Gang Leader for a Day

by Sudhir Venkatesh

  The meeting was held in Ms. Bailey’s office on a Saturday afternoon in December. Although it wasn’t very cold outside, the radiator was at full blast and the windows were closed. Ms. Bailey entered the steaming room and calmly walked past the few dozen people assembled on folding chairs, parking herself up front. She always sat down in the same awkward way. Because she was so heavyset, and because she had arthritis in her legs, she usually had to grab someone or something to help ease herself into a chair.

  I was surprised at the small turnout. The attendees were mostly women and mostly in their mid-fifties like Ms. Bailey. There were, however, a few younger women with children and a few men as well.

  Ms. Bailey deliberately arranged a sheaf of papers in front of her. She motioned for a young woman to open up the window, but it wouldn’t budge.

  “Okay, this meeting is in session,” Ms. Bailey said.

  A well-dressed man toward the back of the room immediately jumped up. “I thought you said you’d talk with those boys!” he said. “They’re still hanging out there, making all that damn noise. I can’t get no sleep.”

  I assumed he was talking about the parties the Black Kings threw inside and outside the building.

  “Did you make a note of that, Millie?” Ms. Bailey asked an old woman to her left. She was the official LAC recording secretary. Millie nodded while scribbling away.

  “Okay,” Ms. Bailey said, “go on, young man.”

  “Go on? I’ve been going on. I’m tired of going on. Each time I come here, I go on. I’m tired of it. Can you do something?”

  “You got that, Millie?” Ms. Bailey asked, looking over the rims of her glasses.

  “Mm-hmm,” Millie answered. “He’s tired of it, he’s been going on, and he wants you to do something.”

  “You can probably leave out the tired part,” Ms. Bailey said in a serious tone.

  “Yes, okay,” Millie said, scratching away in her notes.

  “Will there be anything else, young man?” Ms. Bailey asked. He didn’t say anything. “Okay, then, I’m figuring you don’t want to talk about the fact that you’re living here illegally. Is that right? Now, who’s next? Nobody? Okay, then, we have some serious business to discuss. Before I take questions, let me tell you that Pride will be here on Tuesday registering all of you to vote. Please make sure to show up. It’s very important we have a good turnout for them.”

  Pride was the organization I’d come across earlier, made up of ex-gang members and devoted to gang truces and voter registration. Ms. Bailey had already told me that she worked closely with them.

  “What are we voting for?” asked a young woman in the front row.

  “We’re not actually voting, sweetheart. You need to register first. If you’re already registered, you don’t need to come. But I want every apartment in this building registered.”

  “Ain’t you even a little bit concerned that we’re just helping J.T. and the rest of them?” an older woman asked. “I mean, they’re the only ones who seem to be getting something out of this.”

  “You want these boys to turn themselves around?” Ms. Bailey answered. “Then you got to take them seriously when they try to do right. It’s better than them shooting each other.”

  “The voting hasn’t done a damn thing for us!” someone cried out. “So why are you so accepting of what they’re doing?” A chorus of “oohs” followed the question.

  Ms. Bailey shushed the crowd. “Excuse me, Ms. Cartwright,” she said. “If you’re suggesting that I may be benefiting in any way by the voting stuff going on, you can just come out and say it.”

  “I’m not saying you may be benefiting,” Ms. Cartwright said. “I’m saying you are benefiting. You get that new TV on your own, Ms. Bailey?”

  This produced some more “oohs” and a round of outright giggling.

  “Let me remind you,” Ms. Bailey yelled, trying to reestablish order, “that we ain’t had no harassment, no shooting, no killing for six months. And that’s because these young men are getting right. So you can help them or you can just sit and moan. And about my TV. Who was the one that give you fifty bucks for your new fridge? And you, Ms. Elder, how exactly did you get that new mattress?”

  No one answered.

  “That’s what I thought. You-all can keep up the bitchin’ or you can realize that every one of us is benefiting from me helping these young men.”

  The rest of the meeting was similarly animated and followed this same pattern. Tenants accused Ms. Bailey of going easy on J.T.’s gang and personally benefiting from her alliance with them. She replied that her job was to help the tenants, period, and if that meant finding creative solutions to a multitude of problems, then she needed to be allowed such flexibility. To nearly every resident who complained, Ms. Bailey could cite an instance of giving money to that person for rent, for a utility bill, or to buy food or furniture. She plainly knew how to play the influence game. I’d been to her apartment a few times and, although she never let me stay for long, it was a testament to her skills: There were photos of her with political officials, several new refrigerators from the CHA, and cases of donated food and liquor. One bedroom was practically overrun with stacks of small appliances that she would give to tenants in her favor.

  At one point during the meeting, Ms. Bailey mentioned the “donations” that she regularly procured from the gang, to be applied to various tenants’ causes. J.T. had repeatedly told me that he had to keep Ms. Bailey happy-having his junior members carry out her orders, for instance, and paying her each month for the right to sell drugs in the lobby. But this was the first time I ever heard Ms. Bailey admit to this largesse. In fact, she discussed it with a measure of pride, highlighting her ability to put the gang’s ill-gotten gains to good use. Although none of the tenants said so, I also knew from J.T. that some of them received payoffs from the gang-in exchange for their silence or for allowing the gang to stash drugs, cash, or weapons in their apartments. For a poor family, it was hard to turn down the gang’s money.

  “Why are we even talking about J.T.?” asked an older man. “Why don’t we just go to the police? Can you tell me what you get from taking their help-or their money?”

  “You-all want this place clean,” Ms. Bailey said. “You want this place safe. You want this and that. And you want it right away. Well, the CHA ain’t doing nothing. So I have to find ways to take care of it.”

  “But we can’t walk around safely,” the man said. “My car got the windows shot out last year.”

  “Right,” Ms. Bailey countered. “That was last year, and sometimes that happens. But you see this place getting cleaned up. You see people getting rides to the store. Who do you think is doing that? Before you go yelling at J.T. and the rest of them, you better understand that they’re family, too. And they’re helping-which is more than I can say for you.”

  That a tenant leader-one who was respected by politicians, shop owners, the police, and others-would praise a crack gang and work so closely with its leader made me realize just how desperate people could become in the projects. But I was learning that Ms. Bailey’s compromising position also arose out of her own personal ambitions: in order to retain her authority, she had to collaborate with the other power groups, in this case the gangs, who helped shape the status quo. This resulted in the bizarre spectacle of Ms. Bailey’s publicly defending the very people who were shooting and causing trouble for her tenant families. Even though it was obvious that tenant leaders had few good choices, I still wasn’t convinced that they needed to operate in such murky ethical waters. Nevertheless I found myself wondering how much Ms. Bailey’s actions were actually a response to hardships that limited her options and how much arose from her own desire to have power.

  As the meeting broke up, people approached Ms. Bailey for one-on-one conversations. They all had their grievances: no hot water or a broken sink, a child getting in trouble, prostitutes taking clients into the stairwell, crack addicts partying the whole night.

 
Afterward Ms. Bailey motioned me into her office. Catrina was looking over some notes she’d taken at the meeting. Ms. Bailey asked her to get together with Millie, the LAC secretary, to prepare a list of tenant concerns to pass along to the CHA.

  Ms. Bailey opened a small refrigerator and took out sodas for all of us. Grabbing a small blue rag, she wiped her sweaty forehead. “Did that live up to your expectations?” she asked me with a wink.

  “Well, I thought you were just going to make a few announcements!” I said, laughing. “What do you do with everything you heard? I mean, a lot of it was directed at you. They were saying some pretty harsh things.”

  “We tell the CHA that things ain’t working in the building, and we try to get them to fix it. That’s it.”

  “And do you tell them about residents accusing you of taking gang money?”

  “We tell the CHA that things ain’t working in the building, and we try to get them to fix it.”

  She smiled cunningly and looked over to Catrina, who returned the dutiful glance of an ever-loyal junior officer.

  “Sudhir, you have to remember something,” Ms. Bailey continued. “In the projects it’s more important that you take care of the problem first. Then you worry about how you took care of the problem.” I opened my mouth to object, but she stopped me. “If no one dies, then all the complaining don’t mean nothing, because I’m doing my job. If all I got to worry about is a few people wondering where the money’s coming from, then around here that’s a good day! No one dies, no one gets hurt, I’m doing my job.”

  “That’s an awful way to live,” I blurted out.

  “Now you’re starting to understand,” she said in a tone somewhere between pedantic and patronizing. “Maybe you’re even starting to learn.”

  Someone knocked on the door, and Ms. Bailey got up to answer it. Catrina leaned in toward me. “Watch how she helps people,” she whispered. “She says it don’t matter, but she’s amazing. Have you seen how she gets apartments fixed around here?”

  I told her that I hadn’t.

  “Have you seen how she helps women around here?” Catrina pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose and kept her voice low. I felt as if we were in high school and I was sneaking a conversation with the teacher’s pet.

  “Well, Ms. Bailey gives away food to the mothers, right?” I whispered back.

  Catrina shook her head and inhaled deeply, looking disappointed in me. “That’s not what I’m talking about. You watch what she does when she helps women. Pay attention to that.” Her voice was insistent, but she offered no more details. “She is the most amazing person I know.”

  As I spent more time with Ms. Bailey over the coming months, I found that most tenants were less suspicious of me than they’d been in the past. Sometimes, when a tenant came into Ms. Bailey’s office to talk about a problem, the tenant would say, “It’s okay, I don’t mind if Sudhir listens.”

  Like J.T., Ms. Bailey seemed to enjoy the fact that I was interested in her. Perhaps she, too, thought I was going to be her personal biographer. I could see why she might make this assumption. I took every opportunity to express my fascination for her life, which seemed more fascinating the more I hung around.

  One cold winter morning, I sat in Ms. Bailey’s office with Catrina. It was a slow day, and only a few tenants visited. Ms. Bailey asked if I would go out and get her some coffee, and Catrina came with me. We bundled up and trudged through eight inches of fresh snow. The wind was nearly strong enough to blow you over; it was too cold for even a conversation. Catrina and I just concentrated on stepping in the footprints of people who’d made a first pass in the snow. Catrina wondered aloud what kind of God would make the earth so cold.

  As we slogged our way back to the building, coffee and doughnuts in hand, a young woman hurried over to us as best as she could. “Catrina, you got to come quick,” she said. “Ms. Bailey ran upstairs to Taneesha’s apartment. She said you have to call Officer Reggie.”

  Catrina shoved the coffee at me and ran off as fast as possible under the circumstances. Since tenants had a tough time getting the police to respond, Ms. Bailey summoned Officer Reggie, the cop who’d grown up in Robert Taylor, when the situation warranted.

  “Where’s Taneesha live?” I yelled.

  The young woman who’d summoned Catrina shouted back over her shoulder, “Twelve-oh-four!”

  Approaching the building, I encountered a couple of J.T.’s gang members. They wore brown work boots and thick down jackets with the Oakland Raiders’ distinctive silver-and-black insignia. To me it seemed too cold for business, but I could see a steady stream of cars coming down the alley to buy drugs. White and black addicts jumped out of their cars and ran into the lobby to buy crack. As I walked inside, one of J.T.’s men shouted to me, “They’re up on the twelfth. Elevator’s broken.”

  The stairwells were brutally cold. I had to stop a few times to catch my breath. I came across quite a few other people, all of them upset by the broken elevators. “Merry fucking Christmas,” one said to me bitterly as he passed by with a heavy laundry bag.

  As I stepped into the gallery on the twelfth floor, I saw a group of men standing outside Apartment 1204. I recognized C-Note and a few other squatters among them. They were all moving about, trying to keep warm, some of them jumping up and down. The gallery floor was concrete, so even if you were wearing thick-soled shoes, the cold still shot up your legs.

  The door of 1204 was partially open. Ms. Bailey stood over the sofa and, when she caught sight of me, beckoned me inside. I had met Taneesha a few times, most recently at her twenty-first birthday party, which J.T. had thrown. She was tall and very pretty, with long, straight black hair, and she was trying to make a career as a model. She currently modeled clothes at various nightclubs-so-called lingerie parties-and also went to college at night. She had a baby boy, Justin, named for her favorite high-school teacher, who had encouraged her to pursue modeling.

  Everyone suspected that J.T. was the baby’s father. He had told me never to ask him about the baby.

  The light in her apartment was dim, but bright enough to show that her face was beaten badly and her white T-shirt was stained with blood. Her breathing was labored, her eyes closed; you could hear the blood gurgling in her mouth. Another young woman held her hand and comforted her. “They’re coming,” she said, “the ambulance is coming. Just relax, ’Neesha.”

  Ms. Bailey pulled me aside and asked if I would drive Taneesha to the hospital.

  “I don’t have a car, Ms. Bailey,” I said. “Didn’t you call the ambulance?”

  “Okay, then, do me a favor,” she said. “Ask C-Note to tell the boys in the lobby to take her.”

  “What about the ambulance?”

  “Oh, no, baby,” Ms. Bailey said softly. “They never come.”

  I wasn’t sure whether to believe her, but at least fifteen minutes had passed since I’d arrived and there was no ambulance. Provident Hospital was only two miles away.

  I walked out to the gallery and told C-Note, who simply leaned over and yelled down to the street twelve floors below. “Cheetah! Yo, Cheetah! Ms. Bailey says bring the car ’round! You got to take her to the hospital!”

  “C-Note!” Ms. Bailey shouted out. “Don’t yell! He’s still in the building. Damn, we can’t have him leaving the building.”

  I was confused. Whom didn’t she want to leave the building? Before I could ask, she rounded up the men and addressed them as if she were a general and they, however ragged, were her troops. “She got hurt pretty bad. She’ll make it, but she don’t look so good. I need you-all to find him. He goes by ‘Bee-Bee.’ He may be in 407, inside that vacant apartment, or at his cousin’s. I want to see him before you do anything to him.”

  I figured out that the man who had beat up Taneesha was hiding in the building.

  “What if he starts to run or gets crazy?” one of the men asked. “Can we get him then?”

  “Yeah, I suppose, but don’t hurt him too bad before
I talk to the fool. And don’t let him get away. Sudhir, could you call J.T.?”

  I nodded and followed C-Note and the others as they made for the stairwell. I recognized most of them as squatters who helped C-Note fix cars in the warmer months.

  As soon as we were out of Ms. Bailey’s earshot, I told C-Note I wanted to come with him.

  “Call J.T.,” he said, shaking his head. “Don’t mess around with this. Do what Ms. Bailey says, boy.”

  C-Note had called me “boy” only a few times, the last one when a friend of his was caught in a knife fight and C-Note instructed me to watch from inside a car, where I couldn’t get hurt.

  “I will, I will,” I insisted. “But I want to go.”

  C-Note realized I wouldn’t take no for an answer. “Just stay near me,” he said. “But if shit gets crazy and I tell you to leave, you go, right? You hear me?”

  Eight of us made our way down the stairwell, our breath leaving trails of hot steam in the frigid air. There were a lot of questions I wanted to ask. Who was Bee-Bee and what was his relationship with Taneesha? Did C-Note and the other men know him? But we were moving too fast, and C-Note was preoccupied, his eyes ablaze.

  We stopped just above the fourth-floor stairwell, since it was thought that Bee-Bee had taken refuge in Number 407. “Charlie, you and Blue go ahead,” C-Note said. “Shorty, you and them go to the other stairwell in case he runs past. Sudhir and me will stay in the back. Charlie, I’m right behind you, so if he got a knife, just let him go. I’ll get him.”

  It struck me that I might not be as far out of the way as I’d planned.

  All the men hurried to their positions. I could see the door to Number 407 from where I stood in the stairwell with C-Note. Charlie and Blue approached it. Like C-Note, they wore secondhand clothes and ill-fitting shoes. Charlie had a crowbar in his hand. Blue’s fist was clenched, but I couldn’t tell what he was holding.