by Dan Baum
I learned a lot from reading the forum. A Chinese SKS rifle is cheap, short, powerful, and easy to hide. Smearing its workings with grease and putting desiccants in the tube will prevent rust. The PVC tube containing it should be buried vertically to make it harder to find with a metal detector. Forgetting where it’s buried is a real danger. After reading the forum for a while, I wanted to interview a cacher. I was smart enough to know that anybody burying his guns wouldn’t want to go public about it but not smart enough to realize that, even offering anonymity, asking people about something as secretive and sensitive as TEOTWAWKI preparations was offensive, threatening, and, well, stupid.
The cachers went completely crazy. In torrents of anonymous vitriol, they accused me of being an ATF agent, a gun grabber, a troll. They dug off the Internet pictures of Margaret and Rosa and called them ugly names. Then they found photos of us at Barack Obama’s nomination-acceptance speech, which really sent them around the bend. It went on for weeks, at one point becoming genuinely scary. Even two years after, if I published anything about guns, these same guys rose up to denounce me en masse without reading what I’d written. “You’re a brand,” one gun blogger told me. It was awful. Even writing about it here makes me shudder, because I know that when this book appears, they’ll be back.
There was another group of gun guys I wanted to interview who I figured would be equally resistant to exposure. Unlike cachers, though, these other ones weren’t marginal to the gun-guy story but instead were at its absolute center: criminals. Even though crime wasn’t “out of control” and was falling fast, the United States still experienced more than its share. Much of what was said and done about guns in America had to do with violent crime; millions of people owned and carried firearms to protect themselves from armed criminals, and the gun debate was all about whether, and how, to try to keep guns “out of the hands of criminals.” Halfway through my year of traveling around talking to gun guys, I realized that I had a thug-shaped hole at the center of my story. Vicious armed predators risked becoming an unrepresented constituency. So I went looking for one to speak for the profession, as it were, to explain how it feels to use a gun in a life of crime.
This time, I trod more delicately. Unlike the cachers lobbing insults from the safety of the Internet, gangsters were accustomed to pointing guns at people and pulling the trigger. I quickly established that I wasn’t going to find these guys in online forums; Thug.com was about music, and ExThug.com didn’t exist. But I discovered that every major city had at least one organization either founded or assisted by former gangbangers, devoted to keeping young men from taking the same deadly path—Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles, Beyond Bullets in New York, Vision Regeneration in Dallas, the Miami-Dade Anti-Gang Coalition, CeaseFire-Chicago, and so on. I began calling them, asking if any of the former drug-dealing, baby-shooting savages standing around the office might want to unpack his entire criminal life for publication. “You paying?” asked one. When I said no, he hung up. But at least he didn’t broadcast pictures of my daughter or call me an Obamatron libtard troll.
Finally, I got a call from a man named Tim White, who said that yes, he’d been in the life, had “done it all,” and that, sure, he’d be willing to talk about it. Just to be sure he was the guy I wanted, I asked him if he’d used a gun in his criminal undertakings. He gave one of those short laughs that aren’t intended to be funny.
“Lots of guns,” he said on the phone. “Guns all the time. I’ve been shot twice, too, so I know ’em from both ends.”
We met in a coffee shop near Chicago’s Humboldt Park, in a neighborhood trying mightily to gentrify itself out of the odium of being simply “West Side.” Tim, at forty-six, was engaged in a related exercise: attempting a personal transformation through Christ to elevate himself to the role of elder sage. He worked with CeaseFire-Chicago, traveling around the city and the country trying to teach younger versions of himself to settle their disagreements in some way other than gunfire. “I’m not telling them to give up drug dealing or anything like that,” he’d told me on the phone. “I don’t make judgments. You got to do what you got to do. I’m all about, ‘You got a problem, you settle it some other way.’ Violence is a learned behavior. If you can learn it, you can unlearn it.”
For a man who claimed to have been so fearsome, he was awfully benign-looking—stocky, with baby cheeks and a wide, toothy smile. He wore a black ball cap and a Raiders hoodie. When he sat down, he laid his smartphone on the table where he could see it, indicating that while he was willing to talk, he wasn’t going to interrupt his important business for our conversation. He reminded me of a riverboat gambler casually placing a derringer beside his chips—not making a big deal of it, just letting everybody know what’s what.
I started to ask a question, but he already knew where he wanted to take the conversation, and without preamble pulled up his hoodie to expose a muscular torso of milk-and-coffee brown. “This is where his bullet hit me; see that red mark?”
A young white woman at the next table glanced over, and quickly away. Tim’s fingertip found a raspberry-colored pock on the outboard side of his left pectoral, then slid to another at the center of his sternum. “It bounced off my rib and came out over here.”
Pulling the hoodie back down, he started at the beginning. Tim had grown up at Kedzie Avenue and Ohio Street, in deep West Side. But his wasn’t a typical story of a neglected, fatherless childhood. Just the opposite, in fact, which may have been the problem.
“It was ghetto for sure, but I grew up in a good family. Didn’t want for nothing. My father was a minister; I never saw him smoke or drink. My mother was first lady of the church. There was seven of us kids—three girls and four boys, and I’m second to the last. Until I was twelve or so, I did the thing—went to school, played drums in the church, all that. Them streets, though, man. Them streets. When you’re eleven, twelve years old, they call to you.”
His phone buzzed. He put it to his ear, listened for a moment, said, “I’m doin’ the interview,” and set it back on the table.
“Dad was always gone, building the ministry,” he went on. “Mentally, me and him didn’t connect. He was all fire and brimstone, and I didn’t understand that. He had a way of talking, not listening. Like, ‘This is how it’s going to be.’ And I’d say, ‘Not with me.’ I was like, ‘No matter how much you whip me, preach to me, I’ll be walking away.’ This is when I’m like twelve years old, and my father’s always talking, talking, talking. But what you want at that age is a family that listens. So I went out and found one in the streets.”
In 1977 and ’78, roller disco was big, and the hot hangout for people Tim’s age was a rink called Hot Wheels, at the corner of Chicago and Pulaski. “Everybody from everywhere went there. You skate. You dance. You get into fights with them from other neighborhoods. That’s where we formed our identity—who could fight and who couldn’t.
“My dad, he’d say, ‘You can’t go to that devil place,’ and I’d say, ‘I’m going.’ I’d get home and my dad would be like, ‘Gimme a shoe.’ I’d say, ‘You can go ahead and whup me, but I’m going back there tomorrow.’ The whuppings became numb to me.”
Tim, at least, had parents. “Other kids’ parents, they were, like, gone. This one’s dad’s in jail, that one’s mom’s on aid, or she’s using. So these cats would be way out there, staying out late, showing around big wads of money. They was daredevils. This one boy, Curt, I seen him snatch a chain off a lady’s neck on a bus. He pulled the cord and snatched that chain, and I was, like, shocked. We ran, and I was all ‘What you doin’?’ Man, he showed me that money, and my eyes was like baseballs.”
The phone buzzed again. “Yeah, man, I said. I’m doin’ the interview now, and I’ll get wit’ you later.” He took a moment to remember his place in the story. The speed with which it was tumbling out of him told me it was a tale he’d told many times before. It was the rap he carried around the country with him, spreading it like the Gospel to any you
ng man who’d listen.
Anybody living on the West Side in those days was presumed to be a member of the Vice Lords gang, but that was like being a member of the AFL-CIO. What mattered was one’s clique. “Ours we called KO. One day you start wearing the hats, wearing the colors. And now you got power and respect. Hats was important. We wore ours to the left. Disciples wore theirs to the right. Colors was black and gold, but we weren’t really tripping about the colors. The Latinos, they’re way into colors. And graffiti. They love that shit. Us, we’d tag our territory, but then people knew our territory and we didn’t bother no more.”
Being a Vice Lord, though, involved more than just wearing a hat the right way. It was work. “What it is, when we were coming up, everybody took a path. Some dudes became pickpockets. Some were shoplifters. Some became stickup men. Everybody tried to choose their paths; we knew all them facets of life.
“I was never a robber robber. I didn’t get off on that. Some dudes, they like to see fear in people, they’d come back and be all ‘I liked to put them in their place.’ I didn’t say nothing; it wasn’t my thing. Seemed they always went after people weaker than them, littler than them, people who didn’t have no gun. I’d be like, ‘I don’t like seeing you take from niggers you can beat. I see the punk in you. If you’re so tough, why don’t you take from him.’” He gestured at an imaginary bruiser.
He stopped and looked at the woman at the next table, who was leaning on her elbow and listening to us talk. She nervously turned back to her laptop.
“That’s all right, listen up,” he told her with a gentle laugh. “What I got to say, I want everybody to hear.” He was being genuine, but from the way she studiously ignored him, gazing into her laptop, she seemed to think he was being sarcastic. He smiled at the side of her head a moment longer, then turned back to me with a shrug.
“What I was, I was a hustler. I had a niche for it,” he continued. “Buy. Sell. People trusted me. I served them.”
But what about the guns? I asked. When did you start carrying a gun? His first, he said, he came by the old-fashioned way. He stole it.
“One day, we were cleaning out the backyard of a neighbor across the street, and when my friend went in to use the bathroom, the little girl who lived there showed him a shotgun up in a closet. He went back in later and took it. I said, ‘It’s too long,’ so we cut it off. You could get it up under your clothes then.”
Chicago made it harder to get a gun legally than almost anywhere else in the country, but Tim never had trouble getting guns, even as a young teenager. “You had these guys go to Memphis, where it’s easy to get, and bring them back here, where it’s hard. Maybe it’s a white guy addicted to narcotics. A businessman. He starts partying a little too much, comes into the ghetto, and gets hooked. So he brings a proposition: ‘You guys buy guns?’ And we’d be like, ‘Can you get guns? Go get them and bring them back here.’ That guy, he’s straight. He got no record. He can buy a gun any damned place. Guys would come back from down south and sell them out the trunk of their car. Get whatever you liked.
“I liked a revolver. I had a lot of them, but my favorite was a .41 Magnum. The big guns were famous. Magnums. Forty-fives. Nine-millimeters. The bigger the gun you got, the more powerful you were. Cost you anywhere from one to five hundred dollars, depending on what it was and how it looked. Big guns were the thing. I’d use a girl to carry mine. The man-police at the door of the club can’t search her, so she has the gun, and when we’re inside it’s like, ‘Go in the bathroom and get it out and bring me my gun.’ ”
“So how much of what you were doing was about the gun?” I asked.
“For me, the gun was exciting at first, but I grew out of it. I don’t know when or how; just having so many of them, I guess. It was a tool. If you needed it, you needed it. But it wasn’t like I was all about the guns, like some dudes. You could tell who was way into the guns and who wasn’t. Some dudes, they was addicted. Always asking, ‘Lemme see the gun, lemme see it.’ And I’d be like, ‘What are you always asking to see the motherfucking gun?’ ”
Even in Tim’s criminal world, then, some people liked them, while others could take or leave them.
“There’d be guys you wouldn’t give the gun,” he went on. “Like there’d be guys you wouldn’t let drive the car or hold the money. Some guys you can trust with shit like that; some you can’t. After trial and error, you learn who not to give a gun to. We’d be somewhere and something would happen that you could settle with fists, and out of fucking nowhere it’s Boom! Boom! Boom! And I’d be like, ‘What the fuck you do that for? Gimme that fucking gun.’ ”
I’d had dealings years earlier with a reformed drug dealer from Washington, D.C., who’d told me that he and his friend shot their guns all the time in the course of doing business but that most of the time they hadn’t really tried to hit anybody. Gunfire for them—in 1990s Washington—had mostly been language. They’d blast a few rounds in the general direction of a rival to send a message. If they hit him, that was fine. But mostly they used gunfire simply to make a point. When I ran this past Tim, he looked at me like I was nuts.
“That’s not how we did,” he said. “If we shot at someone, we was sure as hell trying to kill the motherfucker.”
The woman at the next table banged shut the lid of her laptop, slid it into her shoulder bag, and walked off without a glance at either of us. Tim watched her go. He seemed to be wondering how he’d ever connect with people like her, so that he could spread his message that much further. When he turned back to me, he quit the bouncy raconteur act he’d been using and dropped his voice to a deeper, slower, more serious register.
“That Curt, who snatched the chain off the lady? Later on, he tried to rob a guy’s radio—also on a bus. Shot the guy and killed him. I saw him in jail and asked him, ‘What the fuck?’ He said, ‘The guy grabbed the gun.’ It was the guy’s birthday, he’d just gotten the radio and wouldn’t give up. Curt said, ‘I’m not playing; give me the radio,’ and the guy grabbed the gun. ‘But why you shoot him?’ I asked, and all Curt said was, ‘The guy was a little bit bigger than me. He grabbed the gun.’ Curt, man, he’s still doing thirty years.
“There’s a lot of isms in our neighborhood,” Tim said quietly. “Some people are mentally disturbed but aren’t diagnosed. Never been to a doctor. Guy starts shooting when he doesn’t need to be doing no shooting, you know he’s crazy in the head. Guy who’d shoot at a cop: crazy. He’s not a person you can violate physically, but you can manipulate him. ‘You fucked that up; now you owe me.’ ‘You like shooting? Okay, then; you do him over there.’ Everybody else know he’s crazy, too. So a guy doesn’t pay, all you got to say is, ‘I’m going to get Crazy Larry.’ Everybody knows Crazy Larry likes to shoot.”
He stopped for a moment, looking sad. Then, he shuddered visibly, willing himself back to his story.
“I was straightforward,” he announced with renewed vigor. “My word was my bond. I was a trusted man on the street, someone people looked up to. I had a good heart because of my mother and father. Really, I shouldn’t have been in the street life, but since I was, I had that preacher upbringing to draw on, and people knew they could trust me. Some people run the street with fear, some people run the street with love.”
“Love,” I said, “and a .41 Magnum.”
“People weren’t afraid of me. They knew that if I was coming, I was coming. But not if I didn’t have no reason. I had a large following. I took the Vice Lords to another level in my neighborhood, financially and organizationally. Everything happened fast. Millions of dollars passed through my hands. Forty thousand dollars a day. Paid for an apartment six months in advance and put my money in there. Parked a car in a garage with the trunk full of money. Or I’d take the car in to get painted, and then tell them, ‘I changed my mind; paint it again,’ just to leave it there because it’s all stuffed with money and I got no place else to put.”
He sat back, chuckled, and slapped his belly content
edly with both hands. “It’s funny that my dad being a preacher and all helped me in the life,” he said.
Then a shadow crossed his face, as though his little hurricane of braggadocio had blown itself out. His voice pinched down again; we seemed to be coming to a place he didn’t want to go but knew he must.
“Some guys, though, they don’t want to work their way up,” he continued. “They wait until you do all the work and get up there, and then they stick you up. Guys come home all buff from prison. They have tattoos, they’re talking about taking over. But I’m like, ‘You don’t have the finance and you don’t have the guns.’
“The guy I’d started out hustling with was a dude called Shank. We was close. I’d sleep at his house, eat with him and his mama. We was hustling well together. Shank, though, he didn’t understand what they meant when they said, ‘Don’t get high on your own supply.’ He fell into the hype of being somebody. And he was living above his means. I was like, ‘Man, you spent how much last night?’ I chose to walk away, and he messed up with his connect because he couldn’t pay his bills.
“Then he focused on me. He was like, ‘I know who got some money; I’m going to get that nigger.’ He told someone he knew where my safe house was, and he wanted to pop me off.
“So this one night, I’m in my Mercedes and pull up at Augusta and Keeler and he’s right there with a gun and told me to get out the car. He upped with his gun and busted me upside the head. He was going to take me in the house, where the money at.
“I told him, ‘Hold up, let me get my keys,” and I upped with my gun. He shot. I shot. I knew right off I’d been hit. I jumped back in the car and tore it up getting out of there. I could see blood coming out my chest, and I thought I was dying. That’s the thing about getting shot: It hurts, yeah, but you’re more scared than the pain—that unknown, are you going to make it? I was telling my friend in the backseat, ‘If I die, make sure that nigger die, too.’