High-Risers

by Ben Austen

  But there was a certain kind of aloneness to the suburbs that also filled J. R. with dread. He craved an audience and pressured himself to succeed in part to keep people around him. The better he was at sports, the larger the crowds that wanted to hang out. He learned to tell stories of his exploits, to entertain, megaphoning his words, a whirlwind of pantomimed emotions. In Dolton, neighbors would pull into their driveways after work and close themselves indoors. Adults socialized only now and then outside their fenced-in backyards. When the street baseball or the backyard basketball ended at dusk, the other kids went in for dinner and the block fell silent. For J. R., that wasn’t a peaceful quiet. So the summer after his junior year, when he needed to rehab an injured knee, he asked to stay with Joyce at Cabrini-Green. He’d transferred to a high school not far from Dolton; the team played in a higher division, with more college scouts watching. The plan was for him to go to a physical therapist near Cabrini and spend a couple of months in the city as he readied himself for fall football.

  For seventeen-year-old J. R. living without adult supervision, Cabrini-Green in the summertime no longer looked scary. It looked like paradise. It was 1990, and young people swarmed about, packing the swimming pools and baseball diamonds and basketball courts. Boys rode in front of the buildings on decked-out Schwinns, popping wheelies. Older guys detailed their souped-up cars. There was music—Janet Jackson, Digital Underground, Bell Biv DeVoe’s “Poison.” J. R. played basketball and softball. And at Cabrini, people didn’t go inside at dusk. They partied outside the buildings, and not just on the weekend. There were so many girls. J. R. had dated in Dolton, but nothing like this. He’d ask a girl over to Joyce’s to order up music videos on the television show The Box. They’d phone in their selections, picking rap videos for 99 cents a pop that weren’t being shown on MTV or VH1, and chill for the night. When he didn’t stay at Joyce’s, he slept at an aunt’s or a cousin’s. Willie Sr. had moved to Alabama by then, but it still felt to J. R. that everyone was either family or like family.

  J. R. got drunk for the first time. He smoked cigarettes. He got high and stopped going to rehab. One night near the end of August, he was coming back from a party in another high-rise, walking with his cousin, and he fell into the bushes by the basketball courts in Durso Park—Gangster Park, they called it there. He’d been guzzling Olde English 800, and he laughed at how drunk he was. When he came to hours later, his eyes level with the asphalt, he looked up to see the yellow-red glow of dawn. He realized then that he was totally free. “It’s over,” he bellowed to no one and to the world. “This is my life! I’m never going back to the suburbs.”

  IN 1987, HAROLD Washington won reelection, halting a Jane Byrne comeback in the Democratic primary. Then he trounced his nemesis, Ed Vrdolyak, who had switched parties to run in the general election. Gaining majority control of the city council as well, Washington was positioned finally to push his agenda. But just months into his second term, he slumped over his desk in city hall. At sixty-five, he was dead of a heart attack. A new mayor, Eugene Sawyer, was selected by his fellow aldermen after a long night of infighting. Hoping to resuscitate the moribund Chicago Housing Authority, Sawyer turned for help to the Metropolitan Planning Council, the influential nonprofit that had shaped city planning and the CHA from its inception; Elizabeth Wood had led the civic group before taking over the housing authority. The MPC advised Sawyer to pick a new leader for the CHA, the former Illinois governor Dick Ogilvie, who promptly accepted the post and then also died of a heart attack. The MPC offered up a second choice, Vince Lane, a forty-six-year-old African American developer of low-income housing who’d already been chairing the organization’s public housing committee. Lane took over at the CHA in 1988, managing to be named both the executive director and board chairman, positions that were ordinarily separated as a formal check on power.

  A large, excitable man with a high forehead and trim mustache, Lane had served as an executive of the Woodlawn Organization, developing nonprofit housing on the South Side, and he’d also started a successful company building HUD-financed properties across the country. But his conception of public housing had been formed earlier, in the 1950s, when he was growing up in a tenement by the White Sox’s ballpark. Living across the street from a low-rise public housing development called Wentworth Gardens, Lane envied the working families there. Their homes were new, with neat gardens and large communal lawns. Then Lane watched in awe as the twenty-eight towers of the Robert Taylor Homes rose up just east of him. It was an architectural marvel and represented a marked improvement over the slum they replaced. One of Lane’s aunts fled a tenement for the Taylor Homes, and the entire family celebrated her move as a major step up.

  Lane was aghast at how far public housing had fallen. A man prone to pronouncements, his high-pitched twang would intensify along with his indignation. “Horrendous, horrendous,” he screeched about the state of the CHA that was now his responsibility. The mismanaged agency was $30 million in debt, with a bloated staff and a stock of aging housing that hadn’t been properly maintained in years. He heard from tenants who were so fearful of stray bullets that they slept in their bathtubs. In his first weeks on the job, gang members firebombed an apartment at Rockwell Gardens, a West Side development, wounding a little girl. At that moment Lane decided the hell with any real estate or management theories. He couldn’t wait for permission from the mayor or a judge. It was his duty, at the very minimum, to establish public order and safety in the housing he oversaw. He borrowed an idea from a Korean War movie he liked called Pork Chop Hill. The GIs in the film, led by Gregory Peck, have to win back the bluff from the Chinese forces, or it’s all over for them. As in the movie, Lane wanted to send in troops, overwhelming the enemy in each tower with a massive show of force. “I saw these high-rise buildings as my Pork Chop Hill, and I had to get control of them,” he’d say.

  At 5:00 a.m. on a Tuesday, CHA personnel and more than sixty police officers met at a staging area along the Dan Ryan Expressway. No one but Lane and the police chief knew about the target of the first raid, as they feared internal leaks would tip off the gangs. The convoy rolled west, to Rockwell Gardens. Outside the selected high-rise, teams of police blocked the entrances and exits as dozens of other officers rushed inside, searching every apartment for weapons and drugs. CHA staff checked rolls to see who in the buildings officially belonged and who needed to leave. A second battalion of more than a hundred workmen arrived and got to work reinforcing the lobby with iron grating. They erected guard stations and installed video cameras. A midnight curfew was imposed, and residents were issued identification cards they now needed to display to reenter their building.

  Lane called the action Operation Clean Sweep, and announced that he would conduct similar emergency “sweeps” at each of the city’s 168 public housing high-rises and some of the low-rises as well. He would win the war in public housing by going door-to-door, overtaking one building and then another until the entire system was again safe. When Lane and his troops hit their second targeted high-rise, the surprise factor was already gone. “The lookouts saw this huge caravan of trucks and cars, and they realized we were coming to that building,” Lane would recall with a laugh. “Drugs and guns rained out of the building.” Within weeks, a parade of vehicles carrying 150 housing officials and police officers made its way to Cabrini-Green, to lock down one of the high-rises. Lane soon expanded these operations, adding tenant patrols and creating a separate CHA police and security force, its officers training alongside the Chicago police. He placed Chicago police substations inside each of the large housing developments, and had them pursue a kind of “broken windows” strategy, arresting residents for minor offenses as a way to prevent more serious ones.

  Some CHA tenants and their advocates objected to the siege tactics. Lane never sought warrants to search people’s apartments or to seize contraband, and when the American Civil Liberties Union filed a class-action lawsuit against the CHA, the agency had to agree to a
legally binding consent decree setting limits on the raids—limits that Lane would exceed repeatedly. But other public housing residents welcomed the sweeps. They weighed the trade-off between personal freedom and police protection; they wanted the same level of safety as in every other Chicago community, the same standard of law and order. Lane would visit a development, and women would embrace and kiss him; men grasped his hand, thanking him for taking on the challenge. Residents submitted requests for the police to raid their buildings—or more commonly, the buildings next to their own. At Cabrini-Green, tenants reached out to Alderman Natarus, who then passed along the entreaties. “You and the police deserve thanks for leadership during the Cabrini-Green public safety crisis now taking place,” he wrote to Lane. He asked that the agency put a stop to the cross fire between high-rises, adding, “You have my full support.”

  For many outside public housing as well, Lane’s tactics seemed the appropriate response to the perceived mayhem of the inner city. The sweeps coincided with the hysteria over crack cocaine and with gangs battling one another over the growing market. The crack epidemic was real—by 1991, 70 percent of males arrested in Chicago tested positive for cocaine. Yet the crisis didn’t elicit calls to mobilize medical and social services, and addicts weren’t treated with sympathy. Rather, they were crack fiends, a scourge, and when they weren’t being ignored in their ghettoes they were to be arrested, incarcerated, and eradicated. It was time for civil society to take its stand and reclaim its streets.

  The teenage homicide rate rose steadily from the mid-eighties and into the start of the nineties, a tragic effect of the booming drug trade, the poor economy, and the growing strength of organized gangs. The number of killings in Chicago climbed each year, nearing numbers not seen in the city in two decades. But there was also much fretting over illusory threats. Images proliferated of premature “crack babies,” infants exposed to the drug in utero and now convulsing in their cribs. The media reported constantly on this coming tide of damaged children spreading out from the country’s black slums, a permanent underclass that would deplete the store of social services and grow up to run amok. In 1989, in New York City, a twenty-eight-year-old white investment banker was out on her nightly jog in Central Park when she was raped and beaten nearly to death. Police investigating the “Central Park Jogger” case arrested several fourteen-, fifteen-, and sixteen-year-olds who lived in Harlem. According to their confessions, they admitted to being out “wilding.” The five teens never uttered the term; it was a police construct, made up during a night of bullying interrogations and deceptions, and the convictions would be vacated more than a decade later. But the term made sense to people, at least emotionally. It evoked a prevailing idea of out-of-control juvenile violence, the offenders like wolves in a pack, “savage,” “feral,” and “presocial.” “How can our great society tolerate the continued brutalization of its citizens by crazed misfits?” Donald Trump wrote in a full-page ad he paid for in the New York Daily News before the boys’ trials. “CIVIL LIBERTIES END WHEN AN ATTACK ON OUR SAFETY BEGINS!” John DiIulio, a political scientist at Princeton, coined the term “superpredator” to characterize this imagined growing population of murderous boys, mostly black, who were, he said, “fatherless, Godless and jobless.” He cited a prosecutor who told him, “They kill or maim on impulse, without any intelligible motive.”

  In Chicago, the superpredators were coming for you from Cabrini-Green, obviously. “What is the place that quickly strikes fear in the hearts of the citizens of Chicago?” asked a 1988 profile of a police officer who dared to work the Cabrini-Green beat. “The Green has become synonymous with a ‘jungle,’ a place where wild animals roam and devour weaker organisms.” A national television news program on Cabrini-Green asked viewers to visualize a barbarous war zone: “A no-man’s land with broken windows, dark, abandoned buildings, no law and order. There are carefully demarcated areas controlled by rival bands of armed militia fighting over the rubble. Nearly every night there is sniper fire. It sounds like Beirut, but in fact it’s America. A creature of state, local, and federal government. A product of bad politics, failed policy, and official neglect.”

  That the larger societal fears weren’t based on sound science hardly mattered at the time. Children displayed no serious lasting effects from their prenatal exposure to crack; most babies born prematurely jittered in this way; and mothers who abused alcohol during pregnancy did as much harm and were far more common. Moreover, DiIulio’s predictions that horrendous crimes committed by inner-city teens would double and triple in the coming years proved grossly inaccurate. Violent crime peaked in 1991 and then dropped precipitously; by the late nineties, juvenile crime rates had fallen back to the levels of the early 1980s, as the economy improved and crack use abated. By then, however, the hysteria had cemented into policy. Nearly every state had passed harsher sentencing laws for juvenile offenders; children were being tried as adults and receiving mandatory minimum sentences, including life terms. Pregnant cocaine users were charged with child abuse and even manslaughter. In Chicago, annual arrests for drugs other than marijuana tripled in less than a decade, with African Americans making up most of those charged.

  It was during this panic that Vince Lane was touted as a hero. Republicans in Washington praised his aggressive approach, which was seen as a model for other cities to follow. Lane was compared to Joe Louis Clark, the bat-swinging principal of a New Jersey high school who was played by Morgan Freeman in Lean on Me, the movie based on his life. Clark had summarily dismissed hundreds of students who were, he said, “leeches, miscreants, and hoodlums.” The country needed vigilantes like that who were willing to bend the rules. And Lane was tackling social problems that others thought too intractable and hopeless even to bother with, in the process giving CHA employees a new sense of purpose. Workers under him wore buttons announcing, “I’m Part of the Solution.” He said the gangs who operated in public housing were like playground bullies, and the sweeps were his way to “throw the bullies out.” In 1990, Lane was featured on the cover of the Chicago Tribune Sunday Magazine standing on the roof of a Cabrini-Green high-rise, other towers of tartan red brick rising up around him like battlements. Wearing a dark suit, his arms folded across his chest, Lane was a man reigning over his domicile.

  But the sweeps were problematic from the start. In addition to being ruled unconstitutional, they were prohibitively expensive. The estimated cost of a single sweep of a single high-rise was $175,000, and that was without the amount paid in overtime to Chicago police officers. “It cost a shitload,” Lane acknowledged. He was able to secure additional funds from Washington. The CHA also used money on the anti-crime initiative that could have gone to major repairs. The buildings suffered further decline. And whenever Lane swept a high-rise, crime increased in the surrounding buildings; he wasn’t so much removing guns and drugs and miscreants as shifting them around. With each raid, fewer weapons and drugs were confiscated, as people anticipated the invading force. J. R. Fleming said news of the approaching CHA army would reach a building at Cabrini-Green and those with contraband would gather up their goods and store them outside in the trunks of cars.

  Lane also knew enough about the world of public housing to understand that there was something counterproductive in removing every male who wasn’t on a lease. Officially, women headed nine of ten households in CHA properties. Men were around, though. They were people’s sons and lovers and fathers. “I was conflicted,” Lane would admit. Who was he to say if the guys were drug dealers, or good fathers, or both? “To tear somebody out of this family environment was, I thought, wrong,” Lane said. “It wasn’t the right thing to do, the right signal to send. We wanted to send the signal that if you share a relationship with someone and have kids, we will work with you, help you get an education and all that. But I continued to move ahead and secure building after building. I really thought we could secure most of the city. Who would have thought that you could secure Robert Taylor and Cabrini-Green?
Did I succeed?” He’d answer the question himself, his voice breaking into a higher register. “Absolutely. Absolutely.”

  J. R. FLEMING

  BECAUSE HE WAS straight out of the suburbs, J. R. did run into some trouble at Cabrini-Green. Sporting his all-red football letterman jacket, with the collar popped up like Fonzie from Happy Days, he didn’t realize that its color represented the Vice Lords and Cobra Stones. One time a Disciple near Jenner school demanded of him, “What d’you ride?” J. R. took the question literally, not even trying to be funny. “The bus?” He was at first perplexed that because he now stayed in a building controlled by the Gangster Disciples, he couldn’t cross the blacktop and visit the building where he lived as a child that was now home to Cobra Stones. After the mostly white community of Dolton, he expected Cabrini-Green to be an all-black world free of tensions and bigotry. “What is this?” he asked. “Black people don’t like black people?” When he attended Lincoln Park High School in the fall, everyone assumed he was in the Disciples because his cousins and next-door neighbors were in the gang. He would tell people that he wasn’t Folks. “I’m a nerd. I’m an athlete. I’m competitive.” It didn’t matter. A group of Vice Lords chased him out of the pool, J. R. racing home in his swim trunks. Back on the land at Cabrini, people teased him, “You’re not in Kansas anymore.”

  “Then tell me where I’m at, and what I need to do to survive,” J. R. would demand.

  He was walking one day, pushing a bicycle, when a couple of guys on Larrabee started telling him they were going to rob him. “Can I see your bike? I just want a ride, man.” The bike belonged to his cousin G-Ball, from 1117 N. Cleveland, the Castle. No way was J. R. giving it up. He decided he needed to defend himself. This wasn’t dunking a basketball or rushing for a first down. A family member lent him a .32 automatic. The following day he was heading up Larrabee with a girl named Tricia, and he told her about his predicament. “I got this right here for them,” he said, showing her the pistol in his pocket. The weapon didn’t surprise her. “Shoot them in the leg,” she suggested as moderation. But when they came upon the guys, Tricia turned out to be related to them. “You’re not shooting my cousins,” she said, shouting, “He’s got a gun!”