Gang Leader for a Day

by Sudhir Venkatesh

  Catrina was leaving as I entered. She said nothing, just shook her head as if in disapproval. I stepped into Ms. Bailey’s office. “Ms. Bailey, I have to apologize.” I told her about my involvement with Bee-Bee.

  She stared at me for a while. I fidgeted.

  “That’s not really what bothers me, Sudhir,” she finally said. “What bothers me is that you are seeing things and you may not be ready for it.”

  “I’m not sure I understand.”

  “See, if you were in a war and you were a reporter, you could just say what’s going on. No one would be mad at you. But this ain’t a war. I try to tell you that all the time. It’s every day. Every day something happens like what happened to ’Neesha. And you’re getting yourself in the middle. People are saying, ‘Sudhir’s tough, he beat up that man almost by himself. He’ll do things for us.’ You understand why that’s a problem?”

  “I’m not sure. You think they’ll hire me to beat up people?”

  “They might, they might not. But they will start talking about you. Sometimes they’ll give you credit, and sometimes they’ll blame you. Understand?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “And when you say, ‘No, I can’t help you with that,’ they’ll say, ‘But you helped ’Neesha, so why won’t you help me?’ Then they’ll say, ‘Sudhir don’t care about us,’ or ‘Sudhir is ’Neesha’s manager.’ Then they’ll say, ‘Sudhir is working for Ms. Bailey, and he don’t do nothing unless he gets paid.’ Get it?”

  “I think I get it.” I sat silently and stared into my hands. “When do you think I should see these things?”

  “Well, why do you want to see what we do? I mean, why don’t you hang around the police? You should figure out why they don’t come.”

  “Ms. Bailey, I wanted to ask you about that. Did you really call the police? Or the ambulance?”

  “Sudhir, the hardest thing for middle-class white folk to understand is why those people don’t come when we call.”

  Ms. Bailey didn’t think I was actually white, but she always tried to show me how my middle-class background got in the way of understanding life in the projects.

  “They just don’t come around all the time. And so we have to find ways to deal with it. I’m not sure how much better I can explain it to you. Why don’t you watch out for the next few months? See how much they come around.”

  “What about Officer Reggie?”

  “Yes, he’s a friend. But can I tell you how he can be helpful? Not by coming and putting Bee-Bee in jail. Because he’ll be out in the morning. But Officer Reggie can visit Bee-Bee after we’re through with him. Maybe put the fear in him.”

  “Put the fear in him? I don’t understand.”

  “He could visit Bee-Bee and tell him that we won’t be so nice the next time he does that to ’Neesha. If Bee-Bee knows that the cop don’t care if we kick his ass, that may make him think twice. That is what we need Officer Reggie for.”

  “Ms. Bailey, I have to tell you that I just don’t get it. I’ve been watching you for a while, and it just seems to me that you shouldn’t have to be doing everything you’re doing. If you got the help you needed, you wouldn’t have to act like this.”

  “Sudhir, what’s the first thing I told you when you asked about my job?”

  I smiled as I thought of something she’d told me months earlier: “As long as I’m helping people, something ain’t right about this community. When they don’t need me no more, that’s when I know they’re okay.”

  But she’d been helping for three decades and didn’t see any end in sight.

  One day in the middle of February, the Wilson family lost their front door. The Wilsons lived on the twelfth floor, just down the hall from Ms. Bailey. Their door simply fell off its hinges, leaving the family exposed to the brutal cold of a Chicago winter.

  Even with a front door, the Robert Taylor Homes weren’t very comfortable in the winter. Because the galleries are outdoors, you can practically get blown over by the lake wind as you walk from the elevator to your apartment. Inside, the winter wind inevitably finds its way through the seams in the doorframe.

  Chris Wilson worked for the city and moved in and out of Robert Taylor, living off-the-lease with his wife, Mari, and her six children. Chris and Mari were, unsurprisingly, pretty anxious when they lost their door. It wasn’t just the cold; they were worried about being robbed. It was common knowledge that drug addicts would pounce on any opportunity to steal a TV or anything else of value.

  The Wilsons tried calling the CHA but got no response. They put up a makeshift door of wooden planks and plastic sheeting, but it didn’t keep out the cold. Neighbors who said they’d keep an eye on the apartment didn’t show up reliably. So after a few days, the Wilsons called Ms. Bailey.

  Ms. Bailey leaped into action. She asked J.T. to station a few of his gang members in the twelfth-floor stairwells to keep out potential burglars. As a preventive measure, J.T. also shut down a nearby vacant apartment that was being used as a crack den. Then Ms. Bailey contacted two people she knew at the CHA. The first was a man who obtained a voucher so the Wilsons could stay at an inexpensive motel until their door was fixed. The second person was able to speed up the requisition process for obtaining a new door. It arrived two days after Ms. Bailey placed her first call.

  The door didn’t come cheap for the Wilsons. They had to pay Ms. Bailey several hundred dollars, which covered the fees that she paid to her CHA friends, as well as an electrician’s bill, since some of the wiring in the Wilsons’ apartment went bad because of the cold. Ms. Bailey presumably pocketed the rest of the money. Mari Wilson was, on balance, unperturbed. “Last summer we didn’t have running water for a month,” she told me, “so one week without a door was nothing.”

  Having watched Ms. Bailey help women like Taneesha and families like the Wilsons, I was left with deeply mixed feelings about her methodology-often ingenious and just as often morally questionable. With such scarce resources available, I understood why she believed that the ends justified the means. But collaborating with gangs, bribing officials for services, and redistributing drug money did little to help the typical family in her building. Ms. Bailey had told me that she would much rather play by the rules if only the rules worked. But in the end I concluded that what really drove Ms. Bailey was a thirst for power. She liked the fact she could get things done (and get paid for it), and she wasn’t about to give that up, even if it meant that sometimes her families might get short shrift. Many families, meanwhile, were too scared to challenge her and invite the consequences of her wrath.

  I was left discouraged by the sort of power bestowed upon building presidents like Ms. Bailey. People in this community shouldn’t have to wait more than a week to get a new front door. People in this community shouldn’t have to wonder if the ambulance or police would bother responding. People in this community shouldn’t have to pay a go-between like Ms. Bailey to get the services that most Americans barely bother to think about. No one in the suburb where I grew up would tolerate such inconvenience and neglect.

  But life in the projects wasn’t like my life in the suburbs. Not only was it harder, but it was utterly unpredictable, which necessitated a different set of rules for getting by. And living in a building with a powerful tenant leader, as hard as that life could be, was slightly less hard. It may have cost a little more to get what you needed, but at least you had a chance.

  SIX. The Hustler and the Hustled

  Four years deep into my research, it came to my attention that I might get into a lot of trouble if I kept doing what I’d been doing.

  During a casual conversation with a couple of my professors, in which I apprised them of how J.T.’s gang went about planning a drive-by shooting-they often sent a young woman to surreptitiously cozy up to the rival gang and learn enough information to prepare a surprise attack-my professors duly apprised me that I needed to consult a lawyer. Apparently the research I was doing lay a bit out of bounds of the typical academic rese
arch.

  Bill Wilson told me to stop visiting the projects until I got some legal advice. I tried to convince Wilson to let me at least hang out around the Boys & Girls Club, but he shot me a look indicating that his position was not negotiable.

  I did see a lawyer, and I learned a few important things.

  First, if I became aware of a plan to physically harm somebody, I was obliged to tell the police. Meaning I could no longer watch the gang plan a drive-by shooting, although I could speak with them about drive-bys in the abstract.

  Second, there was no such thing as “researcher-client confidentiality,” akin to the privilege conferred upon lawyers, doctors, or priests. This meant that if I were ever subpoenaed to testify against the gang, I would be legally obligated to participate. If I withheld information, I could be cited for contempt. While some states offer so-called shield laws that allow journalists to protect their confidential sources, no such protection exists for academic researchers.

  It wasn’t as if I had any intention of joining the gang in an actual drive-by shooting (nor would they ever invite me). But since I could get in trouble just for driving around with them while they talked about shooting somebody, I had to rethink my approach. I would especially have to be clearer with J.T. We had spoken several times about my involvement; when I was gang leader for a day, for instance, he knew my limits and I understood his. But now I would need to tell him, and perhaps a few others, about the fact that I was legally obligated to share my notes if I was ever subpoenaed.

  This legal advice was ultimately helpful in that it led me to seriously take stock of my research. It was getting to be time for me to start thinking about the next stage: writing up my notes into a dissertation. I had become so involved in the daily drama of tagging along with Ms. Bailey and J.T. that I’d nearly abandoned my study of the broader underground economy my professors wanted to be the backbone of my research.

  So I returned to Robert Taylor armed with two objectives: let people know about my legal issues and glean more details of the tenants’ illegal economic activities.

  I figured that most people would balk at revealing the economics of hustling, but when I presented the idea to J.T., Ms. Bailey, and several others, nearly everyone agreed to cooperate. Most of the hustlers liked being taken seriously as businesspeople-and, it should be said, they were eager to know if they earned more than their competitors. I emphasized that I wouldn’t be able to share the details of anyone else’s business, but most people just shrugged off my caveat as a technicality that could be gotten around.

  So with the blessing of J.T. and Ms. Bailey, I began devoting my time to interviewing the local hustlers: candy sellers, pimps and prostitutes, tailors, psychics, squeegee men.

  I also told J.T. and Ms. Bailey about my second problem, my legal obligation to share notes with the police.

  “You mean you didn’t know this all along?” Ms. Bailey said. “Even I knew that you have to tell police what you’re doing-unless you give them information on the sly.”

  “Oh, no!” I protested. “I’m not going to be an informant.”

  “Sweetheart, we’re all informants around here. Nothing to be ashamed of. Just make sure that you get what you need, I always say. And don’t let them beat you up.”

  “I’m not sharing my data with them-that’s what I mean.”

  “You mean you’ll go to prison?”

  “Well, not exactly. I just mean I won’t share my data with them.”

  “Do you know what being in contempt means?”

  When I didn’t reply, Ms. Bailey shook her head in disgust. I had seen this look before: she was wondering how I had qualified for higher education given my lack of street smarts.

  “Any nigger around here can tell you that you got two choices,” she said. “Tell them what they want or sit in Cook County Jail.”

  I was silent, trying to think of a third option.

  “I’ll ask you again,” she said. “Will you give up your information, or will you agree to go to jail?”

  “You need to know that? That’s important to you?”

  “Sudhir, let me explain something to you. You think we were born yesterday around here. Haven’t we had this conversation a hundred times? You think we don’t know what you do? You think we don’t know that you keep all your notebooks in Ms. Mae’s apartment?”

  I shuddered. Ms. Mae had made me feel so comfortable in her apartment that I’d never even entertained the possibility that someone like Ms. Bailey would think about-and perhaps even page through-my notebooks.

  “So why let me hang out?” I asked.

  “Why do you want to hang out?”

  “I suppose I’m learning. That’s what I do, study the poor.”

  “Okay, well, you want to act like a saint, then you go ahead,” Ms. Bailey said, laughing. “Of course you’re learning! But you are also hustling. And we’re all hustlers. So when we see another one of us, we gravitate toward them. Because we need other hustlers to survive.”

  “You mean that people think I can do something for them if they talk to me?”

  “They know you can do something for them!” she yelped, leaning across the table and practically spitting out her words. “And they know you will, because you need to get your information. You’re a hustler, I can see it. You’ll do anything to get what you want. Just don’t be ashamed of it.”

  I tried to turn the conversation back to the narrow legal issue, but Ms. Bailey kept on lecturing me.

  “I’ll be honest with you,” she said, sitting back in her chair. “If you do tell the police, everyone here will find you and beat the shit out of you. So that’s why we know you won’t tell nobody.” She smiled as if she’d won the battle.

  So who should I be worried about? I wondered. The police or Ms. Bailey and the tenants?

  When I told J.T. about my legal concerns, he looked at me with some surprise. “I could’ve told you all that!” he said. “Listen, I’m never going to tell you anything that’s going to land me in jail-or get me killed. So it don’t bother me what you write down, because I can take care of myself. But that’s really not what you should be worried about.”

  I waited.

  “What you should be asking yourself is this: ‘Am I going to be on the side of black folks or the cops?’ Once you decide, you’ll do whatever it takes. You understand?”

  I didn’t.

  “Let me try again. Either you’re with us-you feel like you’re in this with us and you respect that-or you’re just here to look around. So far these niggers can tell that you’ve been with us. You come back every day. Just don’t change, and nothing will go wrong, at least not around here.”

  J.T.’s advice seemed vague and a bit too philosophical. Ms. Bailey’s warning-that I would get beat up if I betrayed confidences- made more sense. But maybe J.T. was saying the same thing, in his own way.

  I decided to focus my study of the underground economy on the three high-rise buildings that formed the core of J.T.’s territory. I already knew quite a bit-that squatters fixed cars in the alleys, people sold meals out of their homes, and prostitutes took clients to vacant apartments-but I had never asked people how much money they made, what kind of expenses they incurred, and so on.

  J.T. was far more enthusiastic about my project than I’d imagined he would be, although I couldn’t figure out why.

  “I have a great idea,” he told me one day. “I think you should talk to all the pimps. Then you can go to all the whores. Then I’ll let you talk to all the people stealing cars. Oh, yeah! And you also have folks selling stolen stuff. I mean, there’s a whole bunch of people you can talk to about selling shoes or shirts! And I’ll make sure they cooperate with you. Don’t worry, they won’t say no.”

  “Well, we don’t want to force anyone to talk to me,” I said, even though I was excited about meeting all these people. “I can’t make anyone talk to me.”

  “I know,” J.T. said, breaking into a smile. “But I can.”

&n
bsp; I laughed. “No, you can’t do that. That’s what I’m saying. That wouldn’t be good for my research.”

  “Fine, fine,” he said. “I’ll do it, but I won’t tell you.”

  J.T. arranged for me to start interviewing the pimps. He explained that he taxed all the pimps working in or around his buildings: some paid a flat fee, others paid a percentage of their take, and all paid in kind by providing women to J.T.’s members at no cost. The pimps had to pay extra, of course, if they used a vacant apartment as a brothel; they even paid a fee to use the stairwells or a parking lot.

  As I began interviewing the pimps, I also befriended some of the freelance prostitutes like Clarisse who lived and worked in the building. “Oh, my ladies will love the attention,” Clarisse said when I asked for help in talking to these women. Within two weeks I had interviewed more than twenty of them.

  Between these conversations and my interviews with the pimps, some distinctions began to emerge. The prostitutes who were managed by pimps (these women were known as “affiliates”) had some clear advantages over the “independents” who worked for themselves.The typical affiliate was beaten up far less frequently-about once a year, as against roughly four times a year for the independents. The affiliates also earned about twenty dollars per week more than the independents, even though their pimps took a 33 percent cut. (Twenty dollars wasn’t a small sum, considering that the average Robert Taylor prostitute earned only about one hundred dollars per week.) And I never heard of an affiliate being killed in the line of work, whereas in one recent two-year stretch three independents were killed.

  But the two types of prostitutes had much in common. Both groups had high rates of heroin and crack use, and they were bound to the projects, where the demand for sex came mostly from low-income customers. At the truck stops on the other side of the Dan Ryan Expressway-barely a mile away from Robert Taylor but a different ecosystem entirely-a different set of pimps catered to a clientele of white truckers who paid more than the typical black customer in a housing project. Around Robert Taylor a prostitute usually earned ten to twenty dollars for oral sex, sometimes as little as twenty-five dollars for intercourse, and at least fifty dollars for anal sex. But if she was in need of drugs, she would drop her price significantly or accept a few bags of drugs in lieu of any cash.