Gang Leader for a Day

by Sudhir Venkatesh

  “You mean you’re asking people what they think about me?” Now he had turned to look at me again.

  “Well, not really, because you know they would probably not feel comfortable telling me. I’m at stage one. I’m trying to understand what the organization does and how people have to deal with it. If you piss people off, how do they respond? Do they call the police? Do they call you?”

  “Okay. So it’s how others work with me.”

  He seemed appeased, so I was quick to affirm. “Yes! How others work with you. That’s a great way of putting it.” I hoped he wouldn’t ask what “stage two” was, for I had no idea. I felt a little uneasy letting him think that I was actually writing his biography, but at the moment I just wanted to buy myself some time.

  He checked his watch. “All right, I need to get some sleep.” He got up and walked toward his bedroom without saying good-bye. In the kitchen Ms. Mae kissed me good night, and I walked to the bus stop.

  J.T. was a little cool toward me the next few times I saw him. So to warm things up, I stopped going to the club and spent nearly all my time in and around J.T.’s building. I was unhappy to be missing the opportunity to see how Autry worked with other people behind the scenes on important community issues, but I didn’t want to further anger J.T. I just told Autry that I’d be busy for a few weeks but I’d be back once I got settled in with my course work in the coming fall semester.

  Soon after the school year began, a young boy and girl in Robert Taylor were shot, accidental victims of a drive-by gang shooting. The boy was eight, the girl nine. They both spent time in the hospital, and then the girl died. The shooting occurred at the border of Taylor A and Taylor B. J.T.’s gang had been on the receiving end of the shooting, with several members injured. The shooters were from the Disciples, who operated out of the projects near the Boys & Girls Club.

  This single shooting had a widespread effect. Worried that a full-scale gang war would break out, parents began keeping their children inside, which meant taking time off from work or otherwise adjusting their schedules. Senior citizens worried about finding a safe way to get medical treatment. Local churches mobilized to deliver food to families too scared to walk to the store.

  Ms. Bailey told me about a meeting at the Boys & Girls Club where the police would address concerned parents and tenant leaders. If I really wanted to see how the gang’s actions affected the broader community, Ms. Bailey said, I should be there.

  I asked J.T., and he thought it was a good idea, even though he never bothered with such things. “The police don’t do nothing for us,” he said. “You should understand that by now.” Then he muttered something about how the community “takes care of its problems,” mentioning the incident I’d seen with Boo-Boo, Price, and the Middle Eastern store manager.

  The meeting was held late one weekday morning. The streets outside the club were quiet, populated by a smattering of unemployed people, gang members, and drug addicts. The leaves had already changed, but the day was unseasonably warm.

  Autry was busy as usual, running to and fro making sure everything was ready. Although I hadn’t seen him in some time, he shot me a friendly glance. The meeting was held in a large, windowless concrete room with a linoleum floor. There were perhaps forty tenants in attendance-all fanning themselves, since the heat was turned up too high. “If we turn it off, we can’t get it back on right away,” Autry told me. “And then it’s May by the time you get it back on.”

  At the front of the room, several uniformed police officers and police officials sat behind a long table. Ms. Bailey nodded me toward a seat beside her, up front and off to one side.

  The meeting was an exercise in chaos. Residents shouted past one another while the police officials begged for calm. A mother holding her infant yelled that she was “sick and tired of living like this.” The younger and middle-aged parents were the most vocal. The senior citizens sat quietly, many of them with Bibles in their hands, looking as if they were ready for church. Nor did the police have much to say, other than platitudes about their continued efforts to disrupt the gangs and requests for tenants to start cooperating with them by reporting gang crimes.

  After about forty-five minutes, the police looked very ready to leave. So did the tenants. As the meeting broke up, some of them waved their hands dismissively at the cops.

  “Are these meetings always so crazy?” I asked Ms. Bailey.

  “This is how it goes,” she said. “We yell at them, they say nothing. Everyone goes back to doing what they were doing.”

  “I don’t see what you get out of this. It seems like a waste of time.”

  Ms. Bailey just patted my knee and said, “Mm-hmm.”

  “I mean it,” I said. “This is ridiculous. Where I grew up, you’d have an army of cops all over the place. But nothing is going on here. Doesn’t that upset you?”

  By now the room had cleared out except for Ms. Bailey and a few other tenant leaders, Autry, and one policeman, Officer Johnson, a tall black man who worked out of a nearby precinct. He was well groomed, with a short mustache and graying hair. They were all checking their watches and speaking quietly to one another.

  I was about to leave when Ms. Bailey walked over. “In two hours come back here,” she said. “But now you have to go.”

  Autry smiled and winked as he passed. What was he up to? I knew that Autry was still trying to groom himself as a local power broker, but I didn’t know how much power, if any, he had actually accrued.

  As instructed, I left for a while and took a walk around the neighborhood. When I returned to the club, Autry silently pointed me toward the room where the earlier meeting had been held. Inside, I saw Ms. Bailey and some other building presidents; Officer Johnson and Autry’s friend Officer Reggie, a well-liked cop who had grown up in Robert Taylor; and Pastor Wilkins, who was said to be a long-standing expert in forging gang truces. Autry, I knew, saw himself as Pastor Wilkins’s eventual successor.

  They were all milling about, shaking hands and chatting softly before settling into the folding metal chairs Autry had arranged. A few of them looked at me with a bit of surprise as I sat down, but no one said anything.

  And then, to my great surprise, I saw J.T., sitting with a few of his senior officers along one wall. Although our eyes didn’t meet, I could tell that he noticed me.

  Even more surprising was the group on the other side of the room: a gang leader named Mayne, who ran the Disciples, accompanied by his officers, leaning quietly against the wall.

  I took a good look at Mayne. He was a heavyset man with a crumpled face, like a bulldog’s. He appeared bored and irritated, and he kept issuing instructions to his men: “Nigger, get me a cigarette.” “Boy, get me a chair.”

  Autry walked into the room. “Okay!” he shouted. “The club is closed, let’s get going. Kids are going to come back at five.”

  Officer Reggie stood up. “Let’s get moving,” he said. “Ms. Bailey, you wanted to start. Go ahead.” He walked toward the back of the room.

  “First, J.T., get the other men out of the room,” she said. “You, too, Mayne.”

  Mayne and J.T. both motioned for their senior officers to leave, and they did, walking out slowly with stoic faces. Ms. Bailey stood silently until they were gone. Then she took a deep breath. “Pastor, you said you had an idea, something you wanted to ask these young men?”

  “Yes, Ms. Bailey,” Pastor Wilkins said. He stood up. “Now, I know how this began. Shorties probably fighting over some girl, right? And it got all the way to shooting each other. That’s crazy! I mean, I can understand if you were fighting over business, but you’re killing people around here because of a spat in school!”

  “We’re defending our honor,” Mayne said. “Ain’t nothing more important than that.”

  “Yeah,” said J.T. “And it is about business. Those guys come shooting down on our end, scaring people away.”

  Pastor Wilkins asked Mayne and J.T. to describe how the fight had escalated. Past
or Wilkins’s original guess was mostly right: two teenage boys at DuSable High School got into a fight over a girl. One boy was in J.T.’s gang, the other in Mayne’s. Over the course of a few weeks, the conflict escalated from unarmed to armed-first a knife fight and then the drive-by shooting. The shooting occurred during the afternoon, while kids were playing outside after school.

  J.T. said that because his customers had been scared off since the shooting, and because tenants in his buildings were angry about their lives being interrupted, he wanted Mayne to pay a penalty.

  Mayne argued that the shooting took place at the border of the two gangs’ territory, near a park that neither gang claimed. Therefore, he argued, J.T. was ineligible for compensation.

  My mind raced as they spoke. I couldn’t believe that a religious leader and a police officer were not only watching this mediation but were actually facilitating it. What incentive did they have to do so- and what would happen if people from the community found out they were helping gang leaders settle their disputes? I was also struck by how levelheaded everyone seemed, even J.T. and Mayne, as if they’d been through this before. These were the same two gang leaders, after all, who had been trying to kill each other, quite literally, with drive-by shootings. I wondered if one of them might even pull a gun here at any moment. Perhaps the very strangest thing was how sanguine the community leaders were about the fact that these men sold crack cocaine for a living. But at this moment it seemed that pragmatism was more important than moralism.

  After a while the conversation got bogged down, with J.T. and Mayne merely restating their positions. Autry jumped in to try to refocus things. “How much you think you lost?” he asked J.T. “I mean, you don’t need to tell me the amount, but how many days did you lose business?”

  “Probably a few days, maybe a week,” J.T. said.

  “Okay, well, we’re going to bank this,” Autry said. “Put it in the bank.”

  “What the fuck does that mean?” Mayne asked.

  “Nigger, that means you messed up,” Autry told him. “J.T. didn’t retaliate, did he? I mean, he didn’t shoot over at you. It was just you shooting down at his end, right? So J.T. gets to sell his shit in the park for a week. The next time this happens, and J.T. fucks up, you get to sell your shit in the park for a week.”

  Ms. Bailey spoke up. “You-all do not get to sell nothing when the kids are there, okay? Just late at night.”

  “Sounds fine to me,” J.T. said. Mayne nodded in agreement.

  “Then we have a truce,” Pastor Wilkins said. He walked over to J.T. and Mayne. “Shake on it.”

  J.T. and Mayne shook hands, not warmly and not willing to look at each other. The pastor and Ms. Bailey each let out a sigh.

  As J.T., Mayne, and Pastor Wilkins sat down to work out the details of the deal, I walked out front. There was Autry, smoking a cigarette on the sidewalk. He shook his head; he looked fatigued.

  “This stuff is hard, isn’t it?” I asked.

  “Yeah, I try to block out the fact that they could get pissed at me and kill me if I say something they don’t like. You never know if they’ll go home and think you’re working for the other side.”

  “You ever get hurt before?”

  “I got my ass kicked a few times-one time real bad-’cause they thought I wasn’t being fair. I’m not sure I want to have that happen again.”

  “You don’t get paid enough,” I said.

  J.T. came out of the club and stopped beside me. His head was lowered. Autry moved away.

  “You wanted this, right?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said, “this is what I’m looking for.” He knew I’d been eager to see how the community and the gang worked out their differences. But he’d also made it clear that I could do so only if I had a patron, and I had to choose between J.T. and Autry. I chose J.T.

  “Just remember, you wanted this,” he said. “I didn’t make you come here today. I didn’t tell you about this. You wanted this.” He pressed his finger into my chest every time he said “you.” I sensed that despite our last conversation J.T. felt I was slipping from his grasp.

  “I know,” I said. “Don’t worry.”

  “I’m not worried.” He let out a sinister laugh. “But you should really think about this. Just remember, I didn’t bring you here. I can’t protect you. Not all the time anyway. You did this on your own.”

  “I get it, I’m on my own.”

  J.T. smiled, pressed his finger into my chest one last time, with force, and walked away.

  FOUR. Gang Leader for a Day

  After nearly three years of hanging out with J.T., I began talking to several of my professors about my dissertation topic. As it happened, they weren’t as enthusiastic as I was about an in-depth study of the Black Kings crack gang and its compelling leader. They were more interested in the standard sociological issues in the community: entrenched poverty, domestic violence, the prevalence of guns, residents’ charged relations with the government-and, to a lesser extent, how the community dealt with the gang.

  If I explored these subjects well, my professors said, I could explain how the Robert Taylor tenants really behaved, rather than simply arguing that they didn’t act like middle-class people.

  Bill Wilson in particular was adamant that I adopt a wider lens on the gang and its role in Robert Taylor. Because sociology had such a strong tradition of “community studies,” he wanted me to write the definitive report on everyday life in high-rise housing projects.

  He also said he’d started worrying about my safety in the projects.By this point I had taken up golf as a way to spend more time with Wilson, an avid golfer. “I’m having nightmares, Sudhir,” he said once in the middle of the fairway, staring out blankly. “You’re worrying me, and I really want you to think about spending some time with others.” He drifted off, never instructing me about which “others” I should be observing, but I knew this was code for anyone besides the gang.

  I knew he had my best interests in mind, but it still came as a shock to me that I would have to widen my focus if I still planned to base my dissertation on this community. It meant that J.T. wouldn’t be the sole target of my attention, and perhaps not even the primary target. A few of my professors were seasoned ethnographers, experts in the methodology of firsthand observation. They were insistent that I avoid getting so close to any one source that I would be beholden to him.

  Easier said than done. I hadn’t forgotten how agitated J.T. became when he saw me branching out into the community. I really didn’t feel I could tell him that my project was moving away from a focus on his leadership. By now J.T. wasn’t my only access to the community, but he was certainly my best access. He was the one who had brought me in, and he was the one who could open-or shut-any door. But beyond all that lay one simple fact: J.T. was a charismatic man who led a fascinating life that I wanted to keep learning about.

  J.T. seemed to appreciate having the ear of an outsider who would listen for hours to his tales of bravado and managerial prowess. He often expressed how hard it was to oversee the gang, to keep the drug economy running smoothly, and to deal with the law-abiding tenants who saw him as an adversary. Sometimes he spoke of his job with dispassion, as if he were the CEO of some widget manufacturer-an attitude that I found not only jarring but, given the violence and destruction his enterprise caused, irresponsible.

  He fancied himself a philanthropist as much as a leader. He spoke proudly of quitting his mainstream sales job in downtown Chicago to return to the projects and use his drug profits “to help others.” How did he help? He mandated that all his gang members get a high-school diploma and stay off drugs. He gave money to some local youth centers for sports equipment and computers. He willingly loaned out his gang members to Robert Taylor tenant leaders, who deployed them on such tasks as escorting the elderly on errands or beating up a domestic abuser. J.T. could even put a positive spin on the fact that he made money by selling drugs. A drug economy, he told me, was “useful for th
e community,” since it redistributed the drug addicts’ money back into the community via the gang’s philanthropy.

  I have to admit that J.T.’s rhetoric could be persuasive, even when I tried to play the skeptic. The fact was, I didn’t yet have a good grip on how his gang really affected the broader community. On an even more basic level, I wondered if I really had a complete sense of what J.T. did on a daily level. What kind of gang activities wasn’t he showing me?

  One cold February morning, I stood with him on a street corner as he met with one of his drug-selling crews. I was shivering, still unaccustomed to the chilling lake winds, and trying hard to focus on what J.T. was saying. He spoke to his men about the need to take pride in their work. He was also trying to motivate the younger members to brave the cold and sell as much crack as they could. In weather like this, the youngest members had to stand outside and sell while the ones with more seniority hung out in a building lobby.

  After addressing his troops, J.T. said he was going off to play basketball.He climbed into his Malibu and I climbed in with him. We were parked near a busy intersection at State Street, within view of a Robert Taylor high-rise, some low-rise stores, and the Boys & Girls Club. Before he even turned the key, I mentioned, half joking, that I thought he was seriously overpaid.

  “I don’t see what’s so difficult about your job,” I said. “I mean, you say how hard it is to do what you do, but I just can’t see it being that difficult.” All I ever saw him do, I said, was walk around and shake hands with people, spend money, drive nice cars-he owned at least three that I knew of-and party with his friends. J.T. just sat for a moment, making no move to drive off. “Okay, well, you want to give it a try? If you think it’s so easy, you try it.”