Gang Leader for a Day

by Sudhir Venkatesh

  Most of the tenants I spoke with greeted this news with disbelief. Did the politicians really have the will or the power to relocate tens of thousands of poor black people? “The projects will be here forever,” was the phrase I heard from one tenant after another. Only the most elderly tenants seemed to believe that demolition could be a reality. They had already seen the government use urban renewal- or, in their words, “Negro removal”-to move hundreds of thousandsof black Chicagoans, replacing their homes and businesses with highways, sports stadiums, universities-and, of course, huge tracts of public housing.

  From the outset urban renewal held the seeds of its own failure. White political leaders blocked the construction of housing for blacks in the more desirable white neighborhoods. And even though blighted low-rise buildings in the ghetto were replaced with high-rises like the Robert Taylor Homes, the quality of the housing stock wasn’t much better. Things might have been different if housing authorities around the country were given the necessary funds to keep up maintenance on these new buildings. But the buildings that had once been the hope of urban renewal were already, a short forty years later, ready for demolition again.

  A mid all this uncertainty, I finally heard from J.T. He called with the news that his promotion was official. He asked if I still wanted to join him in meetings with some citywide BK leaders.

  “They’re actually interested in talking with you,” he said, surprise in his voice. “They want someone to hear their stories, about jail, about their lives. I thought they might not want to talk because of what’s going on”-he meant the recent gang arrests-“but they were up for it.”

  I told J.T. that I’d been talking to my professors about winding down my field research and finishing the dissertation. I had completed all my classes and passed all my exams, and I was now focused on writing my study about the intricate ways in which the members of a poor community eked out a living. Bill Wilson had arranged for me to present my research at various academic conferences, in hopes of attracting a teaching position for me. My academic career probably started the day I met J.T., but the attention of established sociologists made me feel as though I had just now reached the starting gate. Katchen had completed her applications to law school, and both of us were expecting to leave Chicago soon.

  There were other factors, too: Many of the tenants in Robert Taylor felt betrayed by me, cops were warning me not to hang out, and now the projects themselves were about to come down. All this combined to make it pretty clear that I wouldn’t be spending time in the projects much longer.

  J.T. reacted dismissively, saying I shouldn’t even think about leaving now. “We’ve been together for the longest,” he said. “If you really want to know what my organization is about, you got to watch what happens. We’re on the move, we’re only getting bigger, and you need to see this.”

  J.T. wouldn’t take no for an answer. There was something child-like about his insistence, as if pleading with someone not to abandon him. He laughed and chatted on spiritedly about the future of the BKs, about his own ascension, about the “great book” I would someday write about his life.

  I tried to take it all in, but the sentences started to bleed into one another. I simply sat there, phone to my ear, mumbling “Uh-huh” whenever J.T. took a breath. It was time to acknowledge, if only to myself, exactly what I’d been doing these past several years: I came, I saw, I hustled. Even if J.T. wouldn’t allow me to move on just yet, that’s what I was ready to do.

  Not that this acknowledgment of my inner hustler gave me any peace. I was full of unease about my conduct in the projects. I had actively misled J.T. into thinking that I was writing his biography, mostly by never denying it. This might have been cute in the early days of our time together, but by now it was purely selfish not to tell him what my study was really about. I tended to retreat from conflict, however. This was a useful trait in obtaining information. But as my tenure in the projects was ending, I was noticing the darker side of avoidance.

  With other tenants I played the role of objective social scientist, however inaccurate (and perhaps impossible) this academic conceit may be. I didn’t necessarily feel that I was misrepresenting my intentions. I always told people, for instance, that I was writing up my findings into a dissertation. But it was obvious that there was a clear power dynamic and that they held the short end of the stick. I had the choice of ending my time in the projects; they did not. Long after I was finished studying poverty, they would most likely continue living as poor Americans.

  EIGHT. The Stay-Together Gang

  One July day in 1995, I drove to Calumet Heights, a neighborhood that lay just across the expressway from Chicago’s South Side. In an otherwise run-down working-class area, Calumet Heights stood out for its many middle- and upper-class black families who took great pride in the appearance of their houses. The neighborhood was also home to several of the most powerful gang leaders in the Midwest, including Jerry Tillman and Brian Jackson of the Black Kings. In a practice common among gang leaders, Jerry and Brian had each bought a big suburban home for their moms, and they both spent considerable time there themselves.

  Today they were throwing a BK pool party at Brian’s house; Jerry was supplying the food and beer. Brian lived in a long, white, Prairie-style home built in the style of Frank Lloyd Wright. Parked on the lawn were a dozen expensive sports cars, which belonged to the BK senior leadership, and a lot of lesser sports cars parked along the curb, which belonged to the junior leadership. A bunch of young men stood around idly on the lawn, caps shading their eyes from the sun. These were BK foot soldiers, in charge of guarding their bosses’ cars.

  I parked my own rusting Cutlass at the curb and approached the house. I spotted Barry, one of J.T.’s foot soldiers, standing next to J.T.’s purple Malibu. He nodded me toward the house’s rear entrance.

  J.T. had been meeting regularly with Chicago’s highest-ranking BK leaders for some time before he invited me to this party. I was excited. I had envisioned half-naked women sitting poolside and rubbing the bosses with sunscreen while everyone passed around marijuana joints and cold beer.

  What I saw for real was far less glamorous. True to stereotype, there was an expensive stereo blasting rap music through a dozen speakers and some big crystal statues of wild animals, and a few people were indeed rolling joints. But overall the place looked as worn as an old fraternity house. The leather couches were badly stained, and so were the carpets. I found out later that the gangsters’ mothers felt lonely in the suburbs and told their sons they preferred living in the ghetto, with their friends. Nor were there any half-naked women to be seen, or any women at all. It was a members-only party, and seemingly a pretty tight-knit affair. J.T. had told me that these gatherings were held every few weeks, more often if there were pressing matters to discuss. Although the events were mostly social, he said, the gang leaders inevitably wound up talking business as the evening wore on: Which wholesaler was offering the best and cheapest cocaine? Which neighborhood gangs were acting up and needed discipline?

  I bumped into J.T. as he came out of the kitchen. We shook hands and hugged; he seemed to be in a good mood. Small groups of men were congregating in the kitchen, the dining room, and the living room; I could hear the roar of computer games in a back room. Everyone seemed relaxed and at ease.

  J.T. brought me over to a group of men and introduced me as “the Professor,” which prompted laughs all around. Most of the men were large, their potbellies perhaps the best evidence of a capacity for self-indulgence. They were all tattooed and wore showy gold and silver jewelry. As I would find out later, every one of them had been jailed on a felony at least once.

  J.T. hadn’t told me exactly how he’d explained my presence to his colleagues and superiors. I just had to trust him. No one seemed even remotely threatened-but then again I wasn’t walking around with a tape recorder or asking intrusive questions. In fact, I didn’t need to. The men would randomly come up to me and start talking about thems
elves and, especially, the history of the Black Kings. “In the 1960s, gangs were leading a black revolution,” one of them said. “We’re trying to do the same.” Another took a similar tack, echoing what J.T. had told me many times: “You need to understand that the Black Kings are not a gang; we are a community organization, responding to people’s needs.”

  One of the men put his arm around me warmly and escorted me into the dining room, where a poker game was being played. There must have been thirty thousand or forty thousand dollars in bills on the table. My guide introduced himself as Cliff. He was a senior BK, in his late forties, who acted as a sort of consigliere for the gang, providing advice to the up-and-coming leaders. “All right, folks, listen up!” he said, trying to gain the poker players’ attention. They glanced up briefly. “This is our new director of communications,” Cliff said. “The Professor is going to help us get our word out. Make sure you all talk with him before you leave.”

  I shuddered. J.T. was sitting on the couch with a beer in his hand. He just smiled and shrugged. Two thoughts ran through my mind. On the one hand, I was impressed that J.T. had the confidence to invite me and nominate me for such an exalted position (although part of me felt like I was on the receiving end of a surreal practical joke; perhaps they were just testing my mettle?). On the other hand, knowing that these men managed an organized criminal enterprise, I was scared that I was falling into a hole I could never dig myself out of. I had repeatedly tried to distance myself from the gang, or at least stake out my neutrality. But J.T.’s warning from years earlier rang just as true today: “Either you’re with me or you’re with someone else.” In this world there was no such thing as neutral, as much as the precepts of my academic field might state otherwise.

  I attended several of these high-level BK gatherings. Although I didn’t conduct any formal interviews, in just a few months I was able to learn a good bit about the gang leaders and their business by just hanging around. Over time they seemed to forget that I was even there, or maybe they just didn’t care. They rarely spoke openly about drugs, other than to note the death of a supplier or a change in the price of powder cocaine. Most of their talk concerned the burdens of management: how to keep the shorties in line, how to best bribe tenant leaders and police officers, which local businesses were willing to launder their cash.

  I did harbor a low-grade fear that I would someday be asked to represent the BKs in a press release or a media interview. But that fear wasn’t enough to prevent me from attending as many parties and poker games as J.T. invited me to. I would joke on occasion with J.T.’s superiors that I really had no skills or services to offer them. They never formally appointed me as their director of communications- or even made such an explicit offer, so I just assumed that no such role really existed.

  As a member of the younger set of leaders who had only recently been promoted to these ranks, J.T. was generally a quiet presence. He didn’t speak much with me either. But my presence seemed to provide him with some value. It signaled to the others that J.T. had leadership capacities and unique resources: namely, that he was using his link with a student from a prestigious university to help remake the gang’s image in the wider world. To that end, the gang leaders continued to approach me to discuss the gang’s history and its “community-building” efforts. I took most of this with a grain of salt, as I’d come to consider such claims not only blatantly self-serving but greatly exaggerated.

  Watching J.T. operate in this rarefied club, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of pride in him. By now I had spent about six years hanging out with J.T., and at some level I was pleased that he was winning recognition for his achievements. Such thoughts were usually accompanied by an equally powerful disquietude at the fact that I took so much pleasure in the rise of a drug-dealing gangster.

  Now that he’d graduated into the gang’s leadership, J.T. became even more worried about the basic insecurities of gang life-the constant threat of arrest and imprisonment, injury and death. This anxiety had begun to grow in the weeks after Price was wounded in the drive-by shooting. J.T. began asking me to review his life year by year so that I wouldn’t be missing any details for his biography. By this point my dissertation had little to do with J.T., and I believe he knew that, even though I’d been hesitant to say so outright. Still, the arrests were making him nervous, and he wanted to be sure that I was faithfully recording the events of his life. He also became obsessed with saving money for his mother and his children in case something happened to him. He even began selling off some of his cars and expensive jewelry.

  At the same time, he started to make more money because of his promotion. Not only were there additional BK sales crews whose earnings J.T. could tax, but, as if in an investment bank or law-firm partnership, he also began receiving a share of the overall BK revenues produced by drug sales, extortion, and taxation. By now he was probably earning at least two hundred thousand dollars a year in cash.

  His promotion also carried additional risk. At the suburban meetings I attended, the leaders spoke anxiously about which gang leaders had been named in federal indictments and who was most likely to cooperate with the authorities. I also heard about a young gang member who’d been severely beaten because his bosses thought he had turned snitch.

  Amid the beer drinking, gambling, and carousing at these parties, there was a strong undercurrent of paranoia. For me it was a bizarre experience, since the leaders began voicing their fears to me privately, as if I were a confessor of some sort, knowledgeable about their trade but powerless to harm them. Cold Man, a forty-five-year-old leader who ran the BKs’ operation on the city’s West Side, asked me to step outside for a cigarette so we could talk. He tended to take the long view. “We need to be careful in these times of war,” he told me, alluding to the arrests and their potential to create turn-coats within the gang. “Don’t trust nobody, especially your friends. I love these niggers, they’re my family, but now is not the time to go soft.”

  Pootchie, a smart thirty-year-old leader who’d recently been promoted along with J.T., one night asked me to sit with him in his car to talk. “I’m not going to do this forever,” he said. “I’m here to make my money and get the fuck out.”

  “What will you do next?” I asked.

  “I’m a dancer-tap, jazz, all of it. I’d like to get my own place and teach.”

  I couldn’t help laughing. Pootchie looked sheepish. “Sorry!” I said. “I don’t mean to laugh, but it’s just surprising.”

  “Yeah, my father used to dance, and my mother was a singer. I dropped out of school-stupidest thing I ever did-but I got a business sense about me. I probably saved a few hundred grand. And I ain’t getting arrested. No way. I got bigger things I’m into. Not like some of these jailhouse niggers. I ain’t one of them. I’m an operator.”

  I learned that Pootchie’s distinction between “jailhouse niggers” and “operators” was an essential one. These were the two kinds of leaders within the Black Kings. The first was devoted to building solidarity and staying together during difficult times, like the present threat of widespread arrests. These leaders were known as “jailhouse niggers,” since they had learned from prison that you didn’t survive unless you formed alliances and loyalties. These men tended to be the older leaders, in their late thirties or forties, and they tended to speak more of the BK “family” as opposed to the BK “business.” The “operators,” meanwhile, were a more entrepreneurial breed, like Pootchie and J.T. They were usually younger-J.T. was about thirty by now-and saw the gang primarily as a commercial enterprise. J.T. wanted to be a respected “community man,” to be sure, but that was more of a practical gambit than an ideological one.

  Riding back to the South Side one night with J.T. from a suburban poker game, I sat quietly in the dark. J.T. was in a somber mood. As we pulled up to my apartment building, he admitted that the federal indictments were driving everyone a bit mad. “No one trusts nobody,” he said. “They’ll shoot you for looking funny.” J.T.
shook his head. “I never realized how easy life was when it was just the projects. If they think I’m talking with the cops, I’ll be killed right away. Sometimes I think I should get my money and get out.”

  As he said this, I immediately thought, I’d better get my data and get out! But I didn’t. I kept going back to the BK meetings. With the gang’s most senior officers talking to me, I figured I’d better be careful about how I chose to exit the group. As paranoid as everyone was these days, now was not the time for sudden movements.

  J.T.’s life had also become complicated by the possible demolition of the Robert Taylor Homes. He was smart enough to know that his success was due in considerable part to geography: The concentration of people around Robert Taylor and its great location, near traffic corridors and expressways, guaranteed a huge customer base. J.T. might have been a good business-man, but every drug dealer in Chicago knew that Robert Taylor was among the best sales locations in the city.

  So if the projects were torn down, J.T. would lose his customer base as well as much of his gang membership, since most of his young members lived in Robert Taylor.

  Accordingly, J.T. was far less sanguine about the demolition than some tenants were. He thought it was folly to think that poor families could alter the buildings’ fate. Sometimes he’d just sit detachedly when we were together, muttering to himself, “Man, I need a plan. I need a plan. I have to think what I’m going to do…”

  He also had to worry about retaining his senior leaders, Price and T-Bone. They, too, were getting anxious, since their best shot at success-and their biggest incentive to stay in the gang-was the opportunity to become a leader. If Robert Taylor was torn down, then J.T.’s stock would probably fall, and so would theirs.