Gang Leader for a Day Read online

  “Even the gang needs friends with connections,” J.T. told me. “And we’re getting more successful, so we need more friends.”

  “I don’t see why a gang wants to deal with politicians,” I said. “I don’t see what they get out of it. It seems they’d have a greater chance of getting caught if they started hanging out with politicos, no?”

  He reminded me that his Black Kings gang was just one of about two hundred BK gangs around the city that were making money selling crack. With that much money, the citywide BK leadership needed to think about investing and laundering.

  “Let’s say, Sudhir, that you’re making only a hundred bucks,” he explained. “You probably don’t have a lot of real headaches. You don’t need to worry about niggers stealing it from you. You don’t need to worry that when you go into a store, they’ll ask you where you got the money. But let’s say you got a thousand bucks. Well, you can’t really carry it around, and you’re a street nigger so you don’t have a bank account. You need to keep it somewhere. So you start to have things to think about.

  “Now let’s say it’s ten thousand. Okay, now you got niggers who are watching you buy a few things: a new TV, a new car. They say, ‘Oh, Sudhir, he’s got a new necklace. And he’s a student. He don’t work? So where’d he get the money? Maybe he has cash in his house.’ So now you have more things to worry about.

  “Now let’s say it’s a hundred thousand. You want to buy a car, but the car dealer has to report to the government when people pay for a car with thirty thousand dollars in cash. So what are you going to do? You may have to pay him a thousand bucks to keep his mouth shut. Then maybe you need to hire security, ’cause there’s always some nigger that’s going to take the chance and rob you. That’s another few thousand, and you got to trust the security you hired, ’cause they know where you keep the money.

  “Now let’s say you got five hundred thousand or a million. Or more. That’s what these niggers above me are worrying about. They need to find ways to clean the money. Maybe they hide it in a friend’s business. Maybe they tell their sisters to open up bank accounts. Or they get their church to take a donation. They have to constantly be thinking about the money: keeping it safe, investing it, protecting themselves from other niggers.”

  “But I still don’t understand why you need to deal with politicians.”

  “Well, see, an alderman can take the heat off of us,” J.T. said with a smile. “An alderman can keep the police away. He can make sure residents don’t get too pissed off at us. Let’s say we need to meet in the park. The alderman makes sure the cops don’t come. And the only thing they want from us is a donation-ten thousand dollars gets you an alderman for a year. Like I keep telling you, our organization is about helping our community, so we’re trying to get involved in what’s happening.”

  J.T.’s monologue surprised me on two fronts. Although I’d heard about corrupt aldermen in the old days-denying building permits to political enemies, for instance, or protecting a gang’s gambling racket-I had a hard time believing that J.T. could buy off a politician as easily as he described. Even more surprising was J.T.’s claim about “helping our community.” Was this a joke, I wondered, or did he really believe that selling drugs and bribing politicians would somehow help a down-and-out neighborhood pick itself up?

  Besides the Black Kings’ relationships with various aldermen, J.T. told me, the gang also worked with several community-based organizations, or CBOs. These groups, many of them created with federal funding during the 1960s, worked to bring jobs and housing to the neighborhood, tried to keep kids off the street with recreation programs, and, in places like the South Side, even enacted truces between warring gangs.

  Toward the end of the 1980s, several CBOs tried instilling civic consciousness in the gangs themselves. They hired outreach workers (most of whom were former gangsters) to persuade young gang members to reject the thug life and choose a more productive path. These reformers held life-skills workshops that addressed such issues as “how to act when you go downtown” or “what to do when a lady yells at you for drinking beer in the park.” They also preached the gospel of voting, arguing that a vote represented the first step toward reentry into the social mainstream. J.T. and some other gang leaders not only required their young members to attend these workshops but also made them participate in voter-registration drives. Their motives were by no means purely altruistic or educational: they knew that if their rank-and-file members had good relationships with local residents, the locals were less likely to call the police and disrupt the drug trade.

  J.T.’s ambitions ran even higher. What he wanted, he told me, was to return the gang to its glory days of the 1960s, when South Side gangs worked together with residents to agitate for improvements in their neighborhoods. But he seemed to conveniently ignore a big difference: Gangs back then didn’t traffic in drugs, extort money from businesses, and terrorize the neighborhood with violence. They were not innocent kids, to be sure. But their worst transgressions tended to be street fighting or intimidating passersby. Because J.T.’s gang was involved in drugs and extortion (and more), I was skeptical that he could enjoy much more support from the local residents than he currently had.

  One cold November night, J.T. invited me to a meeting at a small storefront Baptist church. An ex-gangster named Lenny Duster would be teaching young people about the rights, responsibilities, and power of voting. The next election, while a full year away, would place in office a great many state legislators as well as city aldermen.

  Lenny ran a small organization called Pride, which helped mediate gang wars. About a hundred young Black Kings attended the meeting, held in a small room at the rear of the church. They were quiet and respectful, although they had the look of teenagers who’d been told that attendance was mandatory.

  Lenny was about six foot four, built lean and muscular. He was about forty years old, with streaks of blond hair, and he walked with a limp. “You-all need to see where the power is!” Lenny shouted to the assembly, striding about like a Caesar. “J.T. went to college, I earned a degree in prison. You-all are dropping out of school, and you’re ignorant. You can’t read, you can’t think, you can’t understand where the power comes from. It don’t come from that gun you got-it comes from what’s in your head. And it comes from the vote. You can change the world if you get the niggers that are coming down on you out of power. Think about it: No more police stopping you, no more abandoned buildings. You control your destiny!”

  He talked to the young men about how to “work” responsibly. It was understood among gang members that “work” meant selling drugs-a tragic irony in that they referred to working in the legitimate economy as “getting a job,” not “work.”

  “You-all are outside, so you need to respect who else is around you,” he said. “If you’re in a park working, leave the ladies alone. Don’t be working around the children. That just gets the mamas mad. If you see kids playing, take a break and then get back to work. Remember, what you do says a lot about the Black Kings. You have to watch your image, take pride in yourself.

  “You are not just foot soldiers in the Black Kings,” he continued. “You are foot soldiers in the community. You will register to vote today, but then you must all go out and register the people in your buildings. And when elections come around, we’ll tell you who to vote for and you’ll tell them. That’s an important duty you have when you belong to this organization.”

  For my classes at the U of C, I’d been reading about the history of the Chicago political machine, whose leaders-white and black alike-were famous for practicing the dark arts of ballot stuffing, bribery, and yes, predelivered voting blocs. Like his predecessors, Lenny did give these young men a partial understanding of the right to vote, and why it was important, but it seemed that the main point of the meetings was to tell them how to be cogs in a political machine. He held up a small placard with the names of candidates whom the gang was supporting for alderman and state legislator. Th
ere was no discussion of a platform, no list of vital issues. Just an insistence that the young men round up tenants in the projects and tell them how to vote.

  When Lenny finished, J.T. told his young members they could leave. I sat for a while with J.T. and Lenny. Lenny looked drained. As he drank a Coke, he said he’d been speaking to at least four or five groups every day.

  Lenny was careful to explain that his fees came from personal donations from gang members or their leaders. He wanted to distinguish these monies from the profits the gang made from selling drugs. In theory, I understood that Lenny was trying to convince me that he didn’t accept drug money, but I found the distinction almost meaningless. Moreover, the gang leaders had a lot of incentive to pay Lenny to keep their gangs from fighting one another. After all, it was hard to conduct commerce in the midst of a gang war. Younger gang members, however, often wanted to stir things up, mostly to distinguish themselves as fighters. That’s why some gang leaders even paid Lenny to discipline their own members. “Disciplination is an art form,” Lenny said. “One thing I like is to hang a nigger upside down over the freeway as the cars come. Ain’t never had a nigger misbehave after I try that one.”

  J.T. and Lenny talked in nostalgic terms about the gang’s recent political engagement. Lenny proudly recalled his own days as a Black King back in the 1970s, describing how he helped get out the vote for “the Eye-talians and Jews” who ran his community. He then described, with equal pride, how the gangs “kicked the Eye-talian and Jewish mafia” out of his ward. Lenny even managed to spin the black takeover of the heroin trade as a boon to the community: it gave local black men jobs, albeit illegal ones, that had previously gone to white men. Lenny also boasted that black drug dealers never sold to children, whereas the previous dealers had exercised no such moral restraint. With all his bombast, he sounded like an older version of J.T.

  I asked Lenny about his talk that night, how he could simultaneously preach the virtues of voting and the most responsible way to deal drugs. He said he favored a “nonjudgmental approach” with the gang members. “I tell them, ‘Whatever you do, try to do it without pissing people off. Make everything a community thing.’ ”

  About two weeks later, I got to witness this “community thing” in action. I followed four young Black Kings as they went door-to-door in J.T.’s building to register voters.

  Shorty-Lee, a twenty-one-year-old gang member, was the head of the delegation. For about an hour, I trailed him on his route. Most of his knocks went unanswered. The few tenants who did sign their names looked as if they just wanted to make the gang members leave as quickly as possible.

  At one apartment on the twelfth floor, a middle-aged woman answered the door. She was wearing an apron and wiping her wet hands on a dish towel; she looked surprised to see Shorty-Lee and the others. Door-to-door solicitation hadn’t been practiced in the projects for a long time. “We’re here to sign you up to vote,” Shorty-Lee said.

  “Young man, I am registered,” the woman said calmly.

  “No, we didn’t say register!” Shorty-Lee shouted. “We said sign up. I don’t care if you’re registered.”

  “But that’s what I’m saying.” The woman eyed Shorty-Lee curiously. “I already signed up. I’m going to vote in the next primary.”

  Shorty-Lee was puzzled. He looked over to the three other BKs. They were toting spiral-bound notebooks in which they “signed up” potential voters. But it seemed that neither Lenny nor J.T. had told them that there was an actual registration form and that registrars had to be licensed.

  “Look, you need to sign right here,” Shorty-Lee said, grabbing one of the notebooks. He was clearly not expecting even this minor level of resistance. “And then we’ll tell you who you’re going to vote for when the time comes.”

  “Who I’m going to vote for!” The woman’s voice grew sharp. She approached the screen door to take a better look. As she glanced at me, she waved-I recognized her from several parties at J.T.’s mother’s apartment. Then she turned back to Shorty-Lee. “You can’t tell me who to vote for,” she said. “And I don’t think that’s legal anyway.”

  “Black Kings say who you need to vote for,” Shorty-Lee countered, but he was growing tentative. He turned to his fellow gang members. “Ain’t that right? Ain’t that what we’re supposed to do?” The others shrugged.

  “Young man,” the woman continued, “have you ever voted?”

  Shorty-Lee looked at the others, who seemed quite interested in his answer. Then he looked at me. He seemed embarrassed. “No,” he said. “I ain’t voted yet. But I will.”

  “Did you know that you can’t take anyone in the voting booth with you?” the woman asked him.

  “Naw, that’s a lie,” Shorty-Lee said, puffing out his chest. “They told me that we’ll all be voting together. Black Kings vote together. I told you that we’d be telling you who-”

  “No, no, no-that’s not what I mean,” she interrupted. “I mean, first you vote. Then your friend votes, and then he votes-if he’s old enough.” She was staring now at the youngest boy in the group, a new gang member who looked about twelve years old.

  “I’m old enough,” the boy said, insulted.

  “You have to be eighteen,” the woman said with a gentle smile. “How old are you?”

  “I’m Black Kings!” he cried out. “I can vote if I want to.”

  “Well, you’ll probably have to wait,” the woman said, by now exasperated. “And, boys, I got food cooking, so I can’t talk to you right now. But if you come back, I can tell you all about voting. Okay? It’s probably the most important thing you’ll do with your life. Next to raising a family.”

  “Okay.” Shorty-Lee shrugged, defeated.

  The others also nodded. “Yes, ma’am,” one of them muttered, and they walked off. I waved good-bye to the woman, who smiled as if she’d won the victory of a small-town schoolteacher: a promise that her children would learn.

  I followed Shorty-Lee and the others down the gallery. None of them seemed to know what should happen next. Shorty-Lee looked pained, struggling to muster some leadership capacity and perhaps save face.

  “You know you can’t register people until five o’clock?” I said, wanting to break the silence. I was only a few years older than Shorty-Lee, but I found myself feeling strangely parental. “That’s what J.T. told me.”

  J.T. hadn’t told me to say this. But I felt so bad for Shorty-Lee that I wanted to give him an out. I figured I could talk to him later, when we were alone, and explain how registration actually worked.

  Shorty-Lee gazed out silently through the gallery’s chain-link fence.

  “It’s about two-thirty,” I said. “That’s probably why the woman said what she said. You should wait awhile before knocking some more. You’ll get more people signed up if you wait. Why don’t we go to Ms. Turner’s and get some hamburgers? You can start again later.”

  “Yeah, that’s cool,” Shorty-Lee said, looking relieved. “I’m hungry, too!” He started barking out commands. “Blackie, you got to get back home, though. We’ll get you some food. Kenny, hold my shit. Follow me. I’m getting a cheeseburger, if she still has any cheese left.”

  They ran off toward Ms. Turner’s apartment, a makeshift store on the seventh floor where you could buy food, candy, soda, cigarettes, and condoms. I headed back to Ms. Mae’s apartment, trying to think of how to tell J.T. about this “voter-registration drive” without laughing.

  The door-to-door canvassing was thankfully just a small part of J.T.’s strategy to politicize the gang. I began attending dozens of rallies in high schools and social-service centers where politicians came to encourage young black men and women to get involved in politics. Newspaper reporters often attended these events. I’m sure they were interested in the gang’s involvement, but their curiosity was also piqued by the participation of politicians like the Reverend Jesse Jackson, who urged young people to “give up the gun, pick up the ballot.”

  J.T. told
me he never wanted to run for office, but he was certainly attracted to the new contacts he was gaining through the Black Kings’ political initiatives. He talked endlessly about the preachers, politicians, and businesspeople he’d been meeting. J.T. knew that Chicago’s gangs were politically active in the 1960s and 1970s, pushing for desegregation and housing reform. He told me more than a few times that he was modeling his behavior on those gang leaders’. When I asked for concrete examples of his collaboration with his new allies, he’d vaguely say that “we’re working together for the community” or “we’re just trying to make things right.”

  Perhaps, I thought, he didn’t trust me yet, or perhaps there wasn’t anything concrete to talk about. One of the few political activities I saw him directly manage was a series of educational meetings between Lenny Duster of Pride and various high-ranking Chicago gang leaders. Because the police rarely came around to Robert Taylor, it provided a relatively secure site for such meetings. This kept J.T. busy with providing security, keeping tenants out of the way, and otherwise ensuring a safe climate.

  He firmly believed that the community would be stronger when the Black Kings entered the mainstream. “You need to talk about our political activities in your work,” he told me. “It’s part of who I am.”

  But he also admitted that the “legit” image was vital to the gang’s underlying commercial mission: if law-abiding citizens viewed the gang as a politically productive enterprise, they might be less likely to complain about its drug sales. So J.T. continued to order his rank-and-file members to attend these political rallies, and he donated money to social organizations that called for gang members to turn their lives around. More than anything, I realized, J.T. was desperate to be recognized as something other than just a criminal.

  I wasn’t sure that I believed him. I had trouble seeing exactly how the Black Kings were a useful group to have around. But they did seem to have a few noncriminal ventures, and perhaps, I thought, I would see more down the line. By this point I had gotten a reputation around the U of C as “the Indian guy who hangs out with the gangs.” In general this was a positive image, and I saw little reason to change things.