Gang Leader for a Day

by Sudhir Venkatesh

  It was important, she said, to start with the most stable family in the network. That was Cherry, who worked thirty hours a week as a fast-food cashier and also went to night school. Dorothy’s plan called for Cherry to find an apartment in a good neighborhood and then bring the other families over.

  While this plan seemed pretty straightforward, Dorothy told me that success was hardly guaranteed. “Things never go as planned,” she said bluntly, “because we’re dealing with poor people.”

  Dorothy’s first obstacle was Ms. Reemes, a powerful tenant in her building, who was not elected to any office but had great influence with the CHA and police. Like Ms. Bailey, Ms. Reemes expected families to pay her a fee, anywhere from fifty to two hundred dollars, for smoothing the relocation process. Every family that Dorothy helped meant one less potential bribe for Ms. Reemes. Although the building hadn’t even been singled out yet for demolition, Ms. Reemes was already accepting “deposits” from families who wanted a rent voucher or relocation services.

  “She wanted me to give her a cut,” Dorothy said, “and I told her I’m not even getting paid to help these people! So I told her to go to hell. That lady is so selfish.”

  As Dorothy told it, Ms. Reemes was so miffed by Dorothy’s refusal to play the payoff game that she went on a harassment campaign. First, Dorothy said, Ms. Reemes put in a bad word about Dorothy with the CHA. Within a week Dorothy’s two grown daughters, both of whom lived in the same building, received eviction notices for late payment of rent. This was particularly surprising, since one of her daughters had no income and was therefore excused from paying any rent at all. Dorothy successfully got the eviction notices rescinded. Then a CHA janitor cut off the electricity in Dorothy’s apartment, but Dorothy paid a squatter to restore it. Ms. Reemes then tried to get the gangs to harass Dorothy, not realizing that Dorothy’s own son was a senior gang leader. He paid Ms. Reemes a personal visit, and she backed down.

  Through a classified ad in the Chicago Sun-Times, Dorothy found a two-bedroom apartment for Cherry’s family in Woodlawn, a poor but stable neighborhood about two miles away, near Hyde Park and the university. Because Dorothy had a CHA connection who helped Cherry get a $500-a-month housing voucher, she had to pay only $150 a month out of pocket.

  Soon after Cherry moved in with her children and an aunt who would provide day care, Dorothy found a large apartment nearby for Princess and her three children. The only problem was that Princess’s brother and uncle heard about this and decided that they also wanted to move in. If they were found to be living there, Princess would lose her rent voucher on the grounds of illegal tenancy. Worse yet, her brother and uncle were drug dealers who wanted to use Princess’s apartment as a new base of operations. “Princess has put up with those two fools for too long, and it’s hurting her kids,” Dorothy told me. “I wanted her to start over, and now her brother and uncle are going to mess everything up.”

  So Dorothy, with Princess in tow, went to confront the two men at a local bar where they hung out. Princess was worried, since both of them smoked crack and were prone to violence, but Dorothy feared no one. As Princess later described it, Dorothy stormed into the bar and loudly told the two men they’d have her to deal with if they moved in with Princess. The men threatened to beat up Dorothy and then stomped away. They retaliated by calling Princess’s new landlord and, posing as CHA officials, warned the landlord that Princess was a gang member. The landlord promptly called Dorothy.

  He didn’t necessarily believe that Princess was in a gang, he said, but he wasn’t willing to take the chance. So Princess lost her lease. Dorothy eventually found Princess another apartment, but it was smaller, more expensive, and a few miles away from Cherry.

  And then Marna was thrown in jail for six months for stabbing her boyfriend. Dorothy moved Marna’s children around from one apartment to another so that the social workers couldn’t find them and send them to foster care. Soon after, Dorothy heard that Candy had promised J.T. that the Black Kings could stash guns and drugs in the new apartment that Dorothy was helping her rent. Since J.T. was paying Candy for this service, Dorothy had little leverage to persuade her to do otherwise. Within a year Candy would lose her lease (and her rent subsidy) when the landlord called the police, having seen so many people tromping in and out of her apartment.

  The most astounding story concerning Dorothy-one that I could never independently verify-also had to do with the police. She told me that Ms. Reemes called in Officer Jerry, the rogue cop, who caught her in the lobby, dragged her into a vacant apartment, planted drugs on her, and threatened to arrest her for possession if she didn’t stop competing with Ms. Reemes. When Dorothy refused, Officer Jerry arrested her, but she managed to enlist some other police officers, including Officer Reggie, to set her free. According to Dorothy, Officer Jerry returned two weeks later and told Dorothy that if she just paid Ms. Reemes a share of “her cut”- which, Dorothy insisted, didn’t exist-then he would leave her alone.

  In the end Dorothy’s list included twelve families chosen for the Stay-Together Gang. Despite her perseverance, she was able to help only four of them move out together, to neighboring apartments in Woodlawn and South Shore. I would spend much of the next decade keeping track of the Robert Taylor Homes’ former tenants to see how they adapted to life beyond the projects. As it turned out, Dorothy’s success rate was easily as good as that of the various social-services agencies contracted by the CHA, each of which was awarded hundreds of thousands of dollars to carry out the job. Dorothy herself would stay in Robert Taylor until it was demolished, and then she joined her daughter, Lee-Lee, in Englewood, a high-crime, predominantly black neighborhood a few miles away.

  Dorothy’s move to Lee-Lee’s house was, unfortunately, a typical outcome for many tenants who left Robert Taylor and other CHA projects. While the goal of the demolition was to move families to safer, integrated communities, the CHA was so inept that nearly 90 percent of the relocated tenants wound up living in poor black areas that left them as badly off as being in the projects, or worse.

  In place of the projects, the city began to build market-rate condominiums and town houses, three-story structures tucked cozily together instead of the sixteen-story high-rises separated by vast expanses. Robert Taylor tenants had been promised the right to return to the community once construction was done, but fewer than 10 percent of the units were set aside for public-housing families. It is little wonder that the prevailing wisdom in Chicago is that the Daley administration and the powerful real-estate interests, rather than creating new and improved low-income housing, in fact knocked down the projects to initiate a land grab. As of this writing, the new apartments are set to house mostly middle- and upper-class families.

  A few months after T-Bone gave me the Black Kings’ financial ledgers, Ms. Bailey invited me to a back-to-school party for the children in her building. J.T. had given her a thousand dollars to throw the party and to buy the kids some sneakers, clothes, and school supplies.

  I hadn’t been spending much time around J.T.’s building in the months leading up to the party. I was generally holed up in the library, working on my dissertation. My advisers and I had agreed that it should explore how families cope with poverty-specifically, how CHA tenants solved problems and kept the community together without much help from the government or charities.

  When I arrived for the party, it felt like my first visits from years earlier. There were cars parked all around the basketball court, rap music blasting away, kids running everywhere, and squatters grilling burgers and hot dogs to earn a little money. J.T. and his senior officers were drinking beer and casting an eye over the entire scene. J.T., Ms. Mae, Ms. Bailey, and some of the other tenants greeted me with the same carefree attitude they had showed me when I first began coming around. As I watched Ms. Bailey and some of the other older women tend to the children, I couldn’t help but feel kind of nostalgic. Everyone looked a bit older and more fatigued-just like me, I suppose.

 
I saw something out of the corner of my eye that stopped me cold: a small garden bursting with bright orange, red, and purple geraniums. In this vast stretch of concrete and patchy lawn, littered with broken bottles, used condoms, and empty crack vials, here was an oasis. I laughed to myself. Why hadn’t I ever noticed it before?

  I’d been so caught up with gangs, political chicanery, and the life of poverty that I had missed something so beautiful right there in front of me. What else had I missed because of my incessant drive to hustle?

  I thought back to the last time I’d noticed any flowers in Robert Taylor. It had been well over a year earlier. The tenants were preparing for a visit from President Bill Clinton. They were incredibly excited, but also unnerved. His visit was meant to highlight the unprecedented levels of gang violence in Chicago public housing.

  Clinton supported the use of police “sweeps,” the warrantless searches that the Chicago Police Department was using to combat the gang and drug problems. While the ACLU and other groups decried the sweeps as a violation of constitutional rights, Clinton argued that the right to “freedom from fear” was more important. He wanted inner-city residents to believe, as he believed, that the scourge of street gangs required extraordinary measures, and his trip to Robert Taylor provided a firsthand opportunity to persuade them.

  In the weeks before his visit, the project was turned upside down. The police conducted even more sweeps than usual, sometimes ransacking apartments indiscriminately. They also conducted random spot checks in the building lobbies, arresting a great many suspected drug dealers, including many young men who had nothing whatsoever to do with dealing drugs.

  J.T. didn’t go so far as to halt drug sales, but he was a bit more cautious, sometimes having his dealers take customers inside to an apartment to obtain the drugs rather than getting them on the street. He also stopped extorting from local stores, fearing that that might lead to arrest. And he stopped laundering money, stowing his cash in garbage bags until the neighborhood quieted down.

  On the streets, city tow trucks hauled away abandoned vehicles- as well as a lot of vehicles that might have looked abandoned but were in fact just old and beat up. On top of all this disorder, the weather was unrelentingly hot and humid.

  Still, there was hope in the air. Because of Bill Clinton’s overwhelming popularity among African Americans, even the most cynical tenants-including the people whose cars had been towed- were excited about his visit. Tenant leaders led campaigns to spruce up their buildings’ lobbies, hallways, and playgrounds. Tenant patrols went door-to-door asking people to tidy up their living rooms and clean their toilets; in one building, snakes and other strange pets were confiscated from certain households. And throughout the project, aged flower beds sprang to life.

  In the early days of Robert Taylor, the buildings had competed against one another with flower gardens and other beautification projects. This dormant practice was now reborn in anticipation of the president’s visit. He obviously couldn’t visit all twenty-eight Robert Taylor buildings, and he might have time for just one. But this only heightened the intensity of the competition. A few tenant leaders called in favors with city officials to try to make sure their building was on the president’s list. Some of them curried additional favor by turning in drug dealers to the police.

  The 5011 building, located on the far south side of Robert Taylor, showed particular enthusiasm. This was fueled by the belief that a new construction project next door to 5011 was in fact the construction of a presidential podium. The tenant leader taxed the local gang twenty-five hundred dollars to fund a wide-scale restoration effort. The building’s children were given new clothes and shoes; a mural of historic African-American figures was painted along the building’s ground floor; a few particularly civic-minded tenants even wrote speeches, just in case the president called them up to the podium. And families planted rows and rows of flowers in a garden that had seen nothing but trash for years.

  By the morning of June 17, 1994, the day of President Clinton’s visit, the residents of 5011 were fully ready. But his entourage sped past quickly, without so much as a wave. He gave his speech in another part of Robert Taylor. A few of the tenants in 5011 moaned and groaned, but generally they were satisfied that the president had showed up at all. Parents broke out soda and beer, and their kids caught the spirit and launched a party. After the initial disappointment, no one seemed willing to utter a spiteful word. For a time at least, the community shared a deep spirit of satisfaction, of having pulled together. Over and over again, you could hear tenants remark that they hadn’t seen such solidarity in decades.

  Now, a year later, the flower bed outside J.T.’s building stood as a similar sign of hope-and, in light of the imminent demolition of the projects, a sign of proud obstinacy.

  The back-to-school party was in full swing. Kids and grown-ups alike loaded their plates with food. A softball game started up, and a crowd of people gathered to watch. I milled about, saying hello to a lot of people I hadn’t seen in a while.

  Suddenly the sound of gunshots pierced the air, and everyone ran for cover. There were four or five shots, rapid fire, from what sounded like a pistol. Parents grabbed their kids and ducked behind cars or ran for the lobby. Above the blaring music, you could hear women screaming for their children. J.T. hollered for everyone to get down.

  I found myself crouching behind a car parked near the building. Beside me were a few of J.T.’s foot soldiers, young men I barely knew. I asked where the shooting was coming from. They immediately pointed up toward the upper floors of the building.

  “Niggers are probably high on dope,” one of them whispered. “Or else you got an MC who snuck up in the building. It used to be an MC building before we took it over.”

  Some distance away I could see a thin, dark-skinned woman staggering toward us across the grassy expanse in front of the building. Her clothes were sloppy, and she was practically falling down, probably either drunk or high. As she came closer, you could hear her talking to herself, most of it gibberish. People started yelling at her to take cover. A few of J.T.’s men shouted nasty names and threw beer bottles at her. It was pretty common for drug dealers to treat drug users with disdain; they often justified their line of work by pointing out that they took money from the most useless members of the community.

  Some more shots rang out from above, the bullets kicking up clouds of dirt a few feet from the woman.

  “That ain’t the MCs firing at us,” said the foot soldier beside me. “That’s just some nigger who is fucked up and looking to cause trouble.”

  Finally an older gentleman ran out, grabbed the staggering woman, and hustled her into the lobby. After about ten minutes with no more gunfire, most people felt comfortable enough to come out from their hiding places. Parents and children ran into the building, abandoning the party. The squatters and the hustlers, meanwhile, got back to their food and listened to the music. My heart kept racing for several minutes, but even I wasn’t surprised by now that nobody even bothered to call the police.

  In the spring of 1996, I learned that I had received a junior fel-lowship at Harvard’s Society of Fellows. I was ecstatic; it was a much-sought-after position, a three-year salaried research post. I went to tell J.T. the good news, and that I would soon be leaving town, although I still planned to maintain my ties to Chicago.

  The smells of Ms. Mae’s cooking-collard greens, cornbread, and smothered chicken-hit me as I walked in the door. “You still manage to get here right when the food is ready, don’t you?” J.T. said with a laugh.

  I apologized for missing the last few suburban Black Kings meetings.

  “They still think you’re the director of communications,” he said, laughing again but looking at the TV instead of at me. “There’s another meeting next Sunday if you want to come with me.”

  “Sure,” I said, trying to sound enthusiastic. “That would be great.” I explained why I’d been so busy lately. Until I learned of the Harvardfellowship,
I had been applying for teaching jobs at universities all over the country, including Columbia University in New York.

  J.T. interrupted my explanation. “You remember Curtis, that tall, dark boy you met?” He suddenly sat up and began to speak with great enthusiasm. “Curtis is from New Jersey, or at least he has work out there. Hey, what do you think about heading out there with me? I’ve been wanting to go and see how they do things. He and I have this bet. He says the women are hotter in his projects. Says I should come out and see.”

  I did remember Curtis, a nerdy-looking drug dealer who worked out of the housing projects in Newark. We had exchanged a few words at most when he came to visit J.T. about a year earlier.

  “Somehow,” I said to J.T., trying to sound appreciative, “I don’t think that would be such a good-”

  “Yeah, you’re probably right. Probably not the best time for us to leave right now, especially with everything that’s going on. You need to watch me do my thing, I know.” He grew pensive. “I got a couple of big meetings next week, and you probably want to be around for that.”

  Before I could ask him about these meetings, he had another idea: “You know something? You remember how we talked about how gangs are different across the country?”

  I had once told J.T. that gangs in New York and Boston were said to be much smaller than Chicago’s gangs, rooted in local neighborhoods as opposed to being part of a citywide wheel. But no one, I told him, had managed to write an in-depth, multi-city study of street gangs.

  “I could help you meet people all over the place!” he continued. He stood up to get a beer from the fridge. “We got people we know in L.A., in Las Vegas, St. Louis. Black Kings are nationwide! I mean, you and I could figure out how the whole thing works.”

  “So you’ll be my research assistant!” I said with a laugh, not quite sure what he was proposing.