Gang Leader for a Day

by Sudhir Venkatesh

“No one said you have to,” Price offered, laughing from the backseat. “But he might!”

  “What exactly is it that I’m supposed to do?” I asked. “You want me to make him charge you fair prices?”

  “Well, this is a tough one,” J.T. said, “because we can’t have people taking advantage of us, you dig? But the thing is, we provide this nigger protection.”

  “Protection?”

  “Yeah, say somebody steals something. Then we find out who did it and we deal with it.”

  “So he can’t tell us that we can’t come in his store,” Price said. “Not if we’re providing him a service.”

  “Right,” said J.T. “We have to try and remind him that he’s paying us to help him, and it doesn’t look good if he doesn’t let us come in his store. See, what he’s doing is trying to make back the money that he’s paying us for protection.”

  Johnny was out front when we pulled up, smoking a cigarette. “What’s up, Sudhir?” he said. “I see you wasting your time again, hanging around these niggers.”

  Johnny looked like a caricature of a disco-era hustler: bright orange pants, a polyester shirt that appeared to be highly flammable, cowboy boots with fake diamond trim, and lots of ghetto glitter- fake rubies and other stones-on his fingers. A tattoo on his arm read BLACK BITCH, and another on his chest said PENTHOUSE KINGS, which was the name of his long-ago street gang.

  J.T., Price, and I followed Johnny into the back of the store while T-Bone peeled off to attend to some other business. The back room was musty and unswept. The walls were plastered with pictures of naked black women and a big poster of Walter Payton, the beloved Chicago Bears running back. The sturdy shelves and even the floor were crammed with used TV sets, stereo components, and microwaves that Johnny fixed and sold. A big wooden table held the remnants of last night’s poker game: cards and chips, cigar butts, some brandy, and a ledger tallying debts. Through the open back door, a small homeless encampment was visible. J.T. had told me that Johnny paid a homeless couple fifty dollars a week to sleep outside and watch over the store.

  We all sat down around the table. Johnny seemed impatient. “All right,” he said, “what are we going to do?”

  “Well, we were thinking more like what you were going to do, nigger,” Price said.

  “Listen, big black,” Johnny said, cigarette dancing in his lips, “you can take that mouth outside if you can’t say something useful.”

  J.T. told Price to go back to the car, leaving just me, J.T., and Johnny.

  “You’re paying us, Johnny,” J.T. said, “and now you’re charging us. You trying to make your money back? Is that it?”

  Johnny replied in a calm monotone. “You niggers charge me two hundred and fifty dollars a month, and that shit has to stop,” he said. “A man can’t run a business if he has to pay that kind of money.

  And your boys keep coming in here demanding free shit. I told Moochie and the rest of them that if they come in here anymore, this.22 is going to find their back.” He gestured to a rifle hanging behind him on the wall.

  “See now, that’s the kind of talk we don’t need,” J.T. said. “I mean, we need to cooperate.”

  “Cooperate, my ass!” said Johnny. “You can cooperate with my fist.”

  “Whoa, whoa!” I yelled, trying to be useful. “Let’s calm down now, boys. What I think we need is a little-”

  “Is this Arab going to sit here all day with us?” Johnny said.

  “Leave that boy alone,” J.T. said. “I’ll explain later.” He shot me a glance, a Shut the fuck up glance. “Listen, you pay me two hundred dollars a month and you’ll get the same shit from us.” He was talking about the protection the gang afforded. “And I’ll talk to Moochie and everyone else, tell them they can’t steal shit. Okay?”

  “Bitch, you better tell him not to bring his girlfriends up in here.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me. He brings them bitches in here when I’m not around, showing off and taking shit off the shelves, eating candy and drinking soda like he owns the place. When my man tried to do something about it, he pulled a gun on him. Let him bring that shit on me. Try it once, I’ll kill the little bitch.”

  “All right,” J.T. said, putting his hand in front of Johnny’s face to shut him up. “I told you I’ll deal with the nigger.”

  “I pay you two hundred dollars and your boys get to come in here, but they have to promise to spend at least two hundred dollars a month on shit,” Johnny said.

  “And you’re not going to jack up prices, right?” I said.

  “Goddamn, Arab, you still here?” Johnny said. “Yeah, that’s right, they pay what everyone else pays.”

  “Okay, then,” I said, “we got ourselves a deal, boys!” I stood up to go.

  “Boy, sit your ass down,” J.T. said. “Johnny, we’ll get back with you.”

  “Yeah, we’ll get back with you,” I said. “We need to deliberate.”

  Johnny and J.T. started laughing.

  “Goddamn!” Johnny shouted. “You bring this Arab with you wherever you go?”

  “One day,” J.T. muttered, clearly frustrated that I was taking my role a little too seriously. “One day, that’s it.”

  We got back in the Malibu. Price drove, J.T. rode shotgun, and I sat in the back. My next duty, J.T. explained, was to settle a dispute between two gang members, Billy and Otis. Billy was the director of a six-man drug-selling crew. Otis, one of his six dealers, was claiming that Billy had underpaid him for a day’s work. Billy, meanwhile, said that Otis lied about how much crack he sold and kept the extra money. My dilemma would be compounded by the fact that I already knew both Billy and Otis.

  As we drove, Price explained my goal: to adjudicate the case and determine a fair punishment. “If Billy didn’t pay Otis, then you have to punish Billy,” he said. “The punishment for not paying one of your members would be two mouthshots, and Billy can’t work for a week. And if you want, you get to make Otis the director for that week. But if Otis stole something, then we have a bigger problem. You have to beat the shit out of that nigger, not just hit him twice. And he has to work free for a month.”

  The thought of hitting someone in the face-delivering a “mouthshot”-made me nauseous. Growing up, I used to get picked on all the time. I was tall and athletic, but I was also a nerd, completewith pocket protector, bad haircut, and an armful of math and science books. I was a perfect target for the average football player or any other jock, especially since I played the less “manly” sports of tennis and soccer. I never even learned to throw a punch. In school most of the fights culminated with someone-most often a girl I was with-pleading for the bully to reconsider, or with me rolling up in a fetal ball, which I actually found to be quite a good strategy, since most bullies didn’t want to fight someone who wouldn’t fight back.

  “Now, I don’t mean to be picky,” I said, “but isn’t this why we have you here, Price? I mean, you’re the security guy, no? You beat their ass-I mean, isn’t that what you get paid for? And if I’m the leader, I can delegate, no?”

  “Sudhir,” J.T. said, “you have to realize that if you do that, then you lose respect. They need to see that you are the boss, which means that you hand out the beating.”

  “What if I make them do twenty pushups or fifty squat thrusts? Or maybe they have to clean my car.”

  “You don’t own a car,” J.T. said.

  “That’s right-so they have to clean your car for a month!”

  “Listen, these guys already clean my car, wipe my ass, whatever I want, so that ain’t happening,” J.T. said calmly, as if wanting to make sure I understood the breadth of his power. “And if they can steal money or not pay somebody for working and they only have to clean a car, then think how much these guys will steal. You have to make sure they understand that they can’t be stealing! Nigger, they need to fear you.”

  “So that’s your leadership style? Fear?” I was trying to give the impression that I had my own style. Mostly,
I was stalling out of worry that I’d have to throw a punch. “Fear, huh? Very interesting, very interesting.”

  We pulled up to the street corner where Billy and Otis had been told to meet us. It was cold, not quite noon, but the sun had broken through a bit. Aside from a nearby gas station, the corner was surrounded mostly by empty lots and abandoned buildings.

  I watched Billy and Otis saunter over. Billy was about six foot six. He had been a star basketball player at Dunbar High School and won a scholarship to Southern Illinois at Carbondale, a small downstate school. He began using his connections with the Black Kings to deal marijuana and cocaine to students in his dorm. He eventually decided to quit the basketball team to sell drugs full-time. He once told me that the lure of cash “made my mouth water, and I couldn’t get enough of it. Dumbest move I ever made.” Now he was working in the gang to save money in hopes of returning to college.

  I always liked Billy. He was one of thousands of people in this neighborhood who, by the time they turned eighteen, had made all sorts of important decisions by themselves. Fewer than 40 percent of the adults in the neighborhood had even graduated from high school, much less college, so Billy didn’t have a lot of places to go for counsel. Even so, he was the first one to accept responsibility for the bad decisions he’d made. I’ll never forget what he said when he moved back to the projects after dropping out of college: “I just needed someone to talk to. My mind was racing out of control, and I had no one to talk to.”

  I didn’t want to think about hitting Billy today, because I really liked him-and because, at that height, his jaw was nearly out of reach.

  Otis was a different story. He always wore dark sunglasses-even indoors, even in winter-and he kept a large knife underneath a long black jacket that he always wore, even in hot weather. He loved to cut people up and give them a scar. And he didn’t like me at all.

  This acrimony stemmed from a basketball game several months earlier. I regularly attended the gang’s midnight games at the Boys & Girls Club. If Autry came up one referee short, he sometimes pressed me into service. I had played basketball growing up, but not how it was played in the ghetto. In my neighborhood we set picks, passed the ball-and, perhaps most important, called fouls, even in pickup games. In the gang games, if you called even half the fouls that were actually committed, you’d run out of players by halftime. But during one game I refereed when Otis was playing, I called five quick fouls on him because… well, because he fouled somebody five times. He had to leave the game.

  From the bench, with a cheap bottle of liquor in his hand, Otis shouted at me, “I’m going to kill you, motherfucker! I’m going to cut your balls off!” It was pretty hard to concentrate for the rest of the game.

  I left the gym immediately afterward, but Otis chased me down in the parking lot. He was still in his uniform, so he didn’t have his machete with him. He picked up a bottle from the asphalt, smashed it, and pressed the jagged edge to my neck. Just then Autry hustled into the parking lot, pulled Otis back, and told me to run. I stood there in shock while Autry kept yelling, “Run, nigger, run!” After about thirty seconds, he and Otis both started laughing, because my feet simply wouldn’t move. They laughed so hard that they crumpled to the ground. I nearly threw up.

  I was thinking of this incident now, as Otis walked toward us, and I wondered if he was, too. I got out of the car along with J.T. and Price.

  “Okay, let’s hear what happened,” J.T. said. “I need to know who fucked up last week. Billy, you first.”

  J.T. seemed preoccupied, maybe a little upset. I didn’t know why, and it wasn’t the time to ask. It certainly didn’t seem as if I had much chance of leading the conversation.

  “Like I already said,” Billy began, “ain’t nothing to say. Otis got a hundred-pack and was a hundred dollars short. I want my money.” He was stubborn and defiant.

  “Nigger, please,” Otis said. “You ain’t paid me for a week. You owed me that money.” Otis’s eyes were bloodshot, and he looked as if he might reach out and hit Billy at any moment.

  “Didn’t pay?” said Billy. “You’re wrong on that. I paid you, and you went out that night partying. I remember.”

  The director of a sales team-in this case, Billy-usually gave his street dealers an allotment of prepackaged crack. A “100-pack” was the standard. A single bag sold for ten dollars, so once the dealer exhausted his inventory, he was supposed to give his director one thousand dollars. Billy was saying that Otis had turned over just nine hundred dollars. Otis’s only defense seemed to be that Billy owed him money from an earlier transaction-a charge that Billy denied. Otis and Billy kept arguing with each other, but they were looking at J.T., Price, and me, pleading their cases.

  “Okay, okay!” J.T. said. “This ain’t going nowhere. Get the fuck out of here. I’ll be back with you later.”

  Billy and Otis walked away, joining the rest of their crew near some Dumpsters where they stored their drugs and money. Once they were out of earshot, J.T. turned to me: “Well, what do you think? You heard enough?”

  “Yes, I did!” I said proudly. “Here’s my decision: Otis clearly took the money and pocketed it. You notice that he never actually denied taking something. He just said that he was owed the money by Billy. Now, I can’t tell whether Billy never paid Otis for the day’s work, but the fact that Otis didn’t deny stealing the money makes me feel that Billy forgot to pay Otis-or maybe he didn’t want to. But all that doesn’t matter, because Otis did steal some money. And, I bet, Billy didn’t pay.”

  There was silence for about thirty seconds. Finally Price spoke up. “Hey, I like it. Not bad. That was the smartest thing you said all day!”

  “Yeah,” said J.T. “Now, what’s the penalty?”

  “Well, in this case we borrow from the NFL and invoke the offsetting-penalty rule,” I said. “Both guys screwed up, so the two penalties cancel each other out. I know that Otis’s crime is more serious because he stole, but both of them messed up. So no one gets hurt or pays a fine. How about that?”

  More silence. Price watched J.T. for his reaction. I did the same. “Tell Otis to come over here,” J.T. finally said. Price went to fetch him.

  “What are you going to do?” I asked J.T. He said nothing. “C’mon, tell me.” He ignored me.

  Price returned with Otis.

  “Wait for me over there,” J.T. told me quietly, nodding toward the car.

  I did as he said. I climbed into the backseat, which faced away from J.T. and the others. Still, I was close enough to hear J.T. tell Otis to put his hands behind his back. Then I heard a punch, fist hitting cheekbone, and after about ten seconds another one. Then, slowly, two more punches. I looked behind me through the back window and saw Otis, bent over, holding his face. J.T. was slowly walking back toward the car, shaking his fist. He got in, and then Price did, too.

  “You can’t let them steal,” J.T. told me. “I liked your take on what happened. You’re right, they both fucked up. Since we don’t really know if Billy didn’t pay, I can’t beat him. But like you said, we do know that Otis stole something, because he didn’t deny it. So I had to punish him. I let him off easy, though. I told him he only had to work free for a week.”

  I could hear Otis moaning in pain, like a sick cow. I asked quietlyif he was okay. Neither J.T. nor Price answered. As we drove past Billy and Otis, I was the only one who looked over. Otis still had his head down, and he turned away as we passed. Billy just watched us drive by, completely expressionless.

  We spent the next several hours driving around the South Side, covering the great swath of territory controlled not just by J.T.’s faction of the Black Kings but by other gangs within the BK nation.

  As J.T. rose within the BKs’ citywide hierarchy, part of his broader duty was to monitor several BK factions besides his own to make sure that sales proceeded smoothly and that neighboring gangs cooperated with one another. This meant that he now oversaw, directly or indirectly, several hundred members of the Black K
ings.

  There was a constant reshuffling and realignment of gang factions. This typically had less to do with dramatic events like a gang war and more to do with basic economics. When one local gang withered, it was usually because it was unable to supply enough crack to meet the demand or because the gang leader set his street dealers’ wages too low to attract motivated workers. In such cases a gang’s leadership might transfer its distribution rights to a rival gang, a sort of merger in which the original gang got a small cut of the profits and a lower rank in the merged hierarchy. If running a drug gang wasn’t quite business as usual, it was nevertheless very much a business.

  Today was the day that J.T. needed to visit all the four- and six-man sales teams occupying the street corners, parks, alleyways, and abandoned buildings where the Black Kings sold crack. He did this once a week. Because these visits were perhaps J.T.’s most important work, it was pretty obvious that I wasn’t going to have much input.

  But as J.T. drove to his first stop, he told me that I could at least tag along.

  By now a second car had joined us, occupied by four junior gang members. They were J.T.’s security detail, driving ahead to each location and paging him to say it was safe from rival gangs.

  As I watched J.T. question his sales teams, one after the next, I began to realize that he truly was an accomplished manager. All his members knew the drill. As soon as J.T. reached a site, the sales team’s director would approach him alone and instruct his troops to stop all sales activity. One member, taking all the cash and drugs, left the area entirely so that the police couldn’t link J.T. directly to the drug sales. It was unclear to me whether this was J.T.’s idea or standard practice in gangland, but when it came to avoiding the police, J.T. was meticulous.

  In order to keep himself clear, he never carried a gun, drugs, or large amounts of cash. Even though he occasionally alluded to cops he knew personally, men who’d grown up with him in the neighborhood, he was always sketchy as to whether he held any real influence among the police. Whatever the case, he didn’t seem all that concerned about getting arrested. In his view the police could come after him whenever they wanted, but it was in their best interest to let familiar faces run the drug businesses. “They just want to control shit,” he told me, “and that’s why they really only come after us maybe once in a while.”