Gang Leader for a Day

by Sudhir Venkatesh

  A few weeks later, Reggie invited me to a South Side bar fre-quented by black cops. “I think you’re getting a real one-sided view of our work,” he said.

  His offer surprised me. Reggie was a reserved man, and he rarely introduced me to other police officers even if they were standing nearby. He preferred to speak with me behind closed doors-in Ms. Bailey’s office, inside the Boys & Girls Club, or in his car.

  We met at the bar on a Saturday afternoon. It was located a few blocks from the precinct and Robert Taylor. It was nondescript on the outside, marked only by some neon beer signs. On either side of it lay fast-food restaurants, liquor stores, and check-cashing shops. Even Reggie didn’t know the bar’s actual name. “I’ve been coming here for fifteen years,” he said, “and I never even bothered to ask.” He and the other cops just called it “the Lounge.” The place was just as nondescript inside: a long wooden bar, several tables, dim lighting, some Bears and Bulls posters. It had the feel of a well-worn den in a working-class home. All the patrons were black and at least in their mid-thirties, with a few old-timers nursing an afternoon beer.

  Reggie sat us down at a table and introduced me to three of his off-duty colleagues. From the outset they seemed wary of speaking about their work. And since I never liked to question people too much until I got to know them, the conversation was stiff to say the least. In a short time, we covered my ethnic background, the Chicago Bears, and the strange beliefs of the university crowd in Hyde Park. The cops, like most working-class Chicagoans, thought that Hyde Park liberals-myself included, presumably-held quaint, unrealistic views of reality, especially in terms of racial integration. To these men Hyde Park was known as the “why can’t everyone just get along?” part of town.

  One of the cops, a man named Jerry, sat staring at me the entire time. I felt sure I’d seen him before. He was quietly drinking whiskey shots with beer chasers. Once in a while, he’d spit out a question: “So you think you know a lot about gangs, huh?” or “What are you going to write about, Mr. Professor?” I got a little nervous when he started calling me “Mr. Professor,” since that’s how I was known in J.T.’s building. Was this just a coincidence?

  The more Officer Jerry drank, the more belligerent he became. “You university types like to talk about how much you know, don’t you?” he said. “You like to talk about how you’re going to solve all these problems, don’t you?”

  Reggie shot me a glance as if to say that I’d better defend myself.

  “Well, if you think I don’t know something, why don’t you teach me?” I said. I’d had a few beers myself by now, and I probably sounded more aggressive than I’d intended.

  “Motherfucker!” Jerry leaned in hard toward me. “You think I don’t know who you fucking are? You think we all don’t know what you’re doing? If you want to play with us, you better be real careful. If you like watching, you may get caught.”

  A shiver ran over me when he said “watching.” Now I knew exactly where I’d seen him. In J.T.’s buildings Officer Jerry was well known, and by my estimation he was a rogue cop. Some months earlier, I’d been sitting in a stairwell interviewing a few prostitutes and pimps. I heard a commotion in the gallery. The stairwell door was partially open; looking out, I could see three police officers busting open an apartment door. Two of them, one black and one white, ran inside. The third, who was black, stayed outside guarding the door. He didn’t seem to notice us.

  A minute later the cops hauled out a man and a teenage boy. Neither of them resisted, and neither seemed very surprised. The teenager was handcuffed, and they forced him to the floor. The mother was screaming, as was the baby in her arms.

  Then a fourth cop showed up, swaggering down the hall. It was Officer Jerry. He wore black pants, a black and blue fleece jacket, and a bulletproof vest. He started to beat and kick the father violently. “Where’s the money, nigger?” he shouted. “Where’s the cash?”

  I was shocked. I glanced at the folks I’d been talking to in the stairwell. They looked as if they’d seen this before, but they also looked anxious, sitting in silence in the apparent hope that the cops wouldn’t come for them next.

  Finally the man relented. He, too, lay on the floor, bloodied. “In the oven,” he said, “in the oven.”

  Officer Jerry went inside and returned with a large brown bag. “Don’t fuck with us,” he told the father. “You hear me?”

  The father just sat there, dazed. The other cops took the hand-cuffs off the teenager and let him back into the apartment.

  Just as Officer Jerry was leaving, one of the pimps sitting next to me accidentally dropped a beer bottle. Officer Jerry turned and looked down the gallery, straight at us. I jumped back, but he stomped into the stairwell. He cast his eye over the lot of us. “Get the fuck out of here!” he said. Then, noticing me, he smirked, as if I were no more significant than a flea.

  Once he left, I asked one of the pimps, Timothy, about Officer Jerry. “He gets to come in the building whenever he wants and get a piece of the action,” he said. Timothy told me that Sonny, the man that Officer Jerry had just beaten, stole cars for a living but had apparently neglected to pay his regular protection fee to Officer Jerry. “We always joke that whenever Officer Jerry runs out of money, he comes in here and beats up a nigger,” Timothy said. “He got me once last year. Took two hundred bucks and then my girl had to suck his dick. Asshole.”

  In the coming months, I learned that Officer Jerry was a notorious presence in the building. I heard dozens of stories from tenants who said they’d suffered all forms of harassment, abuse, and shakedowns at the hands of Officer Jerry. It was hard to corroborate these stories, but based on what I’d seen with my own eyes, they weren’t hard to believe. And to some degree, it probably didn’t much matter whether all the reports of his abusive behavior were true. In the projects, the “bad cop” story was a myth that residents spread at will out of sheer frustration that they lived in a high-crime area where the police presence was minimal at best, unchecked at worst.

  Now, sitting across the table from him at the Lounge, I started to feel extremely nervous. What if he somehow knew that I had recorded all these incidents in my notebooks?

  He sat there sputtering with rage, shaking the table. I looked over at Reggie, hoping for some help.

  “Jerry, leave him alone,” Reggie said quietly, fiddling with his beer. “He’s okay.”

  “Okay? Are you kidding me? You trust that motherfucking Ay-rab?!” Jerry tossed back his shot and grabbed the beer. I thought he might throw the bottle at me. He let out a nasty laugh. “Just tell him to stay out of my way.”

  “Listen, I’m only trying to get a better understanding of what you do,” I said. “Maybe I could tell you a little bit about my research.”

  “Fuck you,” Jerry said, staring me down. “You write any of that shit down, and I’ll come after your ass. You got me? I don’t want to talk to you, I don’t want you talking to nobody else, and I don’t want to see you around these motherfucking projects. I know who you are, motherfucker. Don’t think I don’t know what you’re doing.”

  Reggie grabbed my arm and threw a twenty-dollar bill on the table. “Let’s go,” he said.

  When we got to the car, Reggie started the ignition but didn’t drive away. He began to speak gently but firmly, his tone almost parental. “Sudhir, I brought you here today because these guys wanted to know who you are and what you’re up to. I didn’t want to tell you that, because I knew you’d be nervous. They know you’re watching, they know you’ve seen them in the building, they know you’re going to be writing something. I told them that you were a good person. Jerry was too drunk-I’m sorry about that.”

  Reggie held his silence for a few minutes, looking out at the busy street.

  “I think you have to make a decision, Sudhir,” he said. “And I can’t make it for you. I never really asked you what you’ll be writing about. I thought you were just helping the club, but then Autry told me last week that you’re w
riting about life in the projects. You and I have talked about a lot of things. But we never talked about whether you would write what I say. I hope not. I mean, if you are, I’d like you to tell me right now. But that’s not really the problem, because I’m not afraid of what I do or what I am.”

  Up to this point, Reggie knew that I was interviewing families and others for my graduate research. A few months later, we wound up talking further about my dissertation, and he said it would be okay to include anything he’d told me, but we agreed to change his name so he couldn’t be identified.

  At this moment, however, what really concerned me was the reaction of his colleagues. “Reggie, are you telling me I need to worry if I write about cops?”

  “Police don’t talk a lot to people like you,” he said. “Like Jerry. He doesn’t want people watching what he does. I know you’ve seen him do some stupid shit. I know you’ve seen a lot of people do some stupid shit. But you need to decide: What good does it do to write about what he does? If you want to work around here, maybe you keep some of this out.”

  I left Reggie that evening not knowing what I should do. If I wanted to write about effective policing-like the good, creative work that Reggie did-I would feel compelled to write about abusive policing as well.

  A week later I was talking to Autry about my dilemma. We were having a beer in the South Shore apartment where he lived with his wife and children. South Shore was a stately neighborhood with pockets of low-income apartments that someone like Autry could afford. He had moved there to keep his children away from street gangs.

  Autry insisted that I not write about the police. His explanation was revealing. “You need to understand that there are two gangs in the projects,” he said. “The police are also a gang, but they really have the power. I mean, these niggers run around with money and cars, but at any moment the cops can get them off the street. They know about you. They’ve been talking with me, and I’ve been telling them you’re okay, but they want to know what you’re looking for.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me this before?” I asked.

  “I didn’t want to worry you, and you haven’t done nothing wrong,” he said. “But you need to do what I do. Never, never, never piss off the police.”

  When I pressed Autry on the subject, he wouldn’t say anything more, other than flatly repeating his advice: “Don’t write about them.”

  Two weeks later my car was broken into. It was parked across the street from the Boys & Girls Club. Curiously, however, neither the lock nor the window was broken; instead the lock had been expertly picked. My backpack and the glove compartment had both been thoroughly rummaged, with some pens, paper, a couple of candy bars, and my gym clothes strewn about. But nothing seemed to be missing. Although I sometimes kept a few notebooks in my backpack, on this occasion I hadn’t.

  I went inside to tell Autry. “Let’s call Reggie,” he said. “Don’t touch anything.”

  We waited for Reggie inside the club, where a children’s Christmas party was in progress. The mood was happy, especially since some local stores had donated crates of food for tenant families.

  Reggie arrived wearing a Santa hat. He’d been at another Christmas party, passing out toys donated by police officers. When he saw my car, he dropped his head and then peered at Autry.

  “Did you talk with him?” he asked Autry.

  “I did, but he’s pigheaded. He don’t listen.”

  I was confused.

  “Sudhir, is there any way you could let me know when you’re going to come around here?” Reggie asked. “I mean, maybe you could page me and leave a message.”

  “What are you talking about? I come over here nearly every day! Can you guys please tell me what’s going on?”

  “Let’s go for a walk,” Reggie said, grabbing my arm.

  It was freezing, and the wind was howling. We walked around the project buildings. The fresh snow made the high-rises look like gravestones sticking up from the ground.

  “Sudhir, you’re getting into something you shouldn’t be messing with,” Reggie said. “You’ve been reading about the gang busts, right?”

  Yes, I told him. The newspapers had been reporting the recent arrests of some of the highest-level drug dealers in Chicago. These arrests were apparently intended to interrupt the trade between the Mexican-American gangs who imported cocaine and the black gangsters who sold crack.

  Word on the street was that the FBI and other federal agencies were behind the arrests. Although I hadn’t been in touch with J.T. lately-he was still busy settling into his expanded Black Kings duties-he had told me in the past that federal involvement frightened the gangs. “Once you see the feds, that’s when you worry,” he said. “If it’s local, we never worry. As long as you don’t do something stupid, you’ll be okay.” Although the recent arrests involved gang leaders more senior than J.T., and not even in his neighborhood, he was habitually concerned that federal officials would work their way down the ladder to him. He also reasoned that the feds would specifically target the Black Kings if possible, considering that the gang ran what was probably the city’s smoothest drug operation.

  Reggie now told me that the feds were indeed working Chicago-and hard. They were hoping to indict the drug gangs under the powerful Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, which was instituted in 1970 to combat the Mafia and other crime groups that dealt in money laundering, gambling, and union shakedowns. RICO had been so successful in disrupting Italian, Irish, and Jewish crime gangs that the feds were now using it to go after street gangs, claiming that they, too, were organized criminal enterprises.

  Reggie explained that he, like most street cops, hated it when federal agents came to town. They were so eager for high-profile indictments, he said, that they’d use allegations of police improprieties to leverage local cops into turning over their gang intelligence. This in turn would disrupt the relationships that cops like Reggie had carefully built up in the community.

  “What does all this mean for you?” I asked. “And for me?”

  “For me it means I got to do everything by the book. For you it means you have to be very, very careful. I heard from Ms. Bailey that you’re asking a lot of people about us. Now, that doesn’t bother me, like I said before. But there are a lot of folks where I work who think you’re trying to bust them, do you understand?”

  “Bust them?”

  “They think you’re looking for dirt. Looking to find something to hold against them. I wouldn’t worry about your car. Just trust me, it won’t happen again.”

  After this talk with Reggie, I began to fear the police much more than I had ever feared J.T. and the gangs. As Autry had told me, it was the cops who had the real power. They controlled where and how openly the gang could operate, and, if so inclined, they could put just about anyone in jail. Still, as both Autry and J.T. had told me, the cops rarely arrested gang leaders, since they preferred to know who was in control rather than having to deal with an unpredictable leader or, even worse, a power vacuum. When I asked Reggie if this was really true, his response-he dropped his head and asked me not to press him on the issue-seemed to indicate that it was.

  Not every cop in the projects was corrupt or abusive, but I had become nervous about getting on the cops’ bad side. I had no desire to get beaten up or be regularly harassed. I’d grown up thinking of cops as people you trusted to help when things went bad, but that wasn’t the way things worked here, even for me. Not that I’d endeared myself to the cops: I came into the projects by befriending a gang leader, after all, and I hung out with a lot of tenants who did illegal things for a living.

  Looking back, I think it would have been better to learn more about the neighborhood from the cops’ perspective. But this wouldn’t have been easy. Most tenants probably would have stopped speaking with me if they thought I was even remotely tied to the police. One reason journalists often publish thin stories about the projects is that they typically rely on the police for information
, and this reliance makes the tenants turn their backs.

  As it was, the best I could do was try to learn a little bit from cops like Reggie. He could be just as creative in his approach to police work as some of the tenants were in their approach to survival. If this meant sharing information with gang members to ensure that their wars didn’t kill innocents, so be it. Rather than arresting young gang members, Reggie and other cops used “scared straight” tactics to try to get them to stop dealing. I also watched many times as the police mediated disputes between hustlers; and even though they weren’t always responsive to domestic-abuse calls, many cops did help Ms. Bailey scare perpetrators so they wouldn’t come into the high-rise again.

  It wasn’t until months after my car was broken into that Reggie confirmed it had been the police who did it. Officer Jerry and a few of his friends were apparently concerned about the contents of my notebooks and wanted to find them. Bad Buck, a young man from Robert Taylor whom I’d befriended, had told the police that I kept my notes in my car. Reggie said that Buck had been caught holding a thousand dollars’ worth of cocaine and had surrendered the information about my notes in exchange for not going to jail.

  In early 1995 the newspapers began to report another story of major import for the residents of Robert Taylor, this one with even greater consequences than the federal drug busts. Members of Congress and the Clinton administration had begun serious discussions with mayors across the country to propose knocking down housing projects. Henry Cisneros, the secretary of housing and urban development, claimed that “high-rises just don’t work.” He and his staff spoke of demolishing these “islands of poverty,” with the goal of pushing their inhabitants to live where “residents of different incomes interact with one another.” Cisneros singled out Chicago’s projects as “without question, the worst public housing in America today.” The Robert Taylor Homes were said to be at the very top of the demolition list. They were to be replaced by an upscale town-house development called Legends South, which would include just a few hundred units of public housing.