Gang Leader for a Day Read online

  His street dealers, however, were constantly getting arrested. From a legal standpoint this was mostly a nuisance; from a business standpoint, however, it posed a disastrous disruption of J.T.’s revenue flow. If a dealer went to prison, J.T. sometimes sent money to his family, but he was also worried that the dealer might decide to give testimony to the police in exchange for a reduced sentence. J.T. was more generous when it came to dealers killed in the line of duty. He nearly always paid their families a generous cash settlement.

  As he met now with each sales director, J.T. would begin by grilling him with a standard set of questions: You losing any of your regulars? (In other words, customers.) Anybody complaining? (About the quality of the crack.) You heard of people leaving you for others? (Customers buying crack from other dealers.) Anybody watching you? (The police or tenant leaders.) Any new hustlers been hanging around? (Homeless people or street vendors.) You seen any niggers come around? (Enemy gangs.)

  After answering these questions, the director had to report on the sales activity over the past week: a summary of the week’s receipts, any drugs that had been lost or stolen, the names of any gang members who’d been causing trouble. J.T. was most concerned with the weekly drug revenues-not just because his own salary derived from these revenues but because of the tribute tax he had to send each month to his superiors. J.T. had told me earlier that his bosses occasionally changed their tax rate, even doubling it, for no good reason (at least no good reason that J.T. was ever told about). When this happened, J.T. had to dip into his own pocket. A few months before, he’d had to contribute five thousand dollars to help build up the gang’s arsenal of weapons, and he wasn’t at all happy about it.

  These pressures, combined with his constant fear that his junior members were planning a coup d’état, made J.T. paranoid about being ripped off. He had told me of several such coups in other neighborhoods. So he practically interrogated his sales directors, asking the same question in a variety of ways or otherwise trying to trip them up.

  “So you sold fifty bags, okay, that’s fine,” J.T. might start.

  “No, I said we sold twenty-five,” the director would answer.

  “No, you said fifty, I could have sworn you said fifty. Everyone else heard fifty, right?”

  “No, no, no. I said twenty-five.”

  Invariably J.T. and the young man directing his sales team-these directors were usually in their late teens or early twenties-would go back and forth like this for several minutes, often over a trivial detail, until J.T. felt confident that he was getting the truth. On this day, as the cold afternoon stretched into night, I watched several of these young men sweat under J.T.’s questioning. Surely they all knew by now what to expect of him. But even a hint of suspicion could earn them a “violation”: J.T. was quick to physically punish them or suspend their privileges-the right to carry a gun, for instance, or the right to earn money.

  J.T. also asked his directors about any behavior in the past week that might have attracted the attention of the police-a dispute between a customer and a dealer, perhaps, or any gunfire. If one of his members had been suspended from high school or had drawn complaints from a tenant leader, he would have to submit to even tougher questioning from J.T.

  For the directors, the worst part of this interrogation was that J.T. maintained his own independent sources. He kept a roster of informants in every neighborhood where the Black Kings operated. He had begun this practice when he first became responsible for monitoring neighborhoods that he didn’t know as well as his own. While he may have been familiar with the streets and stores in these neighborhoods, he didn’t know every pastor, tenant leader, police officer, and hustler as he did in his own.

  Most of his informants were homeless people, squatters, or other hard-up adults. They came cheap-J.T. paid most of them just ten or fifteen dollars a day-and these ghetto nomads could easily hang out in drug areas and spy on J.T.’s gang members without raising suspicion.J.T. generally dispatched his senior officers to debrief these informants, but sometimes he met with them personally. Although they couldn’t tell him if his own members were stealing from him, they were valuable for reporting problems like street fights or customer complaints.

  As we drove through the neighborhood, past the blighted store-fronts on Forty-seventh Street, J.T. told me that one of his sales groups was selling diluted product. The BKs’ crack-selling chain began with J.T.’s senior officers buying large quantities of powder cocaine from a distributor in the outlying suburbs or a neighborhood at the city’s edge. The officers usually cooked up the cocaine into crack themselves, using a vacant apartment or paying a tenant perhaps a hundred dollars a month to use her kitchen. Then the officers would deliver the prepackaged allocations to the sales directors.

  Sometimes, however, the street crews were allowed to cook up the crack themselves. In such a case, J.T. explained, they might surreptitiously use an additive to stretch their cocaine allotment into more crack. They could turn each 100-pack of $10 bags into a 125-pack, which meant earning an extra $250. This money obviously wouldn’t be susceptible to collection by J.T., since he could account only for 100-packs.

  I was surprised that J.T. would give anyone a chance to rip him off like this. But he now had so many crews under management, with such overwhelming volume, that he occasionally farmed out the production. It was a relatively simple process: you mixed together powder cocaine with baking soda and water, then boiled off the water until all that remained were the crystallized nuggets of crack. Subcontracting the production also provided J.T. a hedge of sorts: even if the police raided one of the apartments where the crack was being processed, he wouldn’t lose his entire supply of cocaine.

  The sale of diluted crack troubled J.T. for reasons beyond the obviousfact that his members were stealing from him. Such entrepreneurial energy could be infectious. If other factions of the gang thought up schemes to increase their revenues, not only would J.T. lose taxable receipts but his sales directors might feel empowered to try to knock him off his throne. He was also concerned about the physical dangers of diluted crack cocaine. Not long ago a teenager in Robert Taylor had nearly died of an overdose, and rumor had it that one of J.T.’s dealers had sold him crack that had been processed with a dangerous additive. As a result the building president got the police to post a twenty-four-hour patrol for two weeks, which shut down drug sales. J.T.’s superiors nearly demoted him because of this incident, out of concern that he couldn’t control his members.

  J.T.’s other worry about altered crack was a simple matter of competitive practice: if word got out that the Black Kings were selling an inferior product, they would lose customers to other gangs. This was what troubled him most, J.T. told me now as we drove to meet with Michael, a twenty-year-old gang member who had recently been promoted to run a six-man sales team.

  One of J.T.’s informants had told him that Michael’s crew was selling diluted product. The informant was in fact a crack addict; J.T. had him buy the crack and turn it over to J.T., who could tell from its color and brittle texture that the crack had indeed been stretched.

  J.T. asked me what I would do if I were the gang boss and had to deal with Michael.

  “Kick him out!” I said.

  J.T. explained that this decision couldn’t be so straightforward. “Most guys wouldn’t even think of these ways to make money,” he said. “Here’s a guy who is looking to make an extra buck. I have hundreds of people working for me, but only a few who think like that. You don’t want to lose people like that.” What he needed to do, J.T. told me, was quash Michael’s tactic but not the spirit that lay at its root.

  When we reached Michael, J.T. told his officers and security detail to leave him alone with Michael. He asked me to stay. We went into the alleyway behind a fast-food restaurant.

  “See this?” J.T. said, holding up a tiny Ziploc bag to Michael’s face. “What is it?”

  “It’s mine,” Michael said. I had no idea how he could tell that
the crack was his, and I wondered if he said so simply as a reflex.

  Michael had a stoic look about him, as if he were expecting to be punished. The rest of his crew watched from perhaps ten yards away.

  “Yeah, that’s right, and it’s half what it should be,” J.T. said.

  “You want us to fill it up with more than that?”

  “Don’t play with me, nigger. I know you been putting some shit in the product. I have the shit with me right here. How are you going to deny it?”

  Michael was silent.

  “I’m going to tell you what we’re going to do,” J.T. said. “I’m not going to put you on the spot. You’re going to finish selling this, and next week you’re not earning shit. Your take goes to all the other guys. And you know what? You’re going to tell them, too. You’re going to tell them why it’s no good to make this weaker. You know why, right?”

  Michael, his head down, nodded.

  “Okay, then, you’re going to tell them it’s not right because we lose customers and then we don’t have no work. And you’re going to tell them that it was your idea, that you fucked up, and that as a way of dealing with it, you want them to have the money you would have made.”

  Michael was by now visibly upset, his face set in a sort of angry mope. Finally he looked up, groaned, shook his head, glanced away, kicked a few stones on the ground. It seemed as if he wanted to challenge J.T., but he had obviously been caught. So he said nothing. After a while J.T. called over the other members of Michael’s group and finished obtaining his weekly report.

  It had been dark for a few hours now. My stint as gang leader for a day-albeit in a very limited capacity-was finally over. It was both more banal and more dramatic than I could have envisioned. I was exhausted. My head was spinning with details, settled and unsettled. I never did manage to decide how much the Black Kings should pay Pastor Wilkins for the use of his church.

  I had accompanied J.T. on site visits to roughly twenty Black Kings sales teams. Two sales directors had been taken off to a secluded area and given mouthshots for their transgressions. Another one, who had failed to make his weekly payment to J.T., was levied a 10 percent fine and a 50 percent deduction of his next week’s pay. But J.T. used the carrot as well as the stick. The workers in one group who had done particularly well were allowed to carry guns over the weekend. (J.T. usually didn’t let his members walk around armed unless there was a war going on; he also required that members buy guns directly from the gang.) And he gave a $250 bonus to the members of another group that had several weeks of above-average sales.

  There seemed to be no end to the problems that J.T. encountered during this weekly reconnaissance, problems he’d have to fix before they spun out of control. There were several incidents of customers fighting in public with a BK member who sold them drugs; in each case the customer complained that the bag of crack was too small or that the product was not of suitable quality. A store owner reported to J.T. that several gang members demanded he give them his monthly “protection” payment; this couldn’t have been a legitimate request, since J.T. allowed only his senior officers to pick up extortion receipts. A pastor called the police on one of J.T.’s members who used the church parking lot to receive oral sex (in lieu of cash payment) from a local drug user. And two gang members had been suspended from school for fighting, one of them for having a gun in his locker.

  The next day I would wake up free of the hundreds of obligations and judgments I’d been witness to. But J.T. wouldn’t. He’d still bear all the burdens of running a successful underground economy: enforcing contracts, motivating his members to risk their lives for low wages, dealing with capricious bosses. I was no less critical of what he did for a living. I also wanted to know more about his professed benevolence and how his gang acted on behalf of Robert Taylor’s tenants. And I still knew very little about J.T.’s bosses.

  But all that would take some time. My next set of answers about life in Robert Taylor came from the second-most-powerful force in my orbit, the woman known to one and all as Ms. Bailey.

  FIVE. Ms. Bailey’s Neighborhood

  Iran into Ms. Bailey pretty regularly. Sometimes she accompanied J.T. as he made his rounds of the building; sometimes I’d see her with a police officer or a CHA official. She always said hello and politely introduced me to whomever she was with. But I didn’t really know what she did or how she did it. Although she was present at the backroom gang negotiation I witnessed at the Boys & Girls Club, she hadn’t gotten very involved. So I was curious to learn more about her.

  Specifically, I wanted to know why residents spoke of her with a mixture of reverence and fear, much as they spoke of J.T. “Oh, you don’t want to mess with Ms. Bailey,” they’d say. Or, “Yeah, Ms. Bailey can tell you a lot about what’s happening, but make sure you have five dollars with you.” Even J.T., who agreed that I should spend some time with Ms. Bailey, vaguely hinted that I ought to be careful around her.

  Part of my motivation to observe Ms. Bailey came from my advisersat the University of Chicago. Jean Comaroff, an accomplished ethnographer, said that I was spending too much time with men. Since two-thirds of the community were women raising children, she suggested that I try to better understand how women managed households, secured services from the CHA, and otherwise helped families get by. Bill Wilson told me that poverty scholars knew little about the role women played in community affairs, and he encouraged me to spend time with household leaders like Ms. Mae but also tenant leaders like Ms. Bailey. Wilson and Comaroff both advised me to exercise the same sort of caution with Ms. Bailey as I would with other powerful people, never taking what they told me at face value.

  Ms. Bailey was of average height and stout. Because of arthritis in her knees, she walked slowly, but always looking straight ahead with great focus, like Washington crossing the Delaware. She had a tattoo on her right arm that read MO-JO-the nickname, Ms. Mae told me, of a son who’d passed away. Ms. Bailey had pudgy fingers and, when she shook your hand, the tightest grip I’ve ever felt.

  Her title was building president of the Local Advisory Council (LAC). This was an elected position that paid a part-time wage of a few hundred dollars a month. The official duties of a building president included lobbying the CHA for better building maintenance, obtaining funds for tenant activities, and so on. Elections were held every four years, and incumbents were rarely deposed. Some LAC presidents were much more powerful than others, and from what I’d heard, Ms. Bailey was on the upper end of the power scale. She had actually fought for the creation of the LAC many years ago, and she kept her fighting spirit. I’d heard stories about Ms. Bailey getting medical clinics to give free checkups to the children in her building and local stores to donate food.

  I witnessed this fighting spirit firsthand when I visited her small, decrepit office one day. I wanted to explain why I’d been hanging around her building and also explain my research. I began by discussing the prevailing academic wisdom about urban poverty and the factors that contributed to it.

  “You planning on talking with white people in your study?” she snapped, waving her hand at me as if she’d heard my spiel a hundred times already.

  I was confused. “This is a study of the Robert Taylor Homes, and I suppose that most of the people I’ll be talking to are black. Unless there are whites who live here that I’m not aware of.”

  “If I gave you only one piece of bread to eat each day and asked why you’re starving, what would you say?”

  I was thrown off by this seeming non sequitur. I thought for a minute. “I guess I would say I’m starving because I’m not eating enough,” I answered.

  “You got a lot to learn, Mr. Professor,” she said. “Again, if I gave you one piece of bread to eat each day and asked why you’re starving, what would you say?”

  I was getting even more confused. I took a chance. “Because you’re not feeding me?”

  “Yes! Very good!”

  I felt relieved. I hoped no more tests were
coming my way, but Ms. Bailey kept going. “Let’s say I took away your house key and you had to sleep outside,” she said. “A man from the city comes over and counts you as ‘homeless.’ What would you say?”

  “Umm.” This one seemed even harder. “I’d say you’re wrong. I have a place to stay, so… no! I’m not homeless!” I thought I had nailed this one.

  But she looked exasperated at my answer. “Wow, have you ever had to do anything for yourself?” she said.

  I was at least smart enough to know that she wasn’t literally asking me to reply.

  “If I took your house key away,” she barked, “what does that make you?” She leaned across the desk, and I could feel her breath on my face.

  “Well, I guess you robbed me. So I’m not homeless, I’m a victim.”

  “Okay, we’re getting somewhere. Now let’s say I tell the police to stop coming to your block and to go only where I live. And then I write that you live in a crime-infested neighborhood, that there’s more crime on your block than mine. What would you say?”

  “Well, I guess I’d say that it’s not really fair because you have all the police, so-”

  “Mr. Professor, we’re really getting moving now!” Ms. Bailey threw up her hands in mock celebration. “Okay, so let’s go back to the original question. You want to understand how black folks live in the projects. Why we are poor. Why we have so much crime. Why we can’t feed our families. Why our kids can’t get work when they grow up. So will you be studying white people?”

  “Yes,” I said. I understood, finally, that she also wanted me to focus on the people outside Robert Taylor who determined how the tenants lived day to day.