legit.” I could tell he was expecting a bad ending.

The pages of the ledgers were frayed, and some of the handwriting was hard to decipher, but the raw information was fascinating. For the past four years, T-Bone had been dutifully recording the gang’s revenues (from drug sales, extortion, and other sources) and expenses (the cost of wholesale cocaine and weapons, police bribes, funeral expenses, and all the gang members’ salaries).

It was dangerous for T-Bone to give me this information, a blatantviolation of the gang’s codes, for which he would be severely punished if caught. T-Bone knew of my interest in the gang’s economic structure. He saw how delighted I was now, fondling the ledgers as if they were first editions of famous books.

I never shared the notebooks with anyone in law enforcement. I put them away for a few years until I met the economist Steven Levitt. We published several articles based on this rich data source, and our analysis of the gang’s finances easily received the most notoriety of all the articles and books I have written. T-Bone probably had no idea that I would receive any critical acclaim, but he certainly knew that he was handing me something that few others—in the academy or in the world at large—had ever seen. Looking back, I think he probably wanted to help me, but I also believe he wanted to do something good before meeting whatever bad ending might have been coming his way. Given his love of books and education, it is not altogether inconceivable that T-Bone wanted this to be a charitable act of sorts, helping the world better understand the structure of gangland.

Perhaps the most surprising fact in T-Bone’s ledgers was the incredibly low wage paid to the young members who did the dirtiest and most dangerous work: selling drugs on the street. According to T-Bone’s records, they barely earned minimum wage. For all their braggadocio, to say nothing of the peer pressure to spend money on sharp clothes and cars, these young members stood little chance of ever making a solid payday unless they beat the odds and were promoted into the senior ranks. But even Price and T-Bone, it turned out, made only about thirty thousand dollars a year. Now I knew why some of the younger BK members supplemented their income by working legit jobs at McDonald’s or a car wash.

So a gang leader like J.T. had a tough job: motivating young men to accept the risks of selling drugs despite the low wages and slim chance of promotion. It was one thing to motivate his troops in the Robert Taylor Homes, where BK lore ran deep and the size of the drug trade made the enterprise seem appealingly robust. It would be much harder to start up operations from scratch in a different neighborhood.

I got to witness this challenge firsthand one evening when I accompanied J.T., Price, and T-Bone to West Pullman, a predominantly black neighborhood on the far South Side. Although there were poor sections of West Pullman, it also had a solid working-class base, with little gang activity. That was where the three Black Kings were trying to set up a new BK franchise. J.T. had arranged a meeting with about two dozen young men, a ragtag group of high-school dropouts and some older teenagers, most of whom spent the majority of their time just hanging out. J.T. wanted to help them become “black businessmen,” he told them.

They sat on wooden benches in the corner of a small neighborhood park. Most of them had boyish faces. Some looked innocent, some bored, and some eager, as if attending the first meeting of their Little League team. J.T. stood in front of them like their coach, extolling the benefits of “belonging to the Black Kings family, a nationwide family.” He pointed to his latest car, a Mitsubishi 3000GT, as a sign of what you could get if you worked hard in the drug economy. He sounded a bit like a salesman.

A few of them asked about the particulars of the drug trade. Were they supposed to cook the crack themselves, or were they provided with the finished product? Could they extend credit to good customers, or was it strictly a cash business?

“My auntie said I should ask you if she could join also,” one teenager said. “She says she has a lot of experience—”

J.T. cut him off. “Your auntie?! Nigger, are you kidding me? Ain’t no women allowed in this thing.”

“Well, she said that back in the day she was into selling dope,” the teenager continued. “She said that you should call her, because she could help you understand how to run a business.”

“All right, we’ll talk about this later, my man,” J.T. said, then turned to address the rest of the young men. “Listen, you all need to understand, we’re taking you to a whole ’nother level. We’re not talking about hanging out and getting girls. You’ll get all the pussy you want, but this is about taking pride in who you are, about doing something for yourself and your people. Now, we figure you got nobody serving around here. So there’s a real need—”

“Serving what?” the same teenager interrupted.

J.T. ignored him. “Like I said, you got no one responding to the demand, and we want to work with you-all. We’re going to set up shop.”

“Is there some kind of training?” asked a soft, sweet voice from the back. “And do we get paid to go? I got to be at White Castle on Mondays and Thursdays, and my mama says if I lose that job, she’ll kick me out of the house.”

“White Castle?!” J.T. looked over in disbelief at T-Bone, Price, and me. “Nigger, I’m talking about taking control of your
life.
What is White Castle doing for you? I don’t get it—how far can that take you?”

“I’m trying to save up for a bike,” the boy replied.

Hearing that, J.T. headed for his car, motioning for Price to finish up with the group.

“We’ll be in touch with you-all,” Price said assertively. “Right now, you need to understand that we got this place, you dig? If anyone else comes over and says they want you to work with them, you tell them you are Black Kings. Got it?”

As Price continued speaking to the teenagers, I walked over to J.T. and asked if this meeting was typical.

“This shit is frustrating,” he said, grabbing a soda from the car. “There’s a lot of places where the kids ain’t really done nothing. They have no idea what it means to be a part of something.”

“So why do you want to do this?”

“Don’t have a choice,” he said. “We don’t have any other places left to take over.” Most city neighborhoods, he explained, were already claimed by a gang leader. It was nearly impossible to annex a territory with an entrenched gang structure unless the leader died or went to jail. Even in those cases, there were usually local figures with enough charisma and leverage to step in. This meant that J.T. had to expand into working- and middle-class neighborhoods where the local “gang” was nothing more than a bunch of teenagers who hung out and got into trouble. If today’s meeting was any indication, these gangs weren’t the ideal candidates for Black Kings membership.

“I can’t believe I’m doing this shit,” J.T. said, walking around his car, kicking stones in the dirt. Between the dual threats of arrest and demolition, he seemed to be coming to grips with the possibility that his star might have peaked.

 
 
 

The Black Kings weren’t the only ones anxious about the threat of demolition. All the tenants of Robert Taylor were trying to cope with the news. Although demolition wouldn’t begin for at least two years, everyone was scrambling to learn which building might come down first and where on earth they were supposed to live.

Politicians, including President Clinton and Mayor Richard J. Daley of Chicago, promised that tenants would be relocated to middle-class neighborhoods with good schools, safe streets, and job opportunities. But reliable information was hard to come by. Nor would it be so easy to secure housing outside the black ghetto. The projects had been built forty years earlier in large part because white Chicagoans didn’t want black neighbors. Most Robert Taylor tenants thought the situation hadn’t changed all that much.

The CHA began to hold public meetings where tenants could air their questions and concerns. The CHA officials begged for patience, promising that every family would have help when the time came for relocation. But there was legitimate reason for skepticism. One of the most inept and corrupt housing agencies in the country was now being asked to relocate 150,000 people living in roughly two hundred buildings slated for demolition throughout Chicago. And Robert Taylor was the largest housing project of all, the size of a small city. The CHA’s challenge was being made even harder by Chicago’s tightening real-estate market. As the city gentrified, there were fewer and fewer communities where low-income families could find decent, affordable housing.

Information, much of it contradictory, came in dribs and drabs. At one meeting the CHA stated that all Robert Taylor residents would be resettled in other housing projects—a frightening prospect for many, since that would mean crossing gang boundaries. At another meeting the agency said that some families would receive a housing voucher to help cover their rent in the private market. At yet another meeting it was declared that large families would be split up: aunts and uncles and grandparents who weren’t on the lease would have to fend for themselves.