Of all the relationships I’d developed during my time at Robert Taylor, it turned out that the strongest one by far was my bond with J.T. As unusual and as morally murky as this relationship may have been, it was also undeniably powerful. Our years together had produced a close relationship. This bond would become even more intimate, to the point that J.T. felt personally indebted to me, when I had the opportunity to help save the life of one of his closest friends.
It was a classic Chicago summer afternoon: a cloudless sky, the muggy air broken occasionally by a soft lake breeze. I was hanging around at Robert Taylor, outside J.T.’s building, along with perhaps a hundred other people. Tenants were barbecuing, playing softball, and taking comfort in the cool shadow of the building. Few apartments had a working air conditioner, so on a day like this the lawn got more and more crowded as the day wore on.
I was sitting on the lawn next to Darryl Young, one of J.T.’s uncles,who relaxed on a lawn chair with a six-pack of beer. Since the beer was warm, Darryl sent a niece or nephew inside every now and then to fetch some ice for his cup. Darryl was in his late forties and had long ago lost most of his teeth. He had unkempt salt-and-pepper hair, walked with a stiff limp, and always wore his State of Illinois ID on a chain around his neck. He left the project grounds so rarely that his friends called him “a lifer.” He knew every inch of Robert Taylor, and he loved to tell stories about the most dramatic police busts and the most memorable baseball games between competing buildings. He told me about the project’s famous pimps and infamous murderers as well as about one tenant who tried to raise a tiger in his apartment and another who kept a hundred snakes in her apartment-until the day she let them loose in the building.
Suddenly Darryl sat up, staring at an old beater of a Ford sedan cruising slowly past the building. The driver was a young white man, looking up at the building as if he expected someone to come down.
“Get the fuck out of here, boy!” Darryl shouted. “We don’t need you around here. Go and sleep with your own women!” Darryl turned and hollered to a teenage boy playing basketball nearby. “Cheetah! Go and get Price, tell him to come here.”
“Why do you want Price?” I asked.
“Price is the only one who can take care of this,” Darryl said. His face was tight, and he kept his eyes on the Ford. By now the car had come to a stop.
“Take care of what?” I asked.
“Damn white boys come around here for our women,” Darryl said. “It’s disgusting. This ain’t no goddamn brothel.”
“You think he’s a john?”
“I know he’s a john,” Darryl said, scowling, and then went back to shouting at the Ford. “Boy! Hey, boy, get on home, we don’t want your money!”
Price sauntered out of the building, trailed by a few other members of the BK security squad. Darryl stood up and hobbled over to Price.
“Get that boy out of here, Price!” he said. “I’m tired of them coming around here. This ain’t no goddamn whorehouse!”
“All right, old man,” Price said, irritated by Darryl’s enthusiasm but clearly a bit concerned. “Don’t worry. We’ll take care of him.”
Price and his entourage approached the car. I could hear Price speaking gruffly to the driver while the other BKs surrounded the car so that it couldn’t drive off. Then Price opened the door and gestured for the white guy to get out.
Just then I heard the loud squeal of a car rounding the corner of Twenty-fifth and Federal. Some kids shouted at people to get out of its path. It was a gray sedan, and I could see it roaring toward us, but unsteadily, as if one of the wheels were loose.
The first shots sounded like machine-gun fire. Everyone seemed to duck instinctively, except for me. I was frozen upright; my legs were stuck in place and everything turned to slow motion. The car came closer. Price and the other BK security men ran toward the building as more shots were fired. The car flew past, and I could see four people inside, all black. It looked as if two of them were shooting, one from either side.
Price got hit and dropped to the ground. The rest of his entourage reached the lobby safely. Price wasn’t moving. I saw Darryl lying flat on the grass, while other tenants were crawling toward shelter-a car, a tree, the building itself-and grabbing children as they went. I was still standing, in shock, though I had managed to at least hunch over. The gray car had vanished.
Then I heard a second car screeching down the back alleyway. I was puzzled. In most drive-by shootings, a gang wouldn’t risk a second pass, since the element of surprise had been used up. Indeed, looking around now at the expanse in front of the building, I saw perhaps a dozen young men with guns in their hands, crouching behind cars or along the sides of the building. I had never seen so many guns in Robert Taylor.
Price still hadn’t gotten up. I could see that he was gripping his leg. Somehow the sight of him lying motionless moved me to action. I headed toward him and saw that one of the BKs had come back outside to do the same. We grabbed Price and started to drag him toward the building.
“Get Serena! Get Serena!” someone shouted down from an upper floor. “She’s out there with her baby!”
The BK helping me with Price ran over to help Serena and her children to a safe spot. I dragged Price the rest of the way by myself and made it to the lobby just as the second car emerged from the alley. I heard some shouts and some more gunshots. I saw that the BK who’d gone to help Serena had draped his body atop her and her kids.
In the dim light of the lobby, I could see that Price’s leg was bleeding badly, just above the knee. J.T.’s men pushed me out of the way. They carried Price farther inside the building, toward one of the ground-floor apartments. I wondered where J.T. was.
“Sudhir, get inside, go upstairs to Ms. Mae’s-now!” It was Ms. Bailey. I gestured toward Price, to show that I wanted to help. She just yelled at me again to get upstairs.
About five flights up the stairs, I ran into a group of J.T.’s men on the gallery, looking out. “I don’t see no more!” one of them shouted to some BKs on the ground outside. “It don’t look like there’s any more! Just get everyone inside and put four in the lobby.”
I heard a stream of footsteps in the stairwell. Parents yelled at their children to hurry up, and a few mothers asked for help carrying their strollers. I heard someone say that J.T. was in the lobby, so I hustled back downstairs.
He stood at the center of a small mob, taking reports from his men. There was a lot of commotion, all of them talking past one another:
“Niggers will do it again, I know they will!”
“We need to get Price to the hospital, he’s still bleeding.”
“No, we need to secure the building.”
“I say we drive by and shoot back, now!”
As instructed, four young men now stood armed guard in the lobby, two at each entrance. Under normal circumstances young gang members like these bragged about their toughness, their willingness to kill for the family. But now, with the danger real, they looked shaky, eyes wide and fearful.
J.T. stood calmly, wearing dark sunglasses, picking his teeth. When his eyes fell upon me, he fixed me with a glare. I didn’t know what he was trying to communicate. Then he pointed toward the ceiling. He wanted me upstairs, at his mother’s place, out of the way.
Instead I walked even farther into the lobby, out of his view. I asked a rank-and-file BK where Price was. He pointed down the hall. J.T. approached, patted me on the back, and pulled me in close. “Price isn’t doing so hot,” he whispered. “He’s bleeding real bad, and I need to get him to the hospital.”
“Call the ambulance,” I said instinctively.
“They won’t come. Listen, we need your car. If they see one of our cars come up to Provident, they may call the police. We need to borrow your car.”
“Sure, of course,” I said, reaching for my keys. I had recently bought a junker, a 1982 Cutlass Ciera. “Let me get it.”
“No,” J.T. said, grabbing my hand. “You can’t leave the building for a while. Go upstairs, but let me have the keys. Cherise will take him.”
I gave J.T. my keys and watched him walk toward the apartment where Price was being looked after. It was common practice to have a woman drive a BK to the hospital so that he wouldn’t immediately be tagged as a gangster. Cherise lived in the building and let the Black Kings use her apartment to make crack cocaine. J.T. sometimes joked that the young women in the projects would never turn on their stoves if it weren’t for his gang cooking up crack.
J.T. commandeered a vacant apartment on the fourteenth floor to use as a temporary headquarters. The scene was surreal, like watching an army prepare for war. I sat in a corner and watched as J.T. issued commands. Small groups of men would come inside, receive their orders, and hurry off. J.T. assigned several men to take up rifles and sit in the windows of the third, fifth, and seventh floors. He instructed other groups of men to go door-to-door and warn tenants to stay away from the west-facing windows.
He told one young BK that there probably wouldn’t be another shooting for at least a few hours. “Get some of the older people out of here,” he ordered. “Take them to 2325.” A BK foot soldier told me that Price had made it to the emergency room but was said to be still bleeding badly.
J.T. came over and told me what he knew. The first car, the beat-up Ford, was a decoy to lure some Black Kings out of the building. The attack appeared to be a collaboration between the MCs and the Stones. They were deeply envious, J.T. told me, that the BKs had been able to attract so many customers to their territory. The MCs and the Stones were a constant source of worry for J.T., since they were led by “crazy niggers,” his term for the kind of bad businessmen who thought that a drive-by shooting was the best way to competein a drug market. J.T. much preferred the more established rival gangs, since a shared interest in maintaining the status quo decreased their appetite for violence.
Every so often J.T. sent out an entourage to buy food for people in the building. A few tenants carried on as usual, paying little attention to the Black Kings’ dramatic show of security in the lobby. But except for a couple of stereos and some shouting in the stairwells, the building was eerily quiet. We all baked in the still, hot air.
Occasionally one of J.T.’s more senior members would throw out a plan for retaliation. J. T. listened to every proposal but was noncommittal. “We got time for all that,” he kept saying. “Let’s just see what happens tonight.”
Every half hour Cherise called from the hospital to report on Price’s condition. J.T. looked tense as he took these reports. Price was a friend since high school, one of the few people J.T. allowed in his inner circle.
I was just nodding off to sleep on the floor when J.T. walked over.
“Thanks, man,” he said quietly.
“For what?”
“You didn’t have to get mixed up in this shit.”
He must have heard that I’d helped drag Price into the lobby. I didn’t say anything. J.T. slapped my leg, asked if I wanted a Coke, and walked off to the fridge.
There were no more shootings that night, but the tension didn’t let up. I never went home.
Within a few days, once he figured out exactly who was responsible for the attack, J.T. rounded up T-Bone and several other officers and went after the shooters. J. T. personally helped beat them up; the BKs also took their guns and money. Because these young rivals had “no business sense,” as J.T. told me later, there was no hope of a compromise. Physical retaliation was the only measure to consider.
Price stayed in the hospital for a few days, but the bullet caused no irreparable damage, and he was soon back in action.
T-Bone called me one day with big news: J.T. was on the verge of receiving another important promotion within the citywide Black Kings organization. If all went according to plan, J.T., T-Bone, and Price would be responsible for taking on even more BK factions, which meant managing a considerably larger drug-trafficking operation. I could hear the excitement in T-Bone’s voice. For him, too, the promotion meant more money as well as a boost in status. “Two years, that’s it,” he told me. “Two more years of this shit, and I’m getting out of the game.” Ever practical, T-Bone was saving for his future-a house, full-time college, and a legal job.
J.T. wouldn’t be around Robert Taylor much for the next several weeks, T-Bone told me, since his new assignment required a lot of preparation and legwork. But he had asked T-Bone to give me a message: “J.T. wants you to go with him to the next regional BK meeting. You up for it?”
I had been waiting for this phone call for a few years. I desperately wanted to learn about the gang’s senior leadership, and now that J.T. was one of them, it looked like I’d finally have my chance.
By this point in my research, I still felt guilty sometimes for being as much of a hustler, in my own way, as the other hustlers in the neighborhood. C-Note had called me on it, and C-Note was right. I constantly hustled people for information-stories, data, interviews,facts-anything that might make my research more interesting.
So I was happy whenever I had the chance to give a little bit back. The writing workshop hadn’t worked out as well as I’d wanted, and I was searching for another way to act charitably. An opportunity fell into my lap when the Chicago public-school teachers went on strike. Since BK rules stipulated that each member graduate from high school, J.T. asked Autry to set up a program during the strike so that J.T.’s members could stay off the streets and do some home-work. Autry had set up a similar program at the Boys & Girls Club, but gang boundaries forbade J.T.’s members to go there.
Autry agreed, and he asked me to run a classroom in J.T.’s building. I obliged, pretty sure that lecturing high-schoolers on history, politics, and math shouldn’t be too hard.
We met in a dingy, darkened apartment with a bathroom that didn’t work. On a given day, there were anywhere from twenty to fifty teenage gang members on my watch. The air was so foul that I let them smoke to cover the odor. There weren’t enough seats, so the kids forcibly claimed some chairs from neighboring apartments, with no promise of returning them.
On the first day, as the students talked loudly through my lecture on history and politics, J.T. walked in unannounced and shouted at them to pay attention. He ordered Price to take one particularly noisy foot soldier into the hallway and beat him.
Later I asked J.T. not to interrupt again. The kids would never learn anything, I insisted, if they knew that he was going to be monitoring them. J.T. and Autry both thought I was crazy. They didn’t think I had any chance of controlling the unruly teens without the threat of an occasional visit by J.T.
They were right. Within a day the “classroom” had descended into anarchy. In one corner a few guys were admiring a gun that one of them had just bought. (He was thoughtful enough to remove the bullets during class.) In another corner several teenagers had organized a dice game. The winner would get not only the cash but also the right to rob the homeless people sleeping in a nearby vacant apartment. One kid brought in a radio and improvised a rap song about their “Injun teacher,” replete with references to Custer, Geronimo, and “the smelly Ay-Rab.” (It never seemed to occur to anyone that “Arab” and “Indian” were not in fact interchangeable; in my case they were equally valuable put-downs.) The most harmless kids in the room were the ones who patiently waited for their friends to return from the store with some beer.
Things got worse from there. Some of my students started selling marijuana in the classroom; others would casually leave the building to find a prostitute. When I conveyed all this to J.T., he said that as long as the guys showed up, they weren’t hanging out on the street and getting into any real trouble.
Given that they were using my “classroom” to deal drugs, gamble, and play with guns, I wondered exactly what J.T. meant by “real” trouble.
My role was quickly downgraded from teacher to baby-sitter. The sessions lasted about two weeks, until news came that the teachers’ strike was being settled. By this time my admiration for Autry’s skill with the neighborhood kids had increased exponentially.
Despite my utter failure as a teacher, Autry called me again for help. The stakes were a little higher this time-and, for me, so was the reward.
Autry and the other staffers at the Boys & Girls Club wanted me to help write a grant proposal for the U.S. Department of Justice, which had advertised special funds being allocated for youth programs. The proposal needed to include in-depth crime statistics for the projects and the surrounding neighborhood, data that was typically hard to get, since the police didn’t like to make such information public. But if I took on the project, I’d get direct access to Officer Reggie Marcus-“Officer Reggie” to tenants-the local cop who had grown up in Robert Taylor himself and was devoted to making life there better. I jumped at the chance.
I had met Reggie on several occasions, but now I had an opportunity to work closely with him and cultivate a genuine friendship. He was about six feet tall, as muscular and fit as a football player; he always dressed well and carried himself with a quiet determination. I knew that Reggie often dealt directly with gang leaders in the hopes of keeping violence to a minimum and that he was a diplomatic force among the project’s street hustlers. Now I would be able to ask as many questions as I wanted about the particulars of his work.
Why, for instance, did he try to reduce gun violence by making sure that the gangs were the only ones who had guns?
“They don’t like gun violence any more than the tenants, because it scares away customers,” he explained. “So they try to keep things quiet.”
One wintry afternoon I met Reggie at the police station in the Grand Boulevard neighborhood, a few blocks from J.T.’s territory. When I arrived, he told me he still had some phone calls to make, so I went to find a water fountain. The police station was drab, row after row of bland gray cubicles; the air was cold and damp, the tile floor slippery from the tracked-in snow.
Near the water fountain, I came upon a wall covered with Polaroid pictures. They were all of black men in their teens and twenties, most of them looking dazed or defiant. Beneath each photo was a caption with the person’s name and gang affiliation.
Taped next to the photos was a party flyer headlined “MC Southside Fest.” J.T.’s gang hung similar flyers all around the buildings when they were sponsoring a party or a basketball tournament. On the MC flyer, there were several names handwritten along the right margin, as if it were a sign-up sheet: “Watson,” “O’Neill,” “Brown.”
Reggie came by as I was inspecting the flyer.
“Let’s not hang out here,” he said, looking concerned. “And let’s not talk about that. I’ll explain later.”
We were heading over to the Boys & Girls Club to talk to Autry about the Department of Justice grant. As we walked to Reggie’s SUV, parked behind the police station, I was still thinking about the MC flyer.
I recalled a party the Black Kings had thrown a few years back, having rented out the second floor of an Elks Lodge. The women were dressed up, and the men wore spiffy tracksuits or pressed jeans. They drank beer and wine coolers, danced, and passed marijuana joints around the room.
As J.T. and I stood talking in a corner, a group of five men suddenly busted into the room, all dressed in black. One of them held up a gun for everyone to see. The other four ran to the corners of the room, one of them shouting for everyone to get up against the wall. Four of the men were black, one white. J.T. whispered to me, “Cops.” He and I took our places against the wall.
One of the partying gangsters, a huge man, at least six foot two and 250 pounds, started to resist. “Fuck you, nigger!” he shouted. Two of the men in black promptly yanked him into the bathroom- where, from the sound of it, they beat him brutally. We all stood silently against the wall, listening to his grunts and groans.
“Who’s next?” shouted one of the men in black. “Who wants some of this?”
Two of them pulled out black trash bags. “Cash and jewels, I want everything in the bag!” one shouted. “Now!”
When the bag reached us, J.T. calmly deposited his necklace and his money clip, fat with twenties. I put the cash from my pocket, about fifteen dollars, into the bag. As I did so, the man holding the bag looked up and stared at me. He didn’t say anything, but he kept glancing over at me as he continued his collection rounds. He seemed puzzled as to what I, plainly an outsider, was doing there.
When they were done, the five men dropped the bags out the window and calmly filed out. After a time J.T. motioned for me to follow him outside. We walked to his car, parked in the adjoining lot. Some other BK leaders joined him, commiserating over the robbery.
“Fucking cops do this all the time,” J.T. told me. “As soon as they find out we’re having a party, they raid it.”
“Why? And why don’t they arrest you?” I asked. “And how do you know they were cops?”
“It’s a game!” shouted one of the other BK leaders. “We make all this fucking money, and they want some.”
“They’re jealous,” J.T. said calmly. “We make more than them, and they can’t stand it. So this is how they get back at us.”
I had a hard time believing that the police would so brazenly rob a street gang. But it didn’t seem like the kind of thing that J.T. would lie about; most of his exaggerations served the purpose of making him look more powerful, not less so.
I had forgotten the incident entirely until I saw the MC flyer at the police station. I wondered if the names written in the margin were the cops who had signed up to raid the party. So I told Reggie about the BK party and J.T.’s claim that the robbers were cops.
He took a deep breath and looked straight ahead as he drove. “You know, Sudhir, you have to be careful about what you hear,” he said. Reggie drove fast, barreling over the unplowed snow as if he were off-roading. Our breath was fogging up the windshield. “I’m not going to say that all the people I work with are always doing the right thing. Hell, I don’t do the right thing all the time. But-”
“You don’t have to tell me anything if you don’t want to.”
“I know that, I know that. But you should know what’s going on. Yes, some of the people I work with raid the parties. And you know, sometimes I feel like I should do it, too! I mean, guys like J.T. are making a killing off people. And for what? Peddling stuff that kills. But it’s not for me. I don’t participate-I just don’t see the point.”
“I’ve ridden along with J.T. and a few of his friends in their sports cars,” I said. “Sometimes a cop will pull us over for no reason. And then-”
“He asks to see a paycheck stub, right?”
“Yeah! How did you know I was going to say that?”
“Think about how frustrating it is to do policing,” Reggie said. “You’ve been hanging out with these guys. You know that they never hold the cash that they make. They have all these investments in other people’s names. So what can we do? We can’t arrest their mothers for living in a nice house. But when we stop them in their fancy cars, we can legitimately ask whether they stole the car or not. Now, again, I don’t do that stuff. But some other people do.”
“But I don’t have to carry around a paycheck stub. Why should they?” I knew this was a naïve-sounding question, and I was fully aware that there was a big difference between me and the gang members. But because naïveté had worked in the past, I’d stuck with this strategy.
“You are not peddling that shit,” Reggie said, stating the obvious. I wasn’t sure if his explanation was meant to be sarcastic, whether he was humoring me, or whether he just wanted to make sure I understoodprecisely the police officers’ rationale. “You aren’t making millions by killing people. Sometimes we’ll take their car away.”
“What do you do with it?” I asked. I knew Reggie didn’t believe that the drug dealers were each “making millions,” but some of their earnings were still sufficiently greater than the cops’ to make Reggie upset.
“A lot of times, we’ll sell it at the police auction, and the money goes to charity. I figure it’s a way of getting back at those fools.”
On a few occasions, I’d been riding in a car with some gang members when a cop stopped the car, made everyone get out, and summarily called for a tow truck. On a few other occasions, the cop let the driver keep the car but took everyone’s jewelry and cash. To me the strangest thing was that the gang members barely protested. It was as if they were playing a life-size board game, the rules of which were well established and immutable, and on this occasion they’d simply gotten a bad roll of the dice.
A few weeks later, Reggie invited me to a South Side bar fre-quented by black cops. “I think you’re getting a real one-sided view of our work,” he said.
His offer surprised me. Reggie was a reserved man, and he rarely introduced me to other police officers even if they were standing nearby. He preferred to speak with me behind closed doors-in Ms. Bailey’s office, inside the Boys & Girls Club, or in his car.
We met at the bar on a Saturday afternoon. It was located a few blocks from the precinct and Robert Taylor. It was nondescript on the outside, marked only by some neon beer signs. On either side of it lay fast-food restaurants, liquor stores, and check-cashing shops. Even Reggie didn’t know the bar’s actual name. “I’ve been coming here for fifteen years,” he said, “and I never even bothered to ask.” He and the other cops just called it “the Lounge.” The place was just as nondescript inside: a long wooden bar, several tables, dim lighting, some Bears and Bulls posters. It had the feel of a well-worn den in a working-class home. All the patrons were black and at least in their mid-thirties, with a few old-timers nursing an afternoon beer.
Reggie sat us down at a table and introduced me to three of his off-duty colleagues. From the outset they seemed wary of speaking about their work. And since I never liked to question people too much until I got to know them, the conversation was stiff to say the least. In a short time, we covered my ethnic background, the Chicago Bears, and the strange beliefs of the university crowd in Hyde Park. The cops, like most working-class Chicagoans, thought that Hyde Park liberals-myself included, presumably-held quaint, unrealistic views of reality, especially in terms of racial integration. To these men Hyde Park was known as the “why can’t everyone just get along?” part of town.
One of the cops, a man named Jerry, sat staring at me the entire time. I felt sure I’d seen him before. He was quietly drinking whiskey shots with beer chasers. Once in a while, he’d spit out a question: “So you think you know a lot about gangs, huh?” or “What are you going to write about, Mr. Professor?” I got a little nervous when he started calling me “Mr. Professor,” since that’s how I was known in J.T.’s building. Was this just a coincidence?
The more Officer Jerry drank, the more belligerent he became. “You university types like to talk about how much you know, don’t you?” he said. “You like to talk about how you’re going to solve all these problems, don’t you?”
Reggie shot me a glance as if to say that I’d better defend myself.
“Well, if you think I don’t know something, why don’t you teach me?” I said. I’d had a few beers myself by now, and I probably sounded more aggressive than I’d intended.
“Motherfucker!” Jerry leaned in hard toward me. “You think I don’t know who you fucking are? You think we all don’t know what you’re doing? If you want to play with us, you better be real careful. If you like watching, you may get caught.”
A shiver ran over me when he said “watching.” Now I knew exactly where I’d seen him. In J.T.’s buildings Officer Jerry was well known, and by my estimation he was a rogue cop. Some months earlier, I’d been sitting in a stairwell interviewing a few prostitutes and pimps. I heard a commotion in the gallery. The stairwell door was partially open; looking out, I could see three police officers busting open an apartment door. Two of them, one black and one white, ran inside. The third, who was black, stayed outside guarding the door. He didn’t seem to notice us.
A minute later the cops hauled out a man and a teenage boy. Neither of them resisted, and neither seemed very surprised. The teenager was handcuffed, and they forced him to the floor. The mother was screaming, as was the baby in her arms.
Then a fourth cop showed up, swaggering down the hall. It was Officer Jerry. He wore black pants, a black and blue fleece jacket, and a bulletproof vest. He started to beat and kick the father violently. “Where’s the money, nigger?” he shouted. “Where’s the cash?”
I was shocked. I glanced at the folks I’d been talking to in the stairwell. They looked as if they’d seen this before, but they also looked anxious, sitting in silence in the apparent hope that the cops wouldn’t come for them next.
Finally the man relented. He, too, lay on the floor, bloodied. “In the oven,” he said, “in the oven.”
Officer Jerry went inside and returned with a large brown bag. “Don’t fuck with us,” he told the father. “You hear me?”
The father just sat there, dazed. The other cops took the hand-cuffs off the teenager and let him back into the apartment.
Just as Officer Jerry was leaving, one of the pimps sitting next to me accidentally dropped a beer bottle. Officer Jerry turned and looked down the gallery, straight at us. I jumped back, but he stomped into the stairwell. He cast his eye over the lot of us. “Get the fuck out of here!” he said. Then, noticing me, he smirked, as if I were no more significant than a flea.
Once he left, I asked one of the pimps, Timothy, about Officer Jerry. “He gets to come in the building whenever he wants and get a piece of the action,” he said. Timothy told me that Sonny, the man that Officer Jerry had just beaten, stole cars for a living but had apparently neglected to pay his regular protection fee to Officer Jerry. “We always joke that whenever Officer Jerry runs out of money, he comes in here and beats up a nigger,” Timothy said. “He got me once last year. Took two hundred bucks and then my girl had to suck his dick. Asshole.”
In the coming months, I learned that Officer Jerry was a notorious presence in the building. I heard dozens of stories from tenants who said they’d suffered all forms of harassment, abuse, and shakedowns at the hands of Officer Jerry. It was hard to corroborate these stories, but based on what I’d seen with my own eyes, they weren’t hard to believe. And to some degree, it probably didn’t much matter whether all the reports of his abusive behavior were true. In the projects, the “bad cop” story was a myth that residents spread at will out of sheer frustration that they lived in a high-crime area where the police presence was minimal at best, unchecked at worst.
Now, sitting across the table from him at the Lounge, I started to feel extremely nervous. What if he somehow knew that I had recorded all these incidents in my notebooks?
He sat there sputtering with rage, shaking the table. I looked over at Reggie, hoping for some help.
“Jerry, leave him alone,” Reggie said quietly, fiddling with his beer. “He’s okay.”
“Okay? Are you kidding me? You trust that motherfucking Ay-rab?!” Jerry tossed back his shot and grabbed the beer. I thought he might throw the bottle at me. He let out a nasty laugh. “Just tell him to stay out of my way.”
“Listen, I’m only trying to get a better understanding of what you do,” I said. “Maybe I could tell you a little bit about my research.”
“Fuck you,” Jerry said, staring me down. “You write any of that shit down, and I’ll come after your ass. You got me? I don’t want to talk to you, I don’t want you talking to nobody else, and I don’t want to see you around these motherfucking projects. I know who you are, motherfucker. Don’t think I don’t know what you’re doing.”
Reggie grabbed my arm and threw a twenty-dollar bill on the table. “Let’s go,” he said.
When we got to the car, Reggie started the ignition but didn’t drive away. He began to speak gently but firmly, his tone almost parental. “Sudhir, I brought you here today because these guys wanted to know who you are and what you’re up to. I didn’t want to tell you that, because I knew you’d be nervous. They know you’re watching, they know you’ve seen them in the building, they know you’re going to be writing something. I told them that you were a good person. Jerry was too drunk-I’m sorry about that.”
Reggie held his silence for a few minutes, looking out at the busy street.
“I think you have to make a decision, Sudhir,” he said. “And I can’t make it for you. I never really asked you what you’ll be writing about. I thought you were just helping the club, but then Autry told me last week that you’re writing about life in the projects. You and I have talked about a lot of things. But we never talked about whether you would write what I say. I hope not. I mean, if you are, I’d like you to tell me right now. But that’s not really the problem, because I’m not afraid of what I do or what I am.”
Up to this point, Reggie knew that I was interviewing families and others for my graduate research. A few months later, we wound up talking further about my dissertation, and he said it would be okay to include anything he’d told me, but we agreed to change his name so he couldn’t be identified.
At this moment, however, what really concerned me was the reaction of his colleagues. “Reggie, are you telling me I need to worry if I write about cops?”
“Police don’t talk a lot to people like you,” he said. “Like Jerry. He doesn’t want people watching what he does. I know you’ve seen him do some stupid shit. I know you’ve seen a lot of people do some stupid shit. But you need to decide: What good does it do to write about what he does? If you want to work around here, maybe you keep some of this out.”
I left Reggie that evening not knowing what I should do. If I wanted to write about effective policing-like the good, creative work that Reggie did-I would feel compelled to write about abusive policing as well.
A week later I was talking to Autry about my dilemma. We were having a beer in the South Shore apartment where he lived with his wife and children. South Shore was a stately neighborhood with pockets of low-income apartments that someone like Autry could afford. He had moved there to keep his children away from street gangs.
Autry insisted that I not write about the police. His explanation was revealing. “You need to understand that there are two gangs in the projects,” he said. “The police are also a gang, but they really have the power. I mean, these niggers run around with money and cars, but at any moment the cops can get them off the street. They know about you. They’ve been talking with me, and I’ve been telling them you’re okay, but they want to know what you’re looking for.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this before?” I asked.
“I didn’t want to worry you, and you haven’t done nothing wrong,” he said. “But you need to do what I do. Never, never, never piss off the police.”
When I pressed Autry on the subject, he wouldn’t say anything more, other than flatly repeating his advice: “Don’t write about them.”
Two weeks later my car was broken into. It was parked across the street from the Boys & Girls Club. Curiously, however, neither the lock nor the window was broken; instead the lock had been expertly picked. My backpack and the glove compartment had both been thoroughly rummaged, with some pens, paper, a couple of candy bars, and my gym clothes strewn about. But nothing seemed to be missing. Although I sometimes kept a few notebooks in my backpack, on this occasion I hadn’t.
I went inside to tell Autry. “Let’s call Reggie,” he said. “Don’t touch anything.”
We waited for Reggie inside the club, where a children’s Christmas party was in progress. The mood was happy, especially since some local stores had donated crates of food for tenant families.
Reggie arrived wearing a Santa hat. He’d been at another Christmas party, passing out toys donated by police officers. When he saw my car, he dropped his head and then peered at Autry.
“Did you talk with him?” he asked Autry.
“I did, but he’s pigheaded. He don’t listen.”
I was confused.
“Sudhir, is there any way you could let me know when you’re going to come around here?” Reggie asked. “I mean, maybe you could page me and leave a message.”
“What are you talking about? I come over here nearly every day! Can you guys please tell me what’s going on?”
“Let’s go for a walk,” Reggie said, grabbing my arm.
It was freezing, and the wind was howling. We walked around the project buildings. The fresh snow made the high-rises look like gravestones sticking up from the ground.
“Sudhir, you’re getting into something you shouldn’t be messing with,” Reggie said. “You’ve been reading about the gang busts, right?”
Yes, I told him. The newspapers had been reporting the recent arrests of some of the highest-level drug dealers in Chicago. These arrests were apparently intended to interrupt the trade between the Mexican-American gangs who imported cocaine and the black gangsters who sold crack.
Word on the street was that the FBI and other federal agencies were behind the arrests. Although I hadn’t been in touch with J.T. lately-he was still busy settling into his expanded Black Kings duties-he had told me in the past that federal involvement frightened the gangs. “Once you see the feds, that’s when you worry,” he said. “If it’s local, we never worry. As long as you don’t do something stupid, you’ll be okay.” Although the recent arrests involved gang leaders more senior than J.T., and not even in his neighborhood, he was habitually concerned that federal officials would work their way down the ladder to him. He also reasoned that the feds would specifically target the Black Kings if possible, considering that the gang ran what was probably the city’s smoothest drug operation.
Reggie now told me that the feds were indeed working Chicago-and hard. They were hoping to indict the drug gangs under the powerful Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, which was instituted in 1970 to combat the Mafia and other crime groups that dealt in money laundering, gambling, and union shakedowns. RICO had been so successful in disrupting Italian, Irish, and Jewish crime gangs that the feds were now using it to go after street gangs, claiming that they, too, were organized criminal enterprises.
Reggie explained that he, like most street cops, hated it when federal agents came to town. They were so eager for high-profile indictments, he said, that they’d use allegations of police improprieties to leverage local cops into turning over their gang intelligence. This in turn would disrupt the relationships that cops like Reggie had carefully built up in the community.
“What does all this mean for you?” I asked. “And for me?”
“For me it means I got to do everything by the book. For you it means you have to be very, very careful. I heard from Ms. Bailey that you’re asking a lot of people about us. Now, that doesn’t bother me, like I said before. But there are a lot of folks where I work who think you’re trying to bust them, do you understand?”
“Bust them?”
“They think you’re looking for dirt. Looking to find something to hold against them. I wouldn’t worry about your car. Just trust me, it won’t happen again.”
After this talk with Reggie, I began to fear the police much more than I had ever feared J.T. and the gangs. As Autry had told me, it was the cops who had the real power. They controlled where and how openly the gang could operate, and, if so inclined, they could put just about anyone in jail. Still, as both Autry and J.T. had told me, the cops rarely arrested gang leaders, since they preferred to know who was in control rather than having to deal with an unpredictable leader or, even worse, a power vacuum. When I asked Reggie if this was really true, his response-he dropped his head and asked me not to press him on the issue-seemed to indicate that it was.
Not every cop in the projects was corrupt or abusive, but I had become nervous about getting on the cops’ bad side. I had no desire to get beaten up or be regularly harassed. I’d grown up thinking of cops as people you trusted to help when things went bad, but that wasn’t the way things worked here, even for me. Not that I’d endeared myself to the cops: I came into the projects by befriending a gang leader, after all, and I hung out with a lot of tenants who did illegal things for a living.
Looking back, I think it would have been better to learn more about the neighborhood from the cops’ perspective. But this wouldn’t have been easy. Most tenants probably would have stopped speaking with me if they thought I was even remotely tied to the police. One reason journalists often publish thin stories about the projects is that they typically rely on the police for information, and this reliance makes the tenants turn their backs.
As it was, the best I could do was try to learn a little bit from cops like Reggie. He could be just as creative in his approach to police work as some of the tenants were in their approach to survival. If this meant sharing information with gang members to ensure that their wars didn’t kill innocents, so be it. Rather than arresting young gang members, Reggie and other cops used “scared straight” tactics to try to get them to stop dealing. I also watched many times as the police mediated disputes between hustlers; and even though they weren’t always responsive to domestic-abuse calls, many cops did help Ms. Bailey scare perpetrators so they wouldn’t come into the high-rise again.
It wasn’t until months after my car was broken into that Reggie confirmed it had been the police who did it. Officer Jerry and a few of his friends were apparently concerned about the contents of my notebooks and wanted to find them. Bad Buck, a young man from Robert Taylor whom I’d befriended, had told the police that I kept my notes in my car. Reggie said that Buck had been caught holding a thousand dollars’ worth of cocaine and had surrendered the information about my notes in exchange for not going to jail.
In early 1995 the newspapers began to report another story of major import for the residents of Robert Taylor, this one with even greater consequences than the federal drug busts. Members of Congress and the Clinton administration had begun serious discussions with mayors across the country to propose knocking down housing projects. Henry Cisneros, the secretary of housing and urban development, claimed that “high-rises just don’t work.” He and his staff spoke of demolishing these “islands of poverty,” with the goal of pushing their inhabitants to live where “residents of different incomes interact with one another.” Cisneros singled out Chicago’s projects as “without question, the worst public housing in America today.” The Robert Taylor Homes were said to be at the very top of the demolition list. They were to be replaced by an upscale town-house development called Legends South, which would include just a few hundred units of public housing.
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.