Gang Leader for a Day

by Sudhir Venkatesh

  Once my prostitute research was under way, I asked Ms. Bailey if she would help me meet female hustlers who sold something other than sex. I had casual knowledge of any number of off-the-books businesses: women who sold food out of their apartments or catered parties; women who made clothing, offered marital counseling or baby-sitting; women who read horoscopes, styled hair, prepared taxes, drove gypsy cabs, and sold anything from candy to used appliances to stolen goods. But since most of these activities were conducted out of public view, I needed Ms. Bailey to open some doors.

  She was cautious. For the first week, she selectively introduced me to a few women but refused to let me meet others. I’d suggest a name, and she’d mull it over. “Well,” she’d say, “let me think about whether I want you to meet with her.” Or, just as often, “No, she’s not good. But I got someone else for you.” Once, after Ms. Bailey introduced me to a psychic, I asked if many other psychics worked in the building. “Maybe, maybe,” she said, then changed the subject and left the room.

  I eventually figured out why she was reluctant to let me explore the underground economy. As it turned out, tenant leaders like Ms. Bailey always got their cut from such activities. If you sold food out of your kitchen or took in other people’s children to baby-sit, you’d better give Ms. Bailey a few dollars, or you might find a CHA manager knocking on your door. If you occasionally cut hair in your apartment, it was probably a good idea to give Ms. Bailey a free styling once in a while. In these parts Ms. Bailey was like the local IRS-and probably a whole lot more successful at collecting her due.

  So the people she let me talk to were the ones she probably trusted most not to speak out of line. But I didn’t have much choice: Without Ms. Bailey’s say-so, no one was going to speak with me about any illegal activities.

  Truth be told, nearly everyone Ms. Bailey introduced me to had a fascinating story to tell. One of the most fascinating women I met was Cordella Levy, a close friend of Ms. Bailey. She was sixty-three years old and had lived in public housing her entire life, the past thirty years in Robert Taylor. (She had a Jewish surname, she said, because her grandmother had married a Jewish man; someone else in her family, however, told me that they were descended from black Hebrew Israelites.) Cordella had raised seven children, all but one of whom had moved out of Robert Taylor. Although she used a walkingcrutch to get around, Cordella had the fight of a bulldog inside her.

  She now ran a small candy store inside her apartment. All day long she sat on a stool by the door and waited for children to stop by. Her living room was barren except for the candy: boxes and boxes of lollipops, gum, and candy bars stacked invitingly on a few tables. If you peeked around the corner, you could see into the back bedroom, where Cordella had a TV, couches, and so on. But she liked to keep her candy room sparse, she told me, because if customers saw her furniture, they might decide to come back and rob her.

  “You know,” she told me, “I didn’t always sell candy.”

  “You mean you didn’t go to school for this?” I joked.

  “Sweetheart, I never made it past the fourth grade. Black folks weren’t really allowed to go to school in the South. What I meant was that I used to be somebody different. Ms. Bailey didn’t tell you?” I shook my head. “She told me you wanted to know how I used to hustle.”

  “I’d love to hear,” I said. Cordella seemed itching to tell her story.

  “Sweetheart, I’ve made money around here every which way you can. You know, I started out working for Ms. Bailey’s mother, Ella Bailey. Ella was a madam, used to have parties in the building. Oh, Lord! She could throw a party!”

  “Ms. Bailey’s mother was a madam?” I laughed. “That explains a lot!”

  “Yes, sir, and when she passed, I took over from her. Three apartments on the fourteenth floor. Cordella’s Place, they used to call it. Come in for a drink, play some cards, make a friend, have a nice time.”

  “Make a friend? Is that what they used to call it?”

  “Ain’t nothing wrong with friendship. And then I started making clothes, and then I sold some food, drove people around for a while to the store. My mother taught me how to sew wedding dresses, so I was doing a lot of-”

  “Wait!” I said. “Slow down, please. Let’s get back to helping people make friends. I’m curious why you stopped running the parties. What happened? I ask because all the people doing that today are men: J.T. and the pimps. I haven’t heard about any women.”

  “That’s because they took over. The men ruined everything for us. The first one was J.T.’s mama’s cousin, Miss Mae’s cousin. He just decided to start harassing all the women who were making money. I think it was around 1981. He would beat us up if we didn’t pay him money to work out of the building. I had to pay him a few dollars each week to manage my women and throw my parties. He nearly killed my friend because she wouldn’t give him money for doing hairstyling in her apartment. He was real awful. On heroin, used to carry around a big gun, like he was in the movies. And he was a very violent man.”

  “So what happened, he took over your parties?”

  “Well, all of a sudden, he told me I had to give him fifty percent of what I was making, and he’d protect me-keep the cops away. But I knew he couldn’t keep any cops away. The man was a thug and wasn’t even no good at that. I figured I had been doing it for a while, and so I just gave up and let him have the whole thing. But what I’m saying is that the women ran things around here, before the gangs and the rest of them took over. It was different, because we also helped people.”

  “How?”

  “See, people like me had a little power. I could get your apartment fixed or get you out of jail, because the cops were my best customers. These folks today, like J.T., they can’t do that.”

  “What about Ms. Bailey?”

  “Yeah, she can, but she’s just one person. Imagine if you had about fifty people like her doing their thing! Now, that was a sight. Fifty women, all powerful women with no shame. It was a different time. It was a time for women, a place for women.”

  For several days after I interviewed Cordella, I kept thinking of what she said: “It was a time for women, a place for women.” Her nostalgia reminded me of how Catrina, Ms. Bailey’s assistant, spoke so reverently of women helping each other in the building.

  I spent the next three months focused on meeting the matriarchs of the high-rises. There were plenty to choose from: more than 90 percent of the four thousand households in Robert Taylor were headed by a female. Whenever Ms. Bailey introduced me to an elderly dressmaker or a grandmother who offered day care to working parents, I tried to solicit stories about the past as well as details of her current enterprise.

  Many of these women had protested for civil rights in the 1960s and campaigned for black political candidates in the 1970s; they took the need to fight for their community very seriously. But during the 1980s and 1990s, as their plight was worsened by gangs, drugs, and even deeper poverty, they struggled just to keep their families together. By then the housing authority had grown corrupt and un-supportive, the police were largely unresponsive, and the tribe of strong women had been severely marginalized.

  While the official statistics said that 96 percent of Robert Taylor’s adult population was unemployed, many tenants did have part-time legitimate jobs-as restaurant workers, cabdrivers, cleaning ladies in downtown corporate offices, and nannies to middle-class families. But nearly all of them tried to hide any legitimate income from the CHA, lest they lose their lease or other welfare benefits.

  There were also working men living in Robert Taylor, perhaps a few dozen in each building. But they stayed largely out of sight, again because of the CHA limits on how much money a tenant family could earn. Sometimes a man would leave home for a few weeks just to keep the CHA inspectors off guard. So when I or someone else they didn’t recognize came into an apartment, the men might head for the back room. They didn’t attend many tenant meetings, and for the most part they let the women handle the battl
e for better living conditions. The absence of men in Robert Taylor had made it that much easier for the gang members and pimps to essentially have the run of the place.

  As I began compiling statistics on the illicit earnings generated by women throughout Robert Taylor, it became obvious that all their illicit earnings combined hardly constituted a lucrative economy. Selling food or candy out of your apartment might net you about twenty dollars per week. (Cordella Levy managed to do better than that, having persuaded a local grocery store to sell her candy wholesale in return for steering her customers to that store for their groceries.) Day care brought in five or ten dollars per day per child, but business wasn’t steady. A woman could earn more selling sex, but that was risky in a few ways. One of the favored moneymaking options, therefore, was to take in a boarder, which could generate a hundred dollars a month. There was never any shortage of people who needed a place to stay.

  But I also discovered something more interesting, and probably more important, than the money that changed hands in these various transactions. Many households participated in a vast web of exchange in which women borrowed, bartered, and pooled their resources to survive. One woman might offer day care for a large group of women, another might have a car and contribute by driving folks to buy groceries, and other women might take turns cookingfor various families. In some cases the members of a network maintained a fixed formula of exchange: If you cook my family five dinners, I’ll take care of your kids for two days.

  Often a network of women would share their apartments as well. Let’s say there were five women on one floor whose apartments had maintenance problems (which, given the condition of the buildings, wasn’t uncommon). There was little chance that the CHA would respond to all their repair requests, and the women couldn’t afford to pay five different bribes to Ms. Bailey or the CHA building manager. These women would pool their money to make sure they could pay the necessary bribes so that at least one apartment in their network had hot water and at least two had working refrigerators and stoves; perhaps one of them would also pay for pirated cable TV. Everyone would shower in one apartment, cook in another apartment, keep their food elsewhere, sit in the one air-conditioned room to watch the one TV with cable, and so on. To have your own apartment with all utilities functioning was a luxury that few people expected in Robert Taylor.

  I met most of the neighborhood’s male hustlers by hanging out in the local parking lot with C-Note. He let people know that it was safe to speak with me. There were always a lot of men milling around, talking and drinking, who represented the diversity of the neighborhood hustlers: carpenters who did inexpensive home repairs, freelance preachers, truck drivers who worked off the books for local factories, car thieves, rappers and musicians, cooks and cleaners. All of them made their money under the table.

  Most of them had once held legitimate jobs that they lost out of either misfortune or misbehavior. Until a few years earlier, they could have gotten a few hundred dollars a month in welfare money, but by 1990, Illinois and many other states eliminated such aid for adult men. The conservative revolution launched by President Ronald Reagan would lead eventually to a complete welfare overhaul, culminating in the 1996 directive by President Bill Clinton that made welfare a temporary program by setting time limits on just about every form of public aid-for men, women, and children.

  For men like the ones in Robert Taylor, the welfare changes only exacerbated their poverty. They all learned to keep track of which restaurants and churches offered free food and which abandoned buildings were available for sleeping. Like the women, the men also had a network: One would cook while another looked for work while yet another tried to find a place for all of them to sleep. If they heard of a vacant apartment, they’d pool their resources to bribe the CHA building manager, gang leader, tenant leader, or whoever else happened to have the key. These men also passed along information to cops in exchange for “get out of jail free” promises, and they could always make a few dollars from CHA janitors-who regularly paid off hustlers to clean the buildings when they felt like taking a day off.

  C-Note introduced me to Porter Harris, a bone-thin man, sixtyfive years old, who spent much of his time scouring the South Side for recyclable junk. When I met him, he was pushing a shopping cart filled with wire, cans, and metal scrap, trolling the tall grass between the high-rises and the railroad tracks. Years ago, Porter told me, he was the one who dictated where various hustlers in Robert Taylor could work, sell, and trade, much as C-Note did now. But he’d had to leave because of a battle with a gang leader.

  “Booty Caldwell, real name was Carter,” he told me in a southern drawl. “That was the one who kicked me out of here for good.” Porter picked at his few remaining teeth with a blade of grass. He wore a floppy straw hat that made him look as if he’d stepped out of a faded photograph from the Old South. “There were about ten of us. I controlled Forty-seventh Street to Fifty-first. I had this whole area-you couldn’t sell your soul without letting me know about it, yessir.”

  “Sounds like a good living,” I said, smiling. “You were the king of hustlers?”

  “Lord, king, and chief. Call it what you want, I ran that area. And then one day it all was taken away. By Booty Caldwell. He was part of the El Rukn gang.” By the late 1960s, El Rukn had become the most powerful gang in Chicago. They were widely credited with uniting many independent gangs, making peace treaties and cooperative arrangements that resulted in a few El Rukn “supergangs.” But a federal indictment in the mid-1980s weakened El Rukn, allowing other gangs, including the Black Kings, to take over the burgeoning crack trade.

  From Porter, C-Note, and others, I learned that the most profitable hustling jobs for men were in manual labor: you could earn five hundred dollars a month fixing cars in a parking lot or roughly three hundred dollars a month cleaning up at the local schools. The worst-paying jobs, meanwhile, often required the longest hours: gathering up scrap metal or aluminum (a hundred dollars a month) or selling stolen clothes or cigarettes (about seventy-five dollars a month). While just about every hustler I interviewed told me that he was hoping for a legit job and a better life, I rarely saw anyone get out of the hustling racket unless he died or went to jail.

  One day, after I’d spent hours interviewing Porter and some of the other male hustlers, I was summoned to Ms. Bailey’s office. I’d been so busy that I hadn’t seen her in a while. It was probably a good idea, I thought, to have a catch-up session.

  I said hello to Catrina on my way in, and she gave me a smile. She was assuming more and more duties and seemed to be acting nearly as a junior officer to Ms. Bailey. Inside, J.T. and Ms. Bailey were laughing together and greeted me heartily.

  “Mr. Professor!” J.T. said. “My mother says you haven’t been by in a month! What, you don’t like us anymore? You found somebody who cooks better?”

  “You better not piss off Ms. Mae,” Ms. Bailey said. “You’ll never be able to come back in the building again.”

  “Sorry, all this interviewing has kept me really busy,” I said, exasperated. “I just haven’t had time to do much of anything else.”

  “Well, then, sit down, baby,” Ms. Bailey said. “We won’t keep you long. We just wanted to know who you’ve been meeting. We’re curious about what you’ve learned.”

  “Hey, you know what, I could actually use the chance to tell you what I’ve been finding,” I said, taking out my notebooks. “I’ve been meeting so many people, and I can’t be sure whether they’re telling me the truth about how much they earn. I suppose I want to know whether I’m really understanding what it’s like to hustle around here.”

  “Sure,” J.T. said. “We were just talking about that. You used to ask us to find you people. Now you do it yourself. We feel like you don’t need us no more.” He started laughing, and so did Ms. Bailey.

  “Yeah,” Ms. Bailey said. “Don’t leave us behind, Mr. Professor, when you start to be successful! Go ahead, tell me who you’ve been talking to. If you te
ll us who you met and what they’re doing, maybe we can check for you and see if folks are being straight.”

  For the next three hours, I went through my notebooks and told them what I’d learned about dozens of hustlers, male and female. There was Bird, the guy who sold license plates, Social Security cards, and small appliances out of his van. Doritha the tax preparer.

  Candy, one of the only female carpenters in the neighborhood. Prince, the man who could pirate gas and electricity for your apartment. J.T. and Ms. Bailey rarely seemed surprised, although every now and then one of them perked up when I mentioned a particularly enterprising hustler or a woman who had recently started taking in boarders.

  I finally left, riding the bus home to my apartment. I was grateful for having had the opportunity to discuss my findings with two of the neighborhood’s most formidable power brokers. As I looked out the bus windows, I realized just how much I owed Ms. Bailey and J.T. If it weren’t for the two of them, and a few other people like C-Note and Autry, I wouldn’t ever have made any progress in learning how things really worked around Robert Taylor.

  Ispent the next few weeks turning the information in my note-books into statistical tables and graphs that showed how much different hustlers made. I figured that J.T. would appreciate this data at least as much as my professors would, since he was always talking about the importance of data analysis within his managerial technique. So I headed over to Robert Taylor to show him my research.