Gang Leader for a Day

by Sudhir Venkatesh

  “Do I ever open my mouth?” I asked.

  “No, but every so often you get a little excited, especially after you drink all that coffee. You open your mouth today, and that’s it- we’re through. Okay?”

  Only once before had I heard such insistence in J.T.’s voice, and that was the night we first met in the stairwell of Building Number 4040 in the Lake Park projects. I finished my breakfast quickly, and then we jumped into his Malibu. The late-morning sky was overcast. J.T. was quiet except for asking me once in a while to see if any cops were following him. He had never asked this before. For the first time, I became fully conscious of just what I was doing: tagging along with the leader of a major crack-selling gang.

  But I still hadn’t admitted to myself that the man I sat next to was, at bottom, a criminal. I was too caught up in the thrill of observing the thug life firsthand. In the halcyon suburb where I grew up, people didn’t even wash their cars on the street. In front of me here was a movie come to life.

  There was something else, too, that helped me ignore the questionable morality of the situation. The University of Chicago scholars who helped invent the field of sociology, back when it first became a legitimate academic discipline, did so by venturing into the murkier corners of the city. They became famous through their up-close study of the hobo, the hustler, the socialite; they gained access to brothels and speakeasies and the smoky back rooms where politicians plied their art. Lately I’d been reading the works of these scholars. So even though I was hanging out with drug traffickers and thieves, at heart I felt like I was just being a good sociologist.

  The street leading into the Robert Taylor Homes was lined with old, beat-up cars. A school crossing guard leaned on the hood of a car, her morning duty done, looking as if she’d been through a war. She waved knowingly at J.T. as we drove past. We pulled up in front of a high-rise, the lobby populated by a bunch of young men who seemed to stand at attention when they saw J.T.’s car. Unlike the Lake Park projects, which were nearly abandoned, Robert Taylor was thrumming with life. I could hear rap music blasting from a stereo. People stood around smoking cigarettes and, from the smell of it, marijuana. Every so often a parent and child passed through the loose crowd.

  J.T. parked his Malibu and strode toward the building like a bad-ass cowboy swaggering into a bar. He stopped just short of the entrance, surveying the area and waiting as people came to greet him. As each young man made his way over, J.T. extended his hand graciously.Few words were spoken; most of the communication was in the form of subtle nods, signals familiar to everyone but me.

  “When you gonna come and see me, baby?” one woman called out, and then another: “You gonna take me for a ride, sweetheart?” J.T. smiled and waved them off, playfully tapping their young children on the head as he passed. Two older women in bright blue jackets that read TENANT PATROL came up and hugged J.T., asked him why he didn’t come around more often. J.T. was obviously well known in these parts, although I had no idea why.

  Just then someone emerged from the lobby. He was obese, roughly J.T.’s age, and he was breathing heavily. His name was Curly, and-as if in mockery of my stereotypical preconceptions-he was a ringer for Rerun from What’s Happening!! He and J.T. clasped hands, and then J.T. motioned for me to follow them.

  “Your mama’s house or mine?” Curly asked.

  “Mama’s pissed at me,” J.T. said. “Let’s go to your place.”

  I followed them up a few flights of stairs. We stepped inside an apartment furnished with couches and a few reclining chairs that faced a big TV. There was a Christian show playing. The walls were hung with family photos and a painting of Jesus Christ. Toys were strewn about the floor, and the kitchen counter was crowded with boxes of cereal and cookies. I could smell chicken and rice on the stove. Balls of yarn and knitting needles sat atop a drab glass table. The domestic scene surprised me a bit, for I had read so much about the poverty and danger in Robert Taylor, how children ran around without parents and how drugs had overtaken the community.

  J.T. gestured for me to sit on the sofa, and then he and Curly sat down to talk. J.T. didn’t introduce me, and before long I was forgotten entirely. Between their fast talk and the gangster vocabulary, I couldn’t understand much of what they were saying, but I did manage to pick out some key words: “tax,” “product,” “monthly dues,” “Cobras,” “Kings,” “police,” “CHA security.” They talked quickly and earnestly. After a while they began throwing numbers at each other in some kind of negotiation. A few times a young man arrived at the screen door and interrupted them, shouting “Five-Oh on Federal” or “Five-Oh in 26.” Later J.T. would explain that that’s how they communicated the whereabouts of the police: “Five-Oh” meant police, “26” was a building number in Robert Taylor, and “Federal” was a busy street flanking the projects. Cell phones hadn’t yet arrived-the year was 1989-so gang members had to pass along such information manually.

  I felt a sudden urge to go to the bathroom, but I didn’t feel comfortable asking to use the one in the apartment. After some squirming I decided to stand up and walk around. As I made a move to get up, J.T. and Curly looked at me disapprovingly. I sat back down.

  Their meeting had lasted at least two hours. “That’s it,” J.T. finally said. “I’m hungry. Let’s pick it up tomorrow.”

  Curly smiled. “It’ll be good to have you back,” he said. “Ain’t the same since you left.”

  Then J.T. glanced at me. “Oh, shit,” he said to Curly. “I forgot about him. This is Sudhir. He’s a cop.”

  The two of them began laughing. “You can go ahead and take a piss now,” J.T. said, and they both laughed even harder. I began to sense that in exchange for access I was meant to serve as a source of entertainment for J.T.

  On the car ride back to Hyde Park, J.T. told me what had just happened. He explained that he had grown up in the very Robert Taylor building we’d just visited. For the past couple of years, he’d been working out of the Lake Park projects because the Black Kings’ citywide leaders had wanted to increase productivity there. But since the Lake Park projects were now slated for demolition, J.T. was returning to Robert Taylor, where he would be merging his own Black Kings gang with the local BK faction, which was run by Curly. This merger was being executed at the behest of the gang’s higher-ups. Curly had been installed as a temporary leader when J.T. was sent to turn around the Lake Park operation. Curly apparently wasn’t a very good manager, which made the gang bosses’ decision to bring J.T. back a simple one.

  Robert Taylor and the other projects on State Street, J.T. told me, were “easy money,” partly since thousands of customers lived nearby but also because of “the white folks who drive over to buy our shit.” They came from Bridgeport, Armour Square, and other predominantly white ethnic neighborhoods on the far side of the Dan Ryan Expressway, buying mostly crack cocaine but also some heroin and marijuana. In his new assignment, J.T. told me, he hoped to earn “a hundred times” what he currently earned and buy a house for his mother, who still lived in Robert Taylor. He also said he hoped to buy an apartment for his girlfriend and their children. (In fact, he mentioned several such girlfriends, each of whom apparently needed an apartment.)

  At the Lake Park projects, J.T.’s income had been dropping from a peak of about thirty thousand dollars a year. But he told me that now, in Robert Taylor, he stood to make as much as seventy-five thousand dollars or a hundred thousand if business was steady, which would put him nearly in the same league as some of the gang’s higher-ups.

  He made a few references to the gang’s hierarchy and his effort to rise within it. There were a few dozen Black Kings officers above him, spread throughout Chicago, who earned their money by managing several gang factions like J.T.’s. These men were known as “lieutenants” and “captains.” Above them was another level of gangsters who were known as the “board of directors.” I had had no idea how much a street gang’s structure mirrored the structure of just about any other business in Ame
rica.

  J.T. made it clear that if you rose high enough in the Black Kings dynasty, and lived long enough, you could make an awful lot of money. As he discussed his move up the ladder, I felt a knot in my stomach. Since meeting him I had entertained the notion that my dissertation research might revolve around his gang and its drug trafficking. I had spoken with him not only about his own gang “set” but about all the Black Kings sets in the city-how they collaborated or fought with one another over turf, how the crack-cocaine economy was fundamentally altering the nature of the urban street gang. Although there was a great deal of social-science literature on gangs, very few researchers had written about the actual business dealings of a gang, and even fewer had firsthand access to a gang’s leadership. As we pulled up to my apartment, I realized that I had never formally asked J.T. about gaining access to his life and work. Now it seemed I might be getting shut out just as things were heating up.

  “So when you do you think you’ll be moving over to Robert Taylor?” I asked.

  “Not sure,” he said absentmindedly, staring out at the panhandlers who worked the gas station near my apartment.

  “Well, I’m sure you’ll be busy now-I mean, even busier than you’ve been. So listen, I just wanted to thank you-”

  “Nigger, are we breaking up?” J.T. started laughing.

  “No! I’m just trying to-”

  “Listen, my man, I know you have to write a term paper-and what are you going to write it on? On me, right?” He giggled and stuck a cigar in his mouth.

  It seemed that J.T. craved the attention. It seemed that I was more than just entertainment for him: I was someone who might take him seriously. I hadn’t thought about the drawbacks of having my research dependent on the whims of one person. But now I turned giddy at the prospect of continuing our conversations. “That’s right,” I said. “ ‘The Life and Times of John Henry Torrance.’ What do you think?”

  “I like it, I like it.” He paused. “Okay, get the fuck out, gotta run.”

  He offered his hand as I opened the car door. I shook it and nodded at him.

  My short walk north to the Lake Park projects would now be replaced by a longer commute, usually by bus, to the Robert Taylor Homes. But as a result of his relocation, J.T. reported that he’d be out of touch for a few weeks. I decided to use that time to do some research on housing projects in general and the Robert Taylor Homes in particular.

  I learned that the Chicago Housing Authority had built the project between 1958 and 1962, naming it after the agency’s first African-American chairman. It was the size of a small city, with forty-four hundred apartments housing about thirty thousand people. Poor blacks had arrived in Chicago en masse from the South during the great migrations of the 1930s and 1940s, which left a pressing need for the city to accommodate them.

  In the beginning, the project was greeted with considerable optimism, but it soon soured. Black activists were angry that Chicago politicians put the project squarely in the middle of an already crowded black ghetto, thereby sparing the city’s white ethnic neighborhoods. Urban planners complained that the twenty-eight buildings occupied only 7 percent of the ninety-six-acre plot, leaving huge swaths of vacant land that isolated the project from the wider community. Architects declared the buildings unwelcoming and practically uninhabitable from the outset, even though the design was based upon celebrated French urban-planning principles.

  And, most remarkably, law-enforcement officials deemed Robert Taylor too dangerous to patrol. The police were unwilling to provide protection until tenants curbed their criminality-and stopped hurling bottles or shooting guns out the windows whenever the police showed up.

  In newspaper headlines, Robert Taylor was variously called “Congo Hilton,” “Hellhole,” and “Fatherless World”-and this was when it was still relatively new. By the end of the 1970s, it had gotten worse. As the more stable working families took advantage of civil-rights victories by moving into previously segregated areas of Chicago, the people left behind lived almost uniformly below the poverty line. A staggering 90 percent of the adults in Robert Taylor reported welfare-cash disbursements, food stamps, and Medicaid- as their sole form of support, and even into the 1990s that percentage would never get lower. There were just two social-service centers for nearly twenty thousand children. The buildings themselves began to fall apart, with at least a half dozen deaths caused by plunging elevators.

  By the time I got to Chicago, at the tail end of the 1980s, Robert Taylor was habitually referred to as the hub of Chicago’s “gang and drug problem.” That was the phrase always invoked by the city’s media, police, and academic researchers. They weren’t wrong. The poorest parts of the city were controlled largely by street gangs like the Black Kings, which made their money not only dealing drugs but also by extortion, gambling, prostitution, selling stolen property, and countless other schemes. It was outlaw capitalism, and it ran hot, netting small fortunes for the bosses of the various gangs. In the newspapers, gang leaders were commonly reported as having multimillion-dollar fortunes. This may have been an exaggeration, but it was true that some police busts of the leaders’ homes netted hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash.

  For the rest of the community, the payout of this outlaw economy-drug addiction and public violence-was considerably less appealing. Combine this menace with decades of government neglect, and what you found in the Robert Taylor Homes were thousands of families struggling to survive. It was the epitome of an “underclass” urban neighborhood, with the poor living hard and virtually separate lives from the mainstream.

  But there was surprisingly little reportage on the American inner city-and even less on how the gangs managed to control such a sprawling enterprise, or how a neighborhood like Robert Taylor managed to cope with these outlaw capitalists. Thanks to my chance meeting with J.T. and his willingness to let me tag along with him, I felt as if I stood on the threshold of this world in a way that might really change the public’s-if not the academy’s- understanding.

  I wanted to bring J.T. to Bill Wilson’s attention, but I didn’t know how. I was already working on some of Wilson’s projects, but these were large, survey-based studies that queried several thousand people at a time. Wilson’s research team included sociologists, economists, psychologists, and a dozen graduate students glued to their computers, trying to find hidden patterns in the survey data that might reveal the causes of poverty. I didn’t know anyone who was walking around talking to people, let alone gang members, in the ghetto. Even though I knew that my entrée into J.T.’s life was the stuff of sociology, as old as the field itself, it still felt like I was doing something unconventional, bordering on rogue behavior.

  So while I devoted time to hanging out with J.T., I told Wilson and others only the barest details of my fieldwork. I figured that I’d eventually come up with a concrete research topic that involved J.T., at which point I could share with Wilson a well-worked-out set of ideas.

  In late spring, several weeks after his meeting with Curly, J.T. finally summoned me to Robert Taylor. He had moved in with his mother in her apartment, a four-bedroom unit in the northern end of the complex. J.T. usually stayed in a different neighborhood, in one of the apartments he rented for various girlfriends. But now, he said, he needed to be in Robert Taylor full-time to get his gang firmly transplanted into its new territory. He told me to take the bus from Hyde Park down Fifty-fifth Street to State Street, where he’d have a few gang members meet me at the bus stop. It wasn’t safe to walk around by myself.

  Three of J.T.’s foot soldiers picked me up in a rusty Caprice. They were young and affectless and didn’t have anything to say to me. As low-ranking members of the gang, they spent a lot of their time running errands for J.T. Once, when J.T. was a little drunk and getting excited about my writing his biography, he offered to assign me one of his gang members as a personal driver. I declined.

  We drove up State Street, past a long stretch of Robert Taylor high-rises, and stopped at
a small park in the middle of the complex. It was the sort of beautiful spring day, sunny, with a fresh lake breeze, that Chicagoans know will disappear once the brutal summer settles in. About fifty people of all ages were having a barbecue. There were colorful balloons printed with HAPPY BIRTHDAY CARLA tied to picnic tables. J.T. sat at one table, surrounded by families with lots of young children, playing and eating and making happy noise.

  “Look who’s here!” J.T. shouted. “The Professor. Welcome back.”

  His hands were sticky with barbecue sauce, so he just nodded, then introduced me to everyone at the table. I said hi to his girlfriend, whom I knew as Missie, and the young son they had together, Jamel.

  “Is this the young man you’ve been telling me about?” said an older woman, putting her arm on my shoulder.

  “Yes, Mama,” J.T. said between bites, his voice as obedient as a young boy’s.

  “Well, Mr. Professor, I’m J.T.’s mother.”

  “They call her Ms. Mae,” J.T. said.

  “That’s right,” she said. “And you can call me that, too.” She led me to another table and prepared a large plate of food for me. I told her I didn’t eat meat, so she loaded me up with spaghetti, mac and cheese, greens, and cornbread.

  We sat around for a few hours while the kids played. I spoke mostly to J.T.’s mother, and we forged a bond immediately. Sensing my interests, she began talking about the challenges of raising a family in public housing. She pointed to different people at the barbecue and filled in their stories. Carla, the birthday girl, was a one-year-old whose father and mother were both in jail for selling drugs. The adults in her building had decided to raise the child. This meant hiding her from the Department of Child and Family Services, which would have sent Carla into foster care. Different families took turns keeping Carla, shifting her to a new apartment whenever they caught wind that the social workers were snooping around. Ms. Mae talked about how teenage girls shouldn’t have children so early, about the tragedy of kids getting caught up in violence, the value of an education, and her insistence that J.T. attend college.