Gang Leader for a Day Read online

  “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.

  “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 o
r 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.”