The Last Chicago Boss

by Kerrie Droban

  We started on the ground floor, casually observing the vendor booths, the merchants hawking leathers, T-shirts, sunglasses, used items, toys, kitchenware, jewelry, guns, knives, bows, arrows. I spotted several Hells Angels booths. When I got to five I stopped counting.

  “Do you see what I see?” I whispered to Backlash.

  “They set up the night before.”

  “Plenty of time to haul in their Tupperware containers full of T-shirts and modified AR-15 rifles.”

  Backlash nodded, and blew a small bubble with his gum. “They easily bypassed security.” Our mistake was not having purchased booths.

  The Angels no doubt had an arsenal hidden in plastic containers that included switchblades, pen guns with silencers, tomahawks, and swords. Backlash pretended to trip on a hanging cloth from an Angel’s booth. The booth wobbled, knocking over a few propped items. The broad setting up merchandise glared at him.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” Joker yanked him away.

  “Being Backlash.” He saluted the broad and dramatically stumbled away.

  “You want to get us killed?”

  His recklessness was a prelude to Joker’s “Massacre 101.” We were unarmed and clearly surrounded by Angels. Outlaws promptly lined up in droves to purchase folding knives. The swap meet had triple-wide ramps twenty feet long leading to the second and third floors.

  “Look who’s here.” Frank nodded toward the three “neutral” club members who had approached him the week before. They were dressed in muted brown with leather skullcaps and bandannas. Their patch was a mountain peak with a goat, reminiscent of the Swiss Alps.

  The scene on the ramp unfolded like something out of a street rumble. The three neutrals were amateurs, lingering too long on the ramp, seemingly oblivious to the Angels who’d drifted near them, moving slowly at first, outnumbering Switzerland by five members. And just when the two groups intersected on a shadowy portion of the platform, the Angels attacked.

  “I heard click, click, click. Blades extending. I was never so scared in my life. It happened so quickly. They circled the men, stabbed them in the knees, sides, shoulders and just left them bleeding out,” one support club member who slithered by the attackers reported.

  Ambulances arrived, cops swarmed in, security blew whistles. The three neutrals were strapped to gurneys and carted out.

  “What happened here?” A cop stared at me, hands on hips. He didn’t bother with a clipboard or pen. He already knew the answer. No one saw anything.

  The next day, Super Bowl Sunday, a group of us watched the game at the North Side clubhouse. We were in “recovery mode” from the swap meet debacle. At halftime, we heard a knock at the front door.

  “Boss, someone’s here to see you.”

  “The game’s on.” I didn’t move.

  “They said they’re from the neutral club or some shit.”

  I put down the remote, went to the door. “Can I help you?”

  The neutrals looked worn out, still a little shaken from the day before. One guy’s Swiss Alp had a few blood drops on the goat. They didn’t bother with skullcaps. Their mascot shifted his weight on his crutches, his right leg bandaged. “We thought it over and … we want to join the Outlaws now.”

  I slammed the door in his face.

  10

  NEUTRAL GROUND

  “Look, this is Chicago—you’re an uninvited guest.” I cradled the phone to my ear, only half listening to the violator’s stutter on the other end. I had two baskets on my desk, one for “Problems Handled” and the other for more drastic measures: “The Brown Van.”

  “It’s Stitch.” I slid my slip of paper into Basket #2.

  He was a member of Blitzkrieg, a white supremacist club that boasted a shine Boss and a patch embroidered with a Confederate flag and a Nazi-inspired Iron Cross. I first spotted Stitch at an ABATE1 picnic the week before.

  * * *

  “He’s here.”

  Without another word, Mr. Happy dragged him over. Stitch wore a wide-brimmed cowboy hat and sunglasses and sneakers with the tongue flipped out. He grinned and sipped his beer. I punched him hard in the solar plexus. He doubled over, spit up his drink, and dropped to his knees. I kicked him in the mouth, split open his upper lip. I yanked his braid, grabbed his ear, said “Get the fuck up.”

  Mountain from the South Side joined in. His voice sounded like a stuck car horn. “We will kill you. We will kill your fucking family and their fucking kids. We will fuck you up.” Spit flew from his mouth.

  “Shut up, I got this.” I shoved Mountain aside.

  “We will fuck you up,” he continued.

  The picnic abruptly ended—conversations stopped mid-sentence, burgers sizzled and charred on the grill, paper plates and cups were scattered across the grass.

  Stitch moaned something about “neutral ground.”

  “There’s no such thing. If I see you again I will cut off your ear.”

  “I got this.” Bastardo nodded to the folded note in Basket #2.

  Even so, I felt compelled to instruct him, “Buy the van at auction. Pay no more than two thousand dollars. Make sure it can travel at least the speed limit and has two working back doors.”

  I planned to recycle the van later into scrap and recoup a small profit from the parts. I wasted nothing, taking my cue from the Outfit, who sometimes chopped up bodies and disposed of the remains as fertilizer. And just in case there were witnesses, I ordered Bastardo to switch out plates with similar stolen ones so that VINs never matched and nothing was ever traceable.

  It was critical no one saw me give the orders to inflict harm. “Never kill, just badly injure.” I suggested spiked bats and stressed, “No Outlaw insignia.”

  “In and out, crack a few skulls, get back in the van.” I didn’t want details.

  Bastardo gave me updates in code as he completed the job saying things like, “The cheeseburger was outstanding. I’m stuffed.”

  I put a large “X” through the note and moved it into Basket #1.

  * * *

  The next week several members from the Latin American Motorcycle Association (aka “L.A.M.A.”) rolled into the Illinois Harley-Davidson dealership. I pulled up on my bike with Jimmy and left the engine running. “You guys can’t be here.” I wasn’t a complete asshole, believed in due process. This was their warning. A L.A.M.A. member looked a little startled by my boldness, slid his vest aside, and exposed his Glock.

  “Careful, I’m a Chicago cop.”

  “I’m an Outlaw.” I didn’t flinch.

  The cop/Latino/associate blinked and repeated louder, “Maybe you didn’t hear me the first time. I’m a cop.”

  “You’re not in uniform.” I flashed the .38 inside my vest. “That makes you no different than us.” I knew he wouldn’t shoot. He needed me, needed the Outlaws—we kept the neighborhoods safe. The cop’s hands trembled. His face glistened. He chewed his lower lip, caught in that moral snare between being a law enforcer and simply being the law. His predecessors had likely faced the same dilemma when they shared spit with the Outfit.

  The other L.A.M.A. brothers looked away, pretended to study the shiny chrome on the Harleys displayed in the parking lot. They huddled, debated their next move.

  “You think you’re the only one here with a gun?” I nodded to Jimmy, who grinned and pulled his pistol.

  The L.A.M.A. cop swallowed, stared dully at both barrels, his finger still on the trigger.

  “Go on, shoot. There are two of us. You won’t survive the second bullet.”

  He hesitated, and I could tell he was thinking hard about his options. “Should I, shouldn’t I” knocked around his skull, until finally he chose humiliation … and survival.

  * * *

  Illinois Harley held an open house a month later. I roared into the dealership with fifteen Outlaws. I couldn’t believe it. “They’re here again.”

  The L.A.M.A. cop had returned with eight of his associates, each of whom had likely signed a waiver to be
long, agreeing to “participate voluntarily and at their own risk in all L.A.M.A. activities and assume all risk of injury and damage arising out of the conduct of such activities.”

  “Get them out of here,” I ordered Mr. Happy.

  “They’re invited guests,” Bob, the owner of the dealership, protested. He had a face like raw meat: sweaty, red, cleaved.

  “Is that so?” I said.

  “This is neutral ground.”

  “This is Chicago,” I corrected him.

  “Come on now.”

  “How would you like your guests to go home in a box?”

  Bob blew out a sigh. “I’m not comfortable with that.”

  “Would you feel more comfortable if they went to the hospital?”

  “We’re a family,” one L.A.M.A. brother said. “We don’t want any trouble.”

  “You’re here.” I shrugged.

  “We don’t tolerate violence,” another L.A.M.A. brother volunteered.

  Bob looked like he might throw up.

  “Who’s being violent?” I said.

  “We’re leaving.” The L.A.M.A. cop motioned for his associates to mount their bikes.

  “I know.” I watched them fishtail toward the interstate.

  * * *

  And the next morning, I placed L.A.M.A. Bob into Basket #2.

  * * *

  “Send the Brown Van.” I never had to say much to Bastardo. We spoke a secret language.

  “Hey there” meant he had completed the task.

  “Angels on the move, be fucking careful” was code for the Brown Van has been dispatched and bloodshed will follow.

  * * *

  And while Bastardo and his crew handled the problem in Basket #2, I unwound at a bar with the Hound. We hid at a back table, hoping to blend into the dirty-wallpaper poppy fields.

  “I know who you are.” A skinny broad with hollow eyes stared at me most of the evening. She reminded me of an old stripper, with tattoos in all the wrong places, milk white curls, a few puffy scars. The Hound and I nursed our drinks.

  “No you don’t.”

  “I do, I really do.” She narrowed her eyes, bummed a cigarette off a patron and held it between her painted fingers.

  “She hates you.” The Hound laughed.

  “I fucking do.”

  Fighting words. If she had been a man I would have coldcocked her right there, but instead I listened, amused, and reviewed in my head the possible dangerous ways we knew each other.

  “You’re mean. And there’s not one redeeming quality about you.” She jammed the unlit butt into the counter, grabbed her sparkly purse, and left.

  “Well then.” The Hound tapped his beer to my glass. “I think that says it all.”

  * * *

  Just the thought of violence drained me. “I think I’ll head home.” I slipped a few bills for a tip under my empty glass of Crown Royal.

  “Good idea—counterbalance.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Debbie thinks you’re great.”

  True.

  * * *

  “I’m heading home.” I checked in with Debbie nightly when I left a place. She worried. But if I called her she at least knew I was still alive.

  In the pitch black, I mounted my bike, coasting over trash, broken glass, ripped cardboard lids, discarded milk shakes melted on the pavement. The bar, located in a rotted stretch of city with no streetlights and tin shack dwellings, marked a territory. Lurking in the shadows lived another enemy: the lowlife street urchins with a thriving corner dope business.

  A rock hit my front wheel. I slowed, my eyes straining in the dark to see the perpetrator. There were no streetlamps. My headlights lit up foil shacks. “You don’t want to do that.”

  A shine emerged from the dark, circled a Dumpster, hid the pile of small rocks at his feet. He was maybe twelve, no different than the kids I grew up with who threw stones at passing cars, hoping to make dents.

  We could coexist as neighbors … as long as we had an understanding. The Outlaws had no interest in infringing on the shines’ street drug trade. But throwing rocks at Outlaws, at a Boss no less …

  I placed the kid in Basket #2.

  * * *

  I always prepared for The Raid by federal agents. I stashed a phony ID, hid “emergency flight money” in a hole in my floor, lived simply, drove a used Cadillac, and resisted purchasing the $40,000 gazebo. I melted pounds of gold into medallions I gifted as Christmas presents and lived in a brick house (in case of bombs). I devised a remote control starter device for my car and each morning left the front door open just in case of an explosion so I could possibly survive a bomb blast.

  The detonation came in the form of Frank’s arrest. He, along with thirteen other Outlaws, caught charges for racketeering and drug trafficking. Though I had nothing to do with Frank’s extracurricular activities, the whole idea of The Raid and rats gave me mild PTSD and flashed me back to my college days when the Feds had paid me a friendly visit.

  “All you did with Frank was move water,” Debbie reassured me.

  Yes, water. Still, I played it safe. I disappeared temporarily. Life chained to a cell meant intellectual stagnation, extreme loneliness, grainy television soap operas, daily thirty-minute jaunts around caged concrete, and meals shoved through metal slits in the wall.

  “It’s a burner phone,” I told Debbie. “I’m going into seclusion. Turn it on every night between nine and ten. If I need to get ahold of you I’ll call you then. Otherwise, keep it off.”

  “I’m going underground.” I left Dozer in charge of club business until it was safe for me to resurface. My options for disguise were limited; still, I shaved my goatee and wore a baseball cap and Ray-Bans. I had no tattoos yet, out of respect for my mom, who hated ink but knew that when she passed I would get them—but only up to the elbow, as long as I worked on the street as an “earner.” That way the tattoos could still be covered up if the job required or I needed to evade law enforcement. The last thing I needed was to be easily identifiable.

  “Dope is obsolete,” I told Jaws when I emerged from hiding two weeks later.

  * * *

  But it could be used as leverage.

  The treaty the Hells Angels signed following the flurry of bombings between Outlaws and Hells Angels in the early ’90s prohibited the Angels from building a clubhouse in Chicago. They constructed one in Harvey, a southern suburb in Cook County near the Indiana border and Cedar Lake, home to the Invaders, a Hells Angels ally.

  Rumors spread that Hells Angels had begun to frequent a Polack bar in Chicago that catered to the Hawks,2 a club the Angels’ courted. The Outlaws feared that the Angels planned to partner with these support clubs and eventually form a cartel. The painful truth was that we would never be able to stop the Hells Angels’ reach; but with some small effort (and some ingenuity), we could at least achieve a stalemate.

  My goal was “subtle deterrence” with possible “drastic measures.” If I was lucky, the results might even be comparable to the infamous “thumb-clipping lesson” that left a Hells Angel’s ex-wife’s boyfriend mutilated, the thumb displayed for all to remember in a Mason jar.

  I targeted several local street gangs, inviting two members at a time to my chiropractor’s back office for impromptu meetings.

  “Angels are in the city,” I opened each conversation. “They’re heavy into the dope trade. Their presence might infringe on your business.” Perceived danger induced fear in animals; I hoped the street urchins might make the Angels “disappear.”

  No Face 13 and 21 Mott Street, were concerned. Two of their leaders came back again and again to “discuss the Angel problem.” I used my chiropractor’s office for personal safety in case they resorted to unsolicited bloodshed. The doctor didn’t care; he was vacationing in the Caribbean.

  “I’m not here as an Outlaw,” I reminded them. “Our businesses don’t conflict. I want us to be friends.”

  They looked like teenagers; No Face 13’s
leader shoveled handfuls of M&M’s from the candy bowl into his mouth. He grunted his understanding.

  The leader of 21 Mott Street paced, stopped in front of the built-in aquarium, pressed his lips to the glass, and mimicked the puffer fish. I focused on the sawed-off shotgun tucked inside Mott Street’s trench coat.

  Street gangs were a different breed; disorganized, trigger-happy, mostly about twelve, and fierce defenders of their turf. Strategically, it made sense to befriend them. I didn’t want them dealing dope with the Angels.

  11

  THE ANGELS ARE COMING

  We weren’t Outlaws, we were grown men playing army.

  —BIG PETE

  A war, even a fake one, gave soldiers purpose and a reason to mentally train. It was important the Outlaws believed they were being hunted and so, like a Sunday preacher, I delivered the sermon.

  “I’ve spotted Angels.”

  The details were disclosed in private one-on-one lunch meetings, with each of the six Bosses from Joliet, Chicago South Side, Kankakee, Elgin, and DeKalb. And even though I never saw a single Angel on my North Side turf, it was important to prepare a decent offense.

  “They are hidden in plain sight.” I’d gathered the Bosses into my plush North Side office and cranked up The Weather Channel on the TV so the Feds would never pick up my voice.

  The Game Plan: Arrange to meet one Boss a week at a predetermined diner or truck stop.

  “It’s important that we blend.” I handed each Boss his respective strip of paper.

  “I’ve written the location on these. When I call you to confirm, just know that we’re actually meeting three hours later.”

  “So if you call and say eleven”—Ray Rayner,1 Boss of the Elgin chapter, needed further clarification—“we’re actually meeting at two?” He stared at me with flat, dull eyes, a look I associated with Rottweilers.

  “Right,” I shouted as if his hearing were the problem.

  “Why don’t you just tell us to meet you at two?” Ray Rayner’s mouth was still open.

  Heat flushed my face. I focused on a strip of tinfoil lining my dropped ceiling. The hum of the air conditioner filled the silence. An equation formed in my head—Stupid plus stubborn equals Ray Rayner—and I resisted the urge to slap him.