Gang Leader for a Day

by Sudhir Venkatesh

  J.T. drove up, accompanied by four of his senior officers. Three more cars pulled up behind them, and I recognized several other gang leaders, J.T.’s counterparts who ran the other local Black Kings factions.

  J.T. walked over to C-Note, who was peering into a car engine. J.T. didn’t notice me-I was sitting by a white van, partially hidden from view-but I could see and hear him just fine.

  “C-Note!” J.T. yelled. “What the fuck are you doing?”

  “What the fuck does it look like I’m doing, young man?” C-Note barked right back without looking up from his work. C-Note wasn’t usually quarrelsome, but he could be a hard-liner when it came to making his money.

  “We have games running today,” J.T. said. He meant the gang’s monthly basketball tournament. “You need to get this shit out of here. Move the cars, get all this stuff off the court.”

  “Aw, shit, you should’ve told me.” C-Note threw an oily cloth to the ground. “What the fuck can I do? You see that the work ain’t finished.”

  J.T. laughed. He seemed surprised that someone would challenge him. “Nigger, are you kidding me?! I don’t give a fuck about your work. Get these cars out of here.” J.T. looked underneath the cars. “Oh, shit! And you got oil all over the place. You better clean that up, too.”

  C-Note started waving his hands about and shouting at J.T. “You’re the only one who can make money, is that right? You own all this shit, you own all this land? Bullshit.”

  He pulled out a cigarette, lit it, and kept muttering, “Bullshit.” The other squatters stopped working to see what would happen next. C-Note was drenched in sweat and angry, as if he might lose control.

  J.T. looked down at his feet, then waved over his senior officers, who had been waiting by the car. A few of the other gang members also got out of their cars.

  Once his henchmen were near, J.T. spoke again to C-Note: “I’m asking you one more time, nigger. You can either move this car or-”

  “That’s some bullshit, boy!” C-Note yelled. “I ain’t going anywhere. I been here for two hours, and I told you I ain’t finished working. So fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!” He turned to the other squatters. “This nigger do this every time,” he said. “Every time. Fuck him.”

  C-Note was still chattering when J.T. grabbed him by the neck. In an instant two of J.T.’s officers also grabbed C-Note. The three of them dragged him toward a concrete wall that separated Robert Taylor from the tracks where a commuter train ran. C-Note kept shouting, but he didn’t physically resist. The other squatters turned to watch. The gang leaders nonchalantly took some sodas from the cooler without paying.

  “You can’t do this to us!” C-Note shouted. “It ain’t fair.”

  J.T. pushed C-Note up against the concrete wall. The two officers, their muscular arms plastered with tattoos, pinned him in.

  “I told you, nigger,” J.T. said, his face barely an inch away from C-Note’s, “but you just don’t listen, do you?” He sounded exasperated, but there was also a sinister tone to his voice I’d never heard before. “Why are you making this harder?”

  He started slapping C-Note on the side of the head, grunting with each slap, C-Note’s head flopping back and forth like a toy.

  “Fuck you!” C-Note shouted. He tried to turn to look J.T. in the eye, but J.T. was so close that C-Note butted the side of J.T.’s head with his own. This only irked J.T. more. He cocked his arm and pounded C-Note in the ribs. C-Note held his gut, coughing violently, and then J.T.’s henchmen pushed him to the ground. They took turns kicking him, one in the back and the other in the stomach. When C-Note curled up, they kicked him in the legs. “You should’ve listened to the man, fool!” one of them shouted.

  C-Note lay in a fetal position, struggling to catch his breath. J.T. rolled him over and punched him in the face one last time. “Dumb nigger!” he shouted, then walked back toward us, head down, flexing his hand as if he had hurt it on C-Note’s skull.

  J.T. reached into the squatter’s cooler for a soda. That’s when he finally noticed me standing there. He frowned when our eyes met. He quickly moved away, going toward the high-rise, but his look gave me a chill. He was clearly surprised to see me, and he seemed a little peeved.

  I had been hanging around J.T. and his gang for several months by now, and I’d never seen J.T. engage in violence. I felt like his scribe, tailing a powerful leader who liked to joke with the tenants and, when he needed to be assertive, did so quietly. I was naïve, I suppose, but I had somehow persuaded myself that just because I hadn’t seen any violence, it didn’t exist. Now I had seen a different side of his power, a far less polished presentation.

  In the weeks afterward, I began to contemplate the possibility that I would see more beatings, perhaps even fatal incidents. I still felt exhilarated by my access to J.T.’s gang, but I was also starting to feel shame. My conviction that I was merely a sociological observer, detached and objective, was starting to feel false. Was I really supposed to just stand by while someone was getting beat up? I was ashamed of my desire to get so close to the violence, so close to a culture that I knew other scholars had not managed to see.

  In reality I probably had little power to stop anyone from getting abused by the gang. And for the first time in my life, I was doing work that I truly loved; I was excited by my success. Back at the university, my research was starting to attract attention from my professors, and I certainly didn’t want to let that go. I told Wilson about the young men I had met and their involvement with gangs. I kept things pretty abstract; I didn’t tell him every detail about what I saw. He seemed impressed, and I didn’t want to lose his support, so I figured that if I could forget about the shame, maybe it would simply go away.

  As time passed, I pretty much stopped talking about my research to friends and family. I just wrote down my notes and tried not to draw attention to myself, except to tell my advisers a few stories now and then.

  When I went home to California on vacations or holidays and saw my parents, I told them relatively little about my work in the projects. My mother, who worked as a hospital records clerk, was already worried about my living so far from home, so I didn’t want to heighten her concern with stories of gang beatings. And I knew that my father would be upset if he learned that I hid things from my advisers. So I hid my fieldwork from him as well. Instead I just showed them my grades, which were good, and said the least I could get away with.

  In retrospect the C-Note beating at least enabled me to view my relationship with J.T. more realistically. It made me appreciate just how deeply circumscribed my interactions with the Black Kings had been. What I had taken to be a fly-on-the-wall vantage point was in fact a highly edited view. It wasn’t that I was seeing a false side of the gang, but there was plainly a great deal I didn’t have access to. I knew that the gang made a lot of money in a lot of different ways- I had heard, for instance, that they extorted store owners-but I knew few details. All I saw was the flashy consumption: the jewelry, the cars, the parties.

  And the gang obviously had an enormous impact on the wider community. It went well beyond telling residents they couldn’t hang out in the lobby. The C-Note beating made that clear. But if I was really going to write my dissertation on gang activity, I’d have to learn an awful lot more about how the gang affected everyone else in the community. The problem was figuring the way out from under J.T.’s grip.

  THREE. Someone to Watch Over Me

  C-Note’s friends took him to the hospital, where he received treatment for bruised ribs and cuts on his face. He spent the next couple of months recuperating in the apartment of a friend who lived nearby. Eventually he moved back into Robert Taylor. The building was as much his home as J.T.’s, and no one expected the beating to drive him away for good.

  I wondered how J.T. would react the next time I saw him. Up to that point, he was always happy to have me follow him around, to have a personal biographer. “He’s writing about my life,” he’d boast to his friends. “If you-all could re
ad, you’d learn something.” He had no real sense of what I would actually be writing-because, in truth, I didn’t know myself. Nor did I know if he’d be upset with me for having seen him beat up C-Note, or if perhaps he’d try to censor me.

  I didn’t return to Robert Taylor for a week, until J.T. called to invite me to a birthday party for his four-year-old daughter, Shuggie.She was one of two daughters that J.T. had with his girlfriend Joyce; the other girl, Bee-Bee, was two. J.T. and Joyce seemed pretty close. But then again J.T. also seemed close with Missie and their son, Jamel. As much as J.T. seemed to trust me and let me inside his world, he was fiercely protective of his private life. Except for benign occasions like a birthday party, he generally kept me away from his girlfriends and his children, and he often gave me blatantly contradictory information about his family life. I once tried asking why he was so evasive on that front, but he just shut me down with a hard look.

  I was nervous as I rode the bus toward Robert Taylor, but my reunion with J.T. was anticlimactic. The party was so big, with dozens of friends and family members, that it was split between Ms. Mae’s apartment and another apartment upstairs where J.T.’s cousin LaShona lived. Ms. Mae had cooked a ton of food, and there was a huge birthday cake. Everyone was having a good, loud time.

  J.T. strode right over and shook my hand. “How you feel?” he asked-one of his standard greetings. He stared me down for a moment but said nothing more. Then he winked, handed me a beer, and walked away. I barely saw him the rest of the party. Ms. Mae introduced me to some of her friends-I was “Mr. Professor, J.T.’s friend,” which conferred immediate legitimacy upon me. I stayed a few hours, played some games with the kids, and then took the bus home.

  J.T. and I resumed our normal relationship. Even though I couldn’t stop thinking about the C-Note beating, I kept my questions to myself. Until that incident I had seen gang members selling drugs, tenants taking drugs, and plenty of people engaged in small-time hustles to make money. While I was by no means comfortable watching a drug addict smoke crack, the C-Note affair gave me greater pause. He was an old man in poor health; he could hardly be expected to defend himself against men twice his size and half his age, men who also happened to carry guns.

  What was I, an impartial observer-at least that’s how I thought of myself-supposed to do upon seeing something like this? I actually considered calling the police that day. After all, C-Note had been assaulted. But I didn’t do anything. I am ashamed to say that I didn’t even confront J.T. about it until some six months later, and even then I did so tentatively.

  The confrontation happened after I witnessed another incident with another squatter. One day I was standing outside the building’s entryway with J.T. and a few other BKs. J.T. had just finished his weekly walk-through of his high-rise. He was having a quick meeting with some prostitutes who’d recently started working in the building, explaining the rules and taxes. The tenants, meanwhile, went about their business-hauling laundry, checking the mail, running errands.

  A few of J.T.’s junior members came out to tell him that one of the squatters in the building, a man known as Brass, refused to pay the gang’s squatting fee. They had brought Brass with them down to the lobby. I could see him through the entryway. He looked to be in his late forties, but it was hard to say. He had only a few teeth and seemed in pretty bad shape. I’d heard that Brass was a heroin addict with a reputation for beating up prostitutes. He was also known for moving around from building to building. He wasn’t a regular squatter like C-Note, who was on familiar terms with all the tenants. Brass would anger the tenants in one building and then pack up and move along.

  J.T. dispatched Price, one of his senior officers, to deal with Brass. Unlike C-Note, who offered only a little resistance, Brass decided to fight back. This was a big mistake. Price was generally not a patient man, and he seemed to enjoy administering a good beating. I could see Price punching Brass repeatedly in the face and stomach. J.T. didn’t flinch. Everyone, in fact-gang members and tenants alike- just stood and watched.

  Brass started to crawl toward us, making his way outside to the building’s concrete entryway. Price looked exhausted from hitting Brass, and he took a break. That’s when some rank-and-file gang members took over, kicking and beating Brass mercilessly. Brass resisted throughout. He kept yelling “Fuck you!” even as he was being beaten, until he seemed unconscious. A drool of blood spilled from his mouth.

  Then he began flailing about on the ground in convulsion, his spindly arms flapping like wings. By now his body lay just a few feet from us. I g roaned, a nd J.T. pulled me away. Still no one came to help Brass; it was as if we were all fishermen watching a fish die a slow death on the floor of a boat.

  I leaned on J.T.’s car, quivering from the shock. He took hold of me firmly and tried to calm me down. “It’s just the way it is around here,” he whispered, a discernible tone of sympathy in his voice. “Sometimes you have to beat a nigger to teach him a lesson. Don’t worry, you’ll get used to it after a while.”

  I thought, No, I don’t want to get used to it. If I did, what kind of person would that make me? I wanted to ask J.T. to stop the beating and take Brass to the hospital, but my ears were ringing, and I couldn’t even focus on what he was telling me. My eyes were fixed on Brass, and I felt like throwing up.

  Then J.T. grabbed me by the shoulders and turned me away so I couldn’t watch. But out of the corner of my eye, I could see that a few tenants finally came over to help Brass, while the gang membersjust stood over him doing nothing. J.T. held me up, as if to comfort me. I tried instead to support my weight on his car.

  That’s when C-Note slipped into my thoughts.

  “I understand that Brass didn’t pay you the money he owed, but you guys beat up C-Note and he wasn’t doing anything,” I said impatiently. “I just don’t get it.”

  “C-Note was challenging my authority,” J.T. answered calmly. “I had told him months before he couldn’t do his work out there, and he told me he understood. He went back on his word, and I had to do what I had to do.”

  I pushed a little harder. “Couldn’t you just punish them with a tax?”

  “Everyone wants to kill the leader, so you got to get them first.” This was one of J.T.’s trademark sayings. “I had niggers watching me,” he said. “I had to do what I had to do.”

  I recalled that on the day C-Note challenged him, J.T. had driven up to the building with a few Black Kings leaders from other neighborhoods. J.T. was constantly worried-practically to the point of paranoia, it seemed to me-that his own members and fellow leaders wanted to dethrone him and claim his territory. So he may have felt he couldn’t afford to have his authority challenged in their presence, even by a senior citizen whose legs probably couldn’t buy him one lap around a high-school track. Still, J.T.’s explanation seemed so alien to me that I felt I was watching a scene from The Godfather.

  By now it was nearly a year since I’d started hanging out with J.T.’s gang. It was 1990, which was roughly the peak of the crack epidemic in Chicago and other big U.S. cities. Black and Latino gangs including the Kings, the Cobras, the Disciples, the Vice Lords, the MCs (Mickey Cobras), and even the Stones, which had been temporarily dismantled a few years earlier, were capitalizing on a huge demand for crack and making a lot of money.

  In the old days, a teenager with an appetite for trouble might have gotten involved in vandalism or shoplifting; now he was more likely to be involved in the drug trade. And the neighbor who might have yelled at that misbehaving teenager in the old days was less likely to do so, since that kid might well be carrying a gun.

  Politicians, academics, and law-enforcement officials all offered policy solutions, to little avail. The liberal-minded deployed their traditional strategies-getting young people back into school and finding them entry-level jobs-but few gang members were willing to trade in their status and the prospect of big money for menial work. Conservatives attacked the crack epidemic by supporting mass arrests and hefty
prison sentences. This certainly took some dealers off the streets, but there was always a surplus of willing and eager replacements.

  The national mood had grown increasingly desperate-and punitive. Prosecutors won the right to treat gangs as organized criminal groups, which produced longer prison sentences. Judges gave the police permission to conduct warrantless searches and to round up suspected gang members who were hanging out in public spaces. In schools, mayors ruled out the wearing of bandannas and other clothing that might signal gang affiliation. With each day’s newspaper bringing a fresh story about gang violence, these efforts met little political resistance, even if they weren’t all that effective.

  From J.T.’s perspective the real crisis was that all these measures conspired to make it harder to earn as much money as he would have liked.

  Because crack was sold on street corners, with profits dependent on high volume and quick turnover, J.T. had to monitor a round-the-clockeconomic operation. He loved the challenge of running a business and making money. From all indications his transition to the Robert Taylor Homes was an unqualified success. This had won the attention of his superiors, a group of several dozen people in prison and on the streets known collectively as the Black Kings’ board of directors. They had begun inviting J.T. to high-level meetings to discuss the big picture of their enterprise. Pleased with his managerial prowess and attention to detail, they rewarded J.T. with extra responsibilities. He had just been asked, for instance, to help the gang with its foray into Chicago politics.