Gang Leader for a Day

by Sudhir Venkatesh

  The more time J.T. spent with the citywide Black Kings leader-ship and their newfound political allies, the less time he had to escort me through the projects. This presented me with the opportunity I’d hoped for: getting to learn a bit more about the community for myself without J.T. watching over me.

  Since I still wasn’t very familiar with the neighborhood, I didn’t stray too far from J.T.’s building. He had repeatedly told me that I wouldn’t be safe walking around other parts of Robert Taylor. The longer I hung around the projects, he said, the more likely that I would be associated with his gang. So I would do well to keep to the gang’s areas.

  Strangely, while most people think of a gang as a threat, for me- an uninitiated person in the projects-the gang represented security. The courtyard in the middle of the three buildings that J.T. controlled was a closely guarded space. His gang members were everywhere: sitting in cars, leaning out of apartments, hanging around the playground and the parking lot. I didn’t know most of them well enough to strike up a conversation, but I was familiar enough to receive the local sign for “friend”-a slight nod of the head, perhaps a raised eyebrow.

  I wanted to learn more about the gang’s influence on the greater community. C-Note and Clarisse had both suggested to me that the gang was simultaneously a nuisance, a source of fear, and an ally. But they were always a bit cagey.

  “Oh, you know how J.T. is,” Clarisse once said to me. “He’s family, and you know what family is like.”

  “Them niggers are wearing me out, but I ain’t gonna be the one to say nothing,” C-Note told me, “ ’cause they keep things safe around here.”

  They tended to look at me as if I knew exactly what they meant, which I didn’t. But I was eager to figure it out.

  I met the Johnson brothers, Kris and Michael, two Robert Taylor tenants known as expert car mechanics and consummate hustlers. They were both in their late thirties, skinny, with boyish faces, and they always had a positive outlook. Kris had been a promising baseball player until his career was ended by injury. Michael was a musician who’d never gained the level of success he sought. Now they both wanted good full-time jobs but couldn’t find steady work. Their lives had been an odyssey of drug addiction, street hustling, jail time, and homelessness. For them, and other underemployed men like them, the projects were a refuge: a familiar home turf with at least a few slivers of opportunity.

  These days the Johnson brothers repaired cars in various parking lots around the Robert Taylor Homes. Although J.T. was the ultimate authority in the neighborhood, Kris and Michael also had to strike a deal with C-Note, who was the nominal ruler of the local auto-repair trade. Sometimes C-Note did repair work himself. When he was too tired, he subcontracted it out to people like the Johnson brothers. In return he took a small cut of their profits and let the gang know that the Johnsons were operating with his blessing.

  Kris and Michael had set up shop on Federal Street, in the corner of a parking lot littered with garbage and broken glass. About twenty yards down the street, next to an open fire hydrant, they were also running a car wash. The Johnson brothers always attracted a crowd.

  “You want me to talk?” Kris asked me. “Then you need to find me some work, find me a customer!”

  I was happy to oblige. Walking into the middle of Federal Street, I helped them flag down cars. Then Kris would approach the driver. “You need a wash?” he’d ask. Or, “Looks like your brakes are squeaking, ma’am. Why don’t you step outside and let me take a look.” Kris and Michael would charm the drivers until they broke down and agreed to have their cars looked at. If that failed, one brother would let the air out of the tires while the other brother occupied the driver. The more beer they drank, the more creative they became.

  Toward the end of one hot summer day, T-Bone, one of J.T.’s senior officers, drove up to the car wash in a bright green Chevy Malibu. The Malibu seemed to be the thug’s car of choice. Behind T-Bone was a line of cars waiting for a wash, most of them classic gang vehicles-Malibus, Caprices, Lincoln Town Cars-all with shiny rims and bright paint jobs.

  “Every week we need to wash their shit,” Michael muttered. “What can you do?” The gang apparently taxed the brothers in the form of free car washes. He grabbed a bucket of soapy water and shouted for Kris to come help. But Kris, his head buried in the hood of a customer’s car, shouted back that he was busy. So I offered to help.

  When T-Bone saw me jog over with some clean rags, he nearly fell down laughing. “Oh, shit! Next thing he’ll be moving in with them!” he said. “Hey, Sweetness, how much you paying the Professor?”

  “Ain’t paying nothing,” answered Michael (a.k.a. Sweetness, apparently). “I’m giving him an education.”

  This made T-Bone laugh even harder. T-Bone and I got along pretty well, and unlike other members of the gang, he would routinely strike up a conversation with me. He was attending Kennedy-King College, a South Side community college, majoring in accounting. That’s why J.T. had put him in charge of the gang’s finances. T-Bone had two talkative, precocious children and the appearance of a nerd: he wore big, metal-framed glasses, always carried a notebook (which contained the gang’s financial records, I would later learn), and constantly asked me about life at the U of C. “Hope it’s harder than where I’m at,” he’d say. “I’m getting A’s, and I haven’t had to pay nobody off yet!”

  A commotion rose up from the parking lot where Kris was working: he had gotten into a fight with a customer. Even from afar I could see the veins popping on Kris’s face. He kept trying to grab the other man’s neck, and the other man kept pushing Kris backward. The other man kneed Kris in the stomach, sending him to the ground, and then Kris picked up a rock and hit his combatant in the head. Now both of them were on the ground, writhing and yelling.

  Michael and T-Bone hurried over. “Nigger, not around here!” T-Bone said, laughing at the fairly pathetic display of fighting. “I told you about keeping this shit peaceful.”

  “It will be peaceful as long as he pays up,” Kris said.

  “Pays up?” the other man said. “He can finish, then I’ll pay. Twenty bucks to fix my radiator? Fuck that! He got to do more than that for twenty.”

  “Nigger, I already washed the damn car,” Kris said. He stood up, wincing. “You took this shit too far. I’m not doing nothing else for twenty bucks.” Kris picked up a wrench and hit the man in the leg. The man groaned in pain, his face swollen with anger, and it looked as if he was going to go after Kris.

  T-Bone grabbed Kris, even though he could barely keep himself from laughing. “Damn! What did I tell you? Lay that shit down. Now come over here.”

  T-Bone walked the two men over to the edge of the parking lot. They were both limping. Soon after, Kris started washing T-Bone’s car while the other man sat on the ground, nursing his leg.

  “I’ll teach that nigger!” Kris said to himself loudly. “No one messes with me.”

  T-Bone walked over to Michael and me. “Nigger was right,” he said, pointing to Kris. “He washed the man’s car and fixed the radiator. And that costs twenty dollars. He don’t need to do nothing else. I got the money for you. And five bucks extra for the hassle.”

  T-Bone handed Michael the money, slapped my face gently, winked, and hummed a song as he walked off. Michael didn’t say anything.

  That night, once it was too dark to work on cars, I sat with Michael and Kris by their beat-up white Subaru, and we drank some beers. Michael told me that T-Bone often settled customer disputes for them.

  “Why would he do that?” I asked.

  “Because we pay him to!” Michael said. “I mean, we don’t have a choice.”

  Michael explained that he and Kris paid T-Bone 15 percent of their weekly revenue. Just as J.T.’s foot soldiers squeezed a little money from squatters and prostitutes, his higher-ranked officers supplemented their income with more substantial taxes. In return, the gang brought Kris and Michael customers and mediated any disputes. This occasionally included
beating up a customer who became recalcitrant or abusive. “That happens once a month,” Kris said with satisfaction. “Best way to teach people not to fuck with us.”

  I asked Michael and Kris whether beating one customer might in fact deter other customers. The reply taught me a lot about the Black Kings.

  “When you got a problem, I bet you call the police, right?” Michael said. “Well, we call the Kings. I call T-Bone because I don’t have anyone else to call.”

  “But you could call the police,” I said. “I don’t understand why you can’t call them if something goes wrong.”

  “If I’m out here hustling, or if you’re in the building hustling, there’s no police officer who’s going to do what T-Bone does for us,” Michael said. “Every hustler tries to have someone who offers them protection. I don’t care if you’re selling socks or selling your ass. You need someone to back you up.”

  “See, we were both Black Kings when we were younger,” Kris said. “Most of the people you see, the older ones who live right here? They were Kings at one time. So it’s complicated. I mean, if you own a business on Forty-seventh Street, you pay taxes and you get protection-from the police, from the aldermen-”

  I interrupted Kris to ask why they’d need protection from the aldermen. He looked at me as if I was naïve-which I was-and explained that the aldermen’s line workers, or “precinct captains,” liked to tax any off-the-books entrepreneurial activity. “So instead we pay the gang, and the gang protects us.”

  “But it’s more than that,” Michael said. “I mean, you’re stuck. These niggers make your life hell, but they’re family. And you can’t choose your family!” He started to laugh so hard that he nearly spilled his beer.

  “Just imagine,” Kris prodded me. “Let’s say another gang came by and started shooting. Or let’s say you got a bunch of niggers that get into the building and go and rob a bunch of people. Who’s going to take care of that? Police? They never come around! So you got J.T. and the Kings. They’ll get your stuff back if it was stolen. They’ll protect you so that no niggers can come and shoot up the place.”

  Kris and Michael really seemed to believe, although with some reservations, that the gang was their extended family. Skeptical as I may have been, the gang plainly was looked upon as something other than a purely destructive force. I remembered what J.T. had told me a while back, a pronouncement that hadn’t made much sense at the time: “The gang and the building,” he had said, “are the same.”

  One hot afternoon, while hanging out in the lobby of J.T.’s build-ing with some tenants and a few BKs, I saw another side of the relationship between the gang and the community. Outside the building a car was blasting rap music. A basketball game had just finished, and to combat the heat a few dozen people were drinking beer and enjoying the breeze off the lake.

  I heard a woman shouting, maybe fifty yards away, in a small grove of oak trees. It was one of the few shady areas on the premises.The trees predated Robert Taylor and would likely be standing long after the projects were gone. The music was too loud for me to make out what the woman was saying, and so I-along with quite a few other people-hurried over.

  Several men were physically restraining the woman, who looked to be in her forties. “Let go of me!” she screamed. “I’m going to kick his ass! Just let me at him. Let go!”

  “No, baby,” one of the men said, trying to calm her down. “You can’t do it that way, you can’t take care of it like that. Let us handle it.”

  “Hey, Price!” another man shouted. “Price, come over here.”

  Price had been a Black Kings member for many years and had a wide range of expertise. At present he was in charge of the gang’s security, which matched up well with his love of fighting. He was tall and lanky, and he took his job very seriously. He strode over now to the screaming woman, trailed by a few Black Kings foot soldiers. I waved at Price, and he didn’t seem to mind that I had put myself close to the action.

  “What’s going on?” he asked the men. “Why is Boo-Boo screaming like that?”

  “She said the Ay-rab at the store fucked her baby,” one man told him. “He gave her baby some disease.”

  Price spoke softly to her, trying to calm her down. I asked a young woman next to me what was going on. She said that Boo-Boo thought the proprietor of a nearby corner store had slept with her teenage daughter and given her a sexually transmitted disease. There were several such stores in the neighborhood, all of them run by Arab Americans. “She wants to beat the shit out of that Ay-rab,” the woman told me. “She was just on her way over to the store to see that man.”

  By now about a hundred people had gathered around. We all watched Price talking to Boo-Boo while one of the men locked Boo-Boo’s arms behind her back. Suddenly he let her go, and Boo-Boo marched off toward the store, with Price beside her and a pack of tenants following behind. “Kick his ass, Boo-Boo!” someone hollered. There were other riled shouts: “Don’t let them Ay-rabs do this to us!” and “Price, kill that boy!”

  We arrived at a small, decrepit store known as Crustie’s. The name wasn’t posted anywhere, but the usual signs were: CIGARETTES SOLD HERE and FOOD STAMPS WELCOME and PLEASE DO NOT LOITER. By the time I arrived, Boo-Boo was already inside yelling, but it was hard to hear what she was saying. I moved closer to the entrance. Now I could see Boo-Boo taking boxes and cans of food off the shelves and throwing them, but I couldn’t see her target. Price leaned against the refrigerator case, wearing a serious look. Then Boo-Boo reached for a big glass bottle, and Price grabbed her before she could throw it.

  A few minutes later, a man ran outside. He looked to be Middle Eastern; he waved his arms and shouted in what I assumed was Arabic. He was in his early forties, clean-cut, with a short-sleeved, collared shirt. He broke through the crowd, pushing people aside. Some pushed back, but he managed to unlock his car and get inside.

  But Boo-Boo followed him. She started throwing liquor bottles at the car. One burst on the hood, another missed entirely. The crowd started hooting, and some of the men grabbed her. We all watched as the car sped off, with Boo-Boo falling down in the middle of the street, still screaming, “You raped my baby girl! You raped her, you Ay-rab!”

  Price walked slowly out of the store, accompanied by an older man I recognized as the store’s manager. He also looked Middle Eastern and wore a striped dress shirt and khakis. He had a weary look about him, as if running a store in this neighborhood had taken a grave toll. He was talking quietly while Price stared straight ahead, nodding once in a while; the manager appeared to be pleading his case. Finally they shook hands, and Price moved aside, his foot soldiers trailing him.

  Then the manager started to carry out cases of soda and beer, leaving them on the sidewalk. The crowd pounced. Most people grabbed just a few cans or bottles, but some were tough enough to wrest away a six-pack or two. The manager hauled out more and more cases, and these disappeared just as fast. He set them down with little emotion, although occasionally he’d glance at the crowd, as if he were feeding birds in a park, and wipe the sweat off his brow. When our eyes met, he just shook his head, shrugged, and walked back inside.

  Price watched from a distance. I saw him speaking with Ms. Bailey, a woman in her late fifties who was the tenant president of the building where J.T. lived. I had met Ms. Bailey a few times already. She smiled now as I approached, then grabbed my hand and pulled me into a hug. She turned back to Price.

  “We can’t have people treat women like that, baby,” she said to him. “You-all know that.”

  “I know, Ms. Bailey,” Price said, exasperated. “Like I said, I’m taking care of it. But if you want to do it, go ahead!”

  “I’ll deal with it in my own way, but for now I want you to talk with him tomorrow, okay?”

  “Okay, Ms. Bailey, we’re on it,” Price said matter-of-factly. “J.T. or I will take care of it.”

  Ms. Bailey started yelling at a few women who stood arguing with the store manager. “Everyone g
et your pop and get out of here,” she said. “And you-all leave this man alone. He ain’t the one you’re looking for.” She walked the manager inside and again told everyone to go home.

  I caught up with Price and asked him to explain what had happened.

  “That Ay-rab slept with Coco,” he said with a smirk. “But he didn’t give her no disease. That little girl got that herself-she’s a whore. Sixteen and she’s been around already.”

  “So what was all that about, then?” I asked. “Why the screaming, and what’s up with the beer and soda?”

  “Like I said, the man was sleeping with Coco, but he was giving her diapers and shit for Coco’s baby.” I had heard rumors that some store owners gave women free food and household items in exchange for sex. Some residents were very upset at the practice. In fact, I heard Ms. Mae regularly plead with J.T. to put a stop to this behavior. J.T.’s answer to his mother was nearly identical to what Price now told me: “You can’t stop that shit. It’s been happening like that for the longest time. It’s just how people do things around here.”

  I asked Price what his role had been today. “I told Boo-Boo that I would go over to the store with her and let her yell at that man,” he said. “She said she was going to cut off his dick, take a picture of it, and put it up everywhere. He freaked out. That’s why he ran. Then I told his brother, the one who owns the store, that he had to do something, ’cause people would burn the store down if he didn’t. He said he’d put all the soda and beer he had on the sidewalk if people would leave the store alone. I told him, ‘Cool.’ But I told him that I needed to speak with him tomorrow, because I don’t want Boo-Boo killing his little brother, which she will do. So tomorrow we’ll figure all this shit out so no one gets hurt.”

  I was just about to ask Price why he was responsible for mediating a dispute like this. But he preempted me. “That’s what BKs are about,” he said. “We just help keep the peace. We take care of our community.”