After nearly three years of hanging out with J.T., I began talking to several of my professors about my dissertation topic. As it happened, they weren’t as enthusiastic as I was about an in-depth study of the Black Kings crack gang and its compelling leader. They were more interested in the standard sociological issues in the community: entrenched poverty, domestic violence, the prevalence of guns, residents’ charged relations with the government-and, to a lesser extent, how the community dealt with the gang.
If I explored these subjects well, my professors said, I could explain how the Robert Taylor tenants really behaved, rather than simply arguing that they didn’t act like middle-class people.
Bill Wilson in particular was adamant that I adopt a wider lens on the gang and its role in Robert Taylor. Because sociology had such a strong tradition of “community studies,” he wanted me to write the definitive report on everyday life in high-rise housing projects.
He also said he’d started worrying about my safety in the projects.By this point I had taken up golf as a way to spend more time with Wilson, an avid golfer. “I’m having nightmares, Sudhir,” he said once in the middle of the fairway, staring out blankly. “You’re worrying me, and I really want you to think about spending some time with others.” He drifted off, never instructing me about which “others” I should be observing, but I knew this was code for anyone besides the gang.
I knew he had my best interests in mind, but it still came as a shock to me that I would have to widen my focus if I still planned to base my dissertation on this community. It meant that J.T. wouldn’t be the sole target of my attention, and perhaps not even the primary target. A few of my professors were seasoned ethnographers, experts in the methodology of firsthand observation. They were insistent that I avoid getting so close to any one source that I would be beholden to him.
Easier said than done. I hadn’t forgotten how agitated J.T. became when he saw me branching out into the community. I really didn’t feel I could tell him that my project was moving away from a focus on his leadership. By now J.T. wasn’t my only access to the community, but he was certainly my best access. He was the one who had brought me in, and he was the one who could open-or shut-any door. But beyond all that lay one simple fact: J.T. was a charismatic man who led a fascinating life that I wanted to keep learning about.
J.T. seemed to appreciate having the ear of an outsider who would listen for hours to his tales of bravado and managerial prowess. He often expressed how hard it was to oversee the gang, to keep the drug economy running smoothly, and to deal with the law-abiding tenants who saw him as an adversary. Sometimes he spoke of his job with dispassion, as if he were the CEO of some widget manufacturer-an attitude that I found not only jarring but, given the violence and destruction his enterprise caused, irresponsible.
He fancied himself a philanthropist as much as a leader. He spoke proudly of quitting his mainstream sales job in downtown Chicago to return to the projects and use his drug profits “to help others.” How did he help? He mandated that all his gang members get a high-school diploma and stay off drugs. He gave money to some local youth centers for sports equipment and computers. He willingly loaned out his gang members to Robert Taylor tenant leaders, who deployed them on such tasks as escorting the elderly on errands or beating up a domestic abuser. J.T. could even put a positive spin on the fact that he made money by selling drugs. A drug economy, he told me, was “useful for the community,” since it redistributed the drug addicts’ money back into the community via the gang’s philanthropy.
I have to admit that J.T.’s rhetoric could be persuasive, even when I tried to play the skeptic. The fact was, I didn’t yet have a good grip on how his gang really affected the broader community. On an even more basic level, I wondered if I really had a complete sense of what J.T. did on a daily level. What kind of gang activities wasn’t he showing me?
One cold February morning, I stood with him on a street corner as he met with one of his drug-selling crews. I was shivering, still unaccustomed to the chilling lake winds, and trying hard to focus on what J.T. was saying. He spoke to his men about the need to take pride in their work. He was also trying to motivate the younger members to brave the cold and sell as much crack as they could. In weather like this, the youngest members had to stand outside and sell while the ones with more seniority hung out in a building lobby.
After addressing his troops, J.T. said he was going off to play basketball.He climbed into his Malibu and I climbed in with him. We were parked near a busy intersection at State Street, within view of a Robert Taylor high-rise, some low-rise stores, and the Boys & Girls Club. Before he even turned the key, I mentioned, half joking, that I thought he was seriously overpaid.
“I don’t see what’s so difficult about your job,” I said. “I mean, you say how hard it is to do what you do, but I just can’t see it being that difficult.” All I ever saw him do, I said, was walk around and shake hands with people, spend money, drive nice cars-he owned at least three that I knew of-and party with his friends. J.T. just sat for a moment, making no move to drive off. “Okay, well, you want to give it a try? If you think it’s so easy, you try it.”
“I don’t think that would be possible. I don’t think graduate school is really training me to lead a gang.”
“Yeah, but you don’t think I need any skills at all to do this. So you should have no problem doing it, right?”
It was true that sometimes his job looked hard. When his gang was warring with another gang, for instance, J.T. had to coordinate his troops and motivate fifteen-year-old kids to stand out in the open and sell drugs despite the heightened risk of being shot, beaten up, or arrested. And it wasn’t as though these kids were getting rich for their trouble. The BKs, like most other street gangs, had a small leadership class. J.T. kept only a few officers on his payroll: a treasurer, a couple of “enforcers,” a security coordinator, and then a set of lesser-paid “directors” who managed the six-person teams that did the actual street-level selling of crack.
But for the most part, it seemed that J.T.’s gang members spent their time hanging around on street corners, selling drugs, shooting dice, playing sports, and talking about women. Did it really take a self-styled CEO to manage that?
I expressed this sentiment to J.T. “I could do it,” I said. “Probably.I mean, I don’t think I could handle a war and I’ve never shot a gun, so it depends what you mean when you say ‘try it.’ ”
“Just that-try it. There’s no war on right now, no fighting. So you don’t even have to touch a gun. But I can’t promise that you won’t have to do something you may not like.”
“Such as?”
“I’m not telling you. You said you think it’s easy, so you do it, and you’ll see what I mean.”
“Is this an offer?”
“Nigger, this is the offer of a lifetime. Guaranteed that if you do this, you’ll have a story for all your college friends.”
He suggested that I try it for a day. This made me laugh: how could I possibly learn anything worthwhile in a single day?
From inside the car, I watched as parents gingerly stepped out of the high-rise lobby, kids in tow, trying to get to school and out of the unforgiving lake wind. A crossing guard motioned them to hurry up and cross the street, for there were a couple of eighteen-wheelers idling impatiently at a green light. As they passed his car, J.T. waved. Our breath was fogging up the windshield. He turned on the defroster, jacked the music a bit louder. “One day,” he said. “Take it or leave it. That’s all I’m saying. One day.”
I met J.T. at seven-thirty the next morning at Kevin’s Hamburger Heaven in Bridgeport, a predominantly Irish-American neighborhood across the expressway from the projects. This was his regular morning spot. “None of these white folks here know me,” he said, “so I don’t get any funny looks.”
His steak and eggs arrived just as I sat down. He always ate alone, he said. Soon enough he’d be joined by two of his officers, Price and T-Bone. Even though J.T.’s gang was nearly twice as large as most others on the South Side, he kept his officer class small, because he trusted very few people. All of his officers were friends he’d known since high school.
“All right,” he began, “let’s talk a little about-”
“Listen,” I blurted out, “I can’t kill anybody, I can’t sell shit to anybody.” I had been awake much of the night worrying. “Or even plan any of that stuff! Not me!”
“Okay, nigger, first of all you need to stop shouting.” He looked about the room. “And stop worrying. But let me tell you what I’m worried about, chief.”
He twirled a piece of steak on his fork as he dabbed his mouth with a napkin.
“I can’t let you do everything, right, because I’ll get into trouble, you dig? So there’s just going to be some stuff you can’t do. And you already told me some of the other stuff you don’t want to be doing. But all that doesn’t matter, because I got plenty of stuff to keep you busy for the day. And only the cats coming for breakfast know what you’ll be doing. So don’t be acting like you run the place in front of everybody. Don’t embarrass me.”
It was his own bosses, J.T. explained, that he was worried about, the Black Kings’ board of directors. The board, roughly two dozen men who controlled all the neighborhood BK gangs in Chicago, kept a close eye on drug revenues, since their generous skim came off the top. They were always concerned that local leaders like J.T. keep their troops in line. Young gang members who made trouble drew unwanted police attention, which made it harder to sell drugs; the fewer drugs that were sold, the less money the board collected. So the board was constantly reminding J.T. to minimize the friction of his operation.
As J.T. was explaining all this, he repeated that only his senior officers knew that I was gang leader for a day. It wouldn’t do, he said, for the gang’s rank and file to learn of our experiment, nor the community at large. I was excited at the thought of spending the day with J.T. I felt he might not be able to censor what I saw if I was with him for a full day. It was also an obvious sign that he trusted me. And I think he was flattered that I was interested in knowing what actually went into his work.
Impatient, I asked him what my first assignment was.
“You’ll find out in a minute, as soon as I do. Eat up, you’re going to need it.”
I was nervous, to be sure, but not because I was implicating myself in an illegal enterprise. In fact, I hadn’t even really thought about that angle. I probably should have. At most universities, faculty members solicit approval for their research from institutional review boards, which act as the main insurance against exploitative or unethical research. But the work of graduate students is largely overlooked. Only later, when I began sharing my experiences with my advisers and showing them my field notes, did I begin to understand-and adhere to-the reporting requirements for researchers who are privy to criminal conduct. But at the time, with little understanding of these protocols, I simply relied on my own moral compass.
This compass wasn’t necessarily reliable. To be honest, I was a bit overwhelmed by the thrill of further entering J.T.’s world. I hoped he would someday introduce me to the powerful Black Kings leadership, the reputedly ruthless inner-city gang lords who had since transplanted themselves to the Chicago suburbs. I wondered if they were some kind of revolutionary vanguard, debating the theories of Karl Marx and W. E. B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon and Kwame Nkrumah. (Probably not.) I also hoped that J.T. would bring me to some dark downtown tavern where large Italian men in large Italian suits met with black hustlers like J.T. to dream up a multiethnic, multigenerational,multimillion-dollar criminal plan. My mind, it was safe to say, was racing out of control.
Price and T-Bone soon arrived and sat down at our table. By now I knew these two pretty well-T-Bone, the gang’s bookish and chatty treasurer (which meant he handled most of the gang’s fiscal and organizational issues), and Price, the thuggish and hard-living security chief (a job that included the allocation of particular street corners to particular BK dealers). They were the two men most responsible for helping J.T. with day-to-day affairs. They both nodded in my direction as they sat down, then looked toward J.T.
“Okay, T-Bone,” J.T. said, “you’re up, nigger. Talk to me. What’s happening today?”
“Whoa, whoa!” I said. “I’m in charge here, no? I should call this meeting to order, no?”
“Okay, nigger,” J.T. said, again glancing around. He still seemed concerned that I was talking too loud. “Just be cool.”
I tried to calm down. “T-Bone, you’re up. Talk to me, nigger.”
J.T. collapsed on the table, laughing hard. T-Bone and Price laughed along with him.
“If he calls me ‘nigger’ again, I’m giving him an ass whupping,” T-Bone said. “I don’t care if he’s my leader.”
J.T. told T-Bone to go ahead and start listing the day’s tasks.
“Ms. Bailey needs about a dozen guys to clean up the building today,” T-Bone said. “Last night Josie and them partied all night long, and there’s shit everywhere. We need to send guys to her by eleven or she will be pissed. And I do not want to be dealing with her when she’s pissed. Not me.”
“Okay, Sudhir,” J.T. said, “what do we do?” He folded his arms and sat back, as if he’d just set up a checkmate.
“What? Are you kidding me? Is this a joke?”
“Ain’t no joke,” said T-Bone flatly. “What do I do?” He looked at J.T., who pointed his finger at me. “C’mon, chief,” T-Bone said to me. “I got about ten things I need to go over. Let’s do this.”
J.T. explained that he had to keep Ms. Bailey happy, since the gang sold crack in the lobby of her building and as building president she had the power to make things difficult. To appease her, J.T. regularly assigned his members to clean up her building and do other menial jobs. The young drug dealers hated these assignments not only because they were humiliating but because every hour of community service was one less hour earning money. Josie was a teenage member of J.T.’s gang who’d apparently thrown a party with some prostitutes and left the stairwells and gallery strewn with broken glass, trash, and used condoms.
“All right, who hasn’t done cleanup in a while?” I asked.
“Well, you have Moochie’s group and Kalia’s group,” T-Bone said. “Both of them ain’t cleaned up for about three months.” Moochie and Kalia were each in charge of a six-member sales force.
“Okay, how do we make a decision between the two?” I asked.
“Well, it depends on what you think is important,” J.T. said. “Moochie’s been making tall money, so you may not want to pull him off the streets. Kalia ain’t been doing so hot lately, so maybe you want him to clean up, ’cause he isn’t bringing in money anyway.”
T-Bone countered by saying that maybe I should give the cleanup job to Moochie because he was making so much money lately. A little community service, T-Bone said, might ensure that “Moochie’s head doesn’t get too big.” One of a leader’s constant struggles was to keep younger members from feeling too powerful or independent.
Then Price threw in the fact that Moochie, who was in his early twenties, had been sleeping with Ms. Bailey, who was about fifty-five. This news shocked me: Was Moochie really attracted to a heavyset woman in her fifties? Price explained that younger guys often slept with older women, especially in winter, because otherwise they might not have a warm, safe place to spend the night. Also, a lease-holding woman might let her younger boyfriend stash drugs and cash in her apartment and maybe even use it as a freelance sales spot.
“Maybe Ms. Bailey gets to liking Moochie and she tells everyone not to buy shit from anyone but his boys,” Price said. “You can’t have that, because Moochie feels like he owns the building, and he doesn’t.”
“What if I flip a coin?” I asked, frustrated that I was spending so much time delegating janitorial duties. “I mean, you can’t win one way or the other.”
“Giving up already?” J.T. asked.
“Okay, let’s send Moochie over there,” I said. “It’s better that his head doesn’t get too big. Short run, you lose a little money.”
“You got it,” T-Bone said, and stepped away to make a phone call.
Price brought up the next item. The BKs had been trying to find a large space-a church or school or youth center-where they could hold meetings. There were several occasions, J.T. explained, when the gang needed to gather all its members. If a member violated a major gang rule, J.T. liked to mete out punishment in front of the entire membership in order to encourage solidarity and, just as important, provide deterrence. If a member was caught stealing drugs, for instance, he might be brutally beaten in front of the whole gang.
J.T. might also call a large meeting to go over practical matters like sales strategies or suspicions about who might be snitching to the police. A big meeting also gave J.T. a captive audience for his oratory. I had already been to a few meetings in which the only content was a two-hour speech by J.T. on the virtues of loyalty and bravery.
He often called the gang together on a street corner or in a park.
But this was far from ideal. There were about 250 young men in J.T.’s gang; summoning even 50 of them to the same street corner was sure to bring out the police, especially if a beating was on the agenda.
I was curious about the gang’s relationship with the police, but it was very hard to fathom. Gang members brazenly sold drugs in public; why, I wondered, didn’t the cops just shut down these open-air markets? But I couldn’t get any solid answers to this question. J.T. was always evasive on the issue, and most people in the neighborhood were scared to talk about the cops at all-even more scared, it seemed to me, than to talk about the gang. As someone who grew up in a suburb where the police were a welcome presence, I found this bizarre. But there was plainly a lot that I didn’t yet understand.
The Black Kings also needed to meet en masse if they were preparing for war with another gang. Once in a while, a war began when teenage members of different gangs got into a fight that then escalated. But leaders like J.T. had a strong incentive to thwart this sort of conflict, since it jeopardized moneymaking for no good reason. More typically, a war broke out when one gang tried to take over a sales location that belonged to another gang. Or one gang might do a drive-by shooting in another gang’s territory, hoping to scare off its customers-perhaps right into the territory of the gang that did the shooting.
When this kind of spark occurred, J.T. might pick up the phone and call his counterpart in the other gang to arrange a compromise. But, more often, gang leaders ordered a retaliation in order to save face. One drive-by shooting begat a retaliatory drive-by; if a Black Kings dealer got robbed of his drugs or cash by someone from another gang, then the Black Kings would do at least the same.
The retaliation was what signaled the start of a war. In J.T.’s gang it was the security officer, Price, who oversaw the details of the war: posting sentries, hiring mercenary gunmen if need be, planning the drive-bys. Price enjoyed this work, and was often happiest during gang wars.
I had never seen a war last beyond a few weeks; the higher-ups in each gang understood that public violence was, at the very least, bad for business. Usually, after a week or ten days of fighting, the leaders would find a mediator, someone like Autry, to help forge a truce.
“Pastor Wilkins says we can meet once a week at the church, at night,” Price said. “I spoke to him yesterday. He says he would like a donation.”
Price started to chuckle. So did T-Bone, who had returned from his phone call, and J.T.
“What’s so funny?” I asked.
“Pastor Wilkins is a faggot, man,” J.T. said. “That nigger sucks dick all night long!”
I had no idea whether Pastor Wilkins really did have sex with men, but I didn’t think it much mattered. Price and the others enjoyed making fun of him, and that was that.
“I still don’t see what’s so funny,” I said.
“Nigger, you have to meet with him,” T-Bone said. “Alone!”
“Oh, I get it. Very funny. Well, how about this? Since I’m leader, then that meeting is now scheduled for tomorrow. Ha!”
“No, the pastor wants to meet today,” J.T. said, suddenly stern. “And I need to find out today if we have a place to meet on Friday. So you’re up, brown man. Get ready.”
“All right, then. I’m delegating T-Bone to visit Pastor Wilkins. Now, you can’t tell me that I can’t delegate!”
“Actually, I can,” J.T. said. “It says in the gang’s rules that only the leader can make these kinds of meetings.”
“Now you guys are making shit up. But fine, I’ll do it. I say we give him fifty bucks for the use of the church.”
“What!” Price said. “Are you crazy?”
“Fifty will just make sure the cops arrive on time,” T-Bone said. “You better think a little higher.”
“Well, what did we pay last time?” I asked.
“It depends,” J.T. said, explaining that it was not uncommon for the less well-established clergy to rent out their storefront spaces to the gangs for business meetings. “Five hundred gets you the back room or the basement, but that’s just one time. And the pastor stays in the building. Seven hundred fifty gets you the place to yourself. And sometimes you want to be by yourself, depending on what you’re going to discuss.”
“Yeah,” Price chimed in. “If you have to beat somebody’s ass, you might want to be alone.”
I asked for a little time to think things over.
The four of us left the restaurant and got into J.T.’s Malibu for our next task: a meeting with Johnny, a man who owned a convenience store and no longer allowed members of the Black Kings inside. I already knew Johnny. He was a local historian of sorts who liked to regale me with stories of the 1960s and 1970s, when he was a gang leader himself. But he stressed how the gangs of that period were totally different. They were political organizations, he said, fighting police harassment and standing up for the community’s right to a fair share of city services. In his view, today’s gangs were mostly moneymaking outfits with little understanding of, or commitment to, the needs of Chicago’s poor black population.
Johnny’s store was on Forty-seventh Street, a busy commercial strip that bisected Robert Taylor. The strip was lined with liquor stores, check-cashing shops, party-supply and hardware stores, a few burned-out buildings and empty lots, a public-assistance center, two beauty salons, and a barbershop.
I wasn’t very worried about meeting with Johnny until Price spoke up. “We’ve also got a problem with this nigger,” he said, “because he’s been charging us more than he charges other niggers.”
“You mean he rips off only people in the Black Kings?” I asked.
“That’s right,” said J.T. “And this one is hard, because Johnny is T-Bone’s uncle. He’s also a dangerous motherfucker. He’ll use a gun just like that. So you got to be careful.”
“No, you have to be careful,” I said. “I told you I won’t use a gun.”
“No one said you have to,” Price offered, laughing from the backseat. “But he might!”
“What exactly is it that I’m supposed to do?” I asked. “You want me to make him charge you fair prices?”
“Well, this is a tough one,” J.T. said, “because we can’t have people taking advantage of us, you dig? But the thing is, we provide this nigger protection.”
“Protection?”
“Yeah, say somebody steals something. Then we find out who did it and we deal with it.”
“So he can’t tell us that we can’t come in his store,” Price said. “Not if we’re providing him a service.”
“Right,” said J.T. “We have to try and remind him that he’s paying us to help him, and it doesn’t look good if he doesn’t let us come in his store. See, what he’s doing is trying to make back the money that he’s paying us for protection.”
Johnny was out front when we pulled up, smoking a cigarette. “What’s up, Sudhir?” he said. “I see you wasting your time again, hanging around these niggers.”
Johnny looked like a caricature of a disco-era hustler: bright orange pants, a polyester shirt that appeared to be highly flammable, cowboy boots with fake diamond trim, and lots of ghetto glitter- fake rubies and other stones-on his fingers. A tattoo on his arm read BLACK BITCH, and another on his chest said PENTHOUSE KINGS, which was the name of his long-ago street gang.
J.T., Price, and I followed Johnny into the back of the store while T-Bone peeled off to attend to some other business. The back room was musty and unswept. The walls were plastered with pictures of naked black women and a big poster of Walter Payton, the beloved Chicago Bears running back. The sturdy shelves and even the floor were crammed with used TV sets, stereo components, and microwaves that Johnny fixed and sold. A big wooden table held the remnants of last night’s poker game: cards and chips, cigar butts, some brandy, and a ledger tallying debts. Through the open back door, a small homeless encampment was visible. J.T. had told me that Johnny paid a homeless couple fifty dollars a week to sleep outside and watch over the store.
We all sat down around the table. Johnny seemed impatient. “All right,” he said, “what are we going to do?”
“Well, we were thinking more like what you were going to do, nigger,” Price said.
“Listen, big black,” Johnny said, cigarette dancing in his lips, “you can take that mouth outside if you can’t say something useful.”
J.T. told Price to go back to the car, leaving just me, J.T., and Johnny.
“You’re paying us, Johnny,” J.T. said, “and now you’re charging us. You trying to make your money back? Is that it?”
Johnny replied in a calm monotone. “You niggers charge me two hundred and fifty dollars a month, and that shit has to stop,” he said. “A man can’t run a business if he has to pay that kind of money.
And your boys keep coming in here demanding free shit. I told Moochie and the rest of them that if they come in here anymore, this.22 is going to find their back.” He gestured to a rifle hanging behind him on the wall.
“See now, that’s the kind of talk we don’t need,” J.T. said. “I mean, we need to cooperate.”
“Cooperate, my ass!” said Johnny. “You can cooperate with my fist.”
“Whoa, whoa!” I yelled, trying to be useful. “Let’s calm down now, boys. What I think we need is a little-”
“Is this Arab going to sit here all day with us?” Johnny said.
“Leave that boy alone,” J.T. said. “I’ll explain later.” He shot me a glance, a Shut the fuck up glance. “Listen, you pay me two hundred dollars a month and you’ll get the same shit from us.” He was talking about the protection the gang afforded. “And I’ll talk to Moochie and everyone else, tell them they can’t steal shit. Okay?”
“Bitch, you better tell him not to bring his girlfriends up in here.”
“What?”
“You heard me. He brings them bitches in here when I’m not around, showing off and taking shit off the shelves, eating candy and drinking soda like he owns the place. When my man tried to do something about it, he pulled a gun on him. Let him bring that shit on me. Try it once, I’ll kill the little bitch.”
“All right,” J.T. said, putting his hand in front of Johnny’s face to shut him up. “I told you I’ll deal with the nigger.”
“I pay you two hundred dollars and your boys get to come in here, but they have to promise to spend at least two hundred dollars a month on shit,” Johnny said.
“And you’re not going to jack up prices, right?” I said.
“Goddamn, Arab, you still here?” Johnny said. “Yeah, that’s right, they pay what everyone else pays.”
“Okay, then,” I said, “we got ourselves a deal, boys!” I stood up to go.
“Boy, sit your ass down,” J.T. said. “Johnny, we’ll get back with you.”
“Yeah, we’ll get back with you,” I said. “We need to deliberate.”
Johnny and J.T. started laughing.
“Goddamn!” Johnny shouted. “You bring this Arab with you wherever you go?”
“One day,” J.T. muttered, clearly frustrated that I was taking my role a little too seriously. “One day, that’s it.”
We got back in the Malibu. Price drove, J.T. rode shotgun, and I sat in the back. My next duty, J.T. explained, was to settle a dispute between two gang members, Billy and Otis. Billy was the director of a six-man drug-selling crew. Otis, one of his six dealers, was claiming that Billy had underpaid him for a day’s work. Billy, meanwhile, said that Otis lied about how much crack he sold and kept the extra money. My dilemma would be compounded by the fact that I already knew both Billy and Otis.
As we drove, Price explained my goal: to adjudicate the case and determine a fair punishment. “If Billy didn’t pay Otis, then you have to punish Billy,” he said. “The punishment for not paying one of your members would be two mouthshots, and Billy can’t work for a week. And if you want, you get to make Otis the director for that week. But if Otis stole something, then we have a bigger problem. You have to beat the shit out of that nigger, not just hit him twice. And he has to work free for a month.”
The thought of hitting someone in the face-delivering a “mouthshot”-made me nauseous. Growing up, I used to get picked on all the time. I was tall and athletic, but I was also a nerd, completewith pocket protector, bad haircut, and an armful of math and science books. I was a perfect target for the average football player or any other jock, especially since I played the less “manly” sports of tennis and soccer. I never even learned to throw a punch. In school most of the fights culminated with someone-most often a girl I was with-pleading for the bully to reconsider, or with me rolling up in a fetal ball, which I actually found to be quite a good strategy, since most bullies didn’t want to fight someone who wouldn’t fight back.
“Now, I don’t mean to be picky,” I said, “but isn’t this why we have you here, Price? I mean, you’re the security guy, no? You beat their ass-I mean, isn’t that what you get paid for? And if I’m the leader, I can delegate, no?”
“Sudhir,” J.T. said, “you have to realize that if you do that, then you lose respect. They need to see that you are the boss, which means that you hand out the beating.”
“What if I make them do twenty pushups or fifty squat thrusts? Or maybe they have to clean my car.”
“You don’t own a car,” J.T. said.
“That’s right-so they have to clean your car for a month!”
“Listen, these guys already clean my car, wipe my ass, whatever I want, so that ain’t happening,” J.T. said calmly, as if wanting to make sure I understood the breadth of his power. “And if they can steal money or not pay somebody for working and they only have to clean a car, then think how much these guys will steal. You have to make sure they understand that they can’t be stealing! Nigger, they need to fear you.”
“So that’s your leadership style? Fear?” I was trying to give the impression that I had my own style. Mostly, I was stalling out of worry that I’d have to throw a punch. “Fear, huh? Very interesting, very interesting.”
We pulled up to the street corner where Billy and Otis had been told to meet us. It was cold, not quite noon, but the sun had broken through a bit. Aside from a nearby gas station, the corner was surrounded mostly by empty lots and abandoned buildings.
I watched Billy and Otis saunter over. Billy was about six foot six. He had been a star basketball player at Dunbar High School and won a scholarship to Southern Illinois at Carbondale, a small downstate school. He began using his connections with the Black Kings to deal marijuana and cocaine to students in his dorm. He eventually decided to quit the basketball team to sell drugs full-time. He once told me that the lure of cash “made my mouth water, and I couldn’t get enough of it. Dumbest move I ever made.” Now he was working in the gang to save money in hopes of returning to college.
I always liked Billy. He was one of thousands of people in this neighborhood who, by the time they turned eighteen, had made all sorts of important decisions by themselves. Fewer than 40 percent of the adults in the neighborhood had even graduated from high school, much less college, so Billy didn’t have a lot of places to go for counsel. Even so, he was the first one to accept responsibility for the bad decisions he’d made. I’ll never forget what he said when he moved back to the projects after dropping out of college: “I just needed someone to talk to. My mind was racing out of control, and I had no one to talk to.”
I didn’t want to think about hitting Billy today, because I really liked him-and because, at that height, his jaw was nearly out of reach.
Otis was a different story. He always wore dark sunglasses-even indoors, even in winter-and he kept a large knife underneath a long black jacket that he always wore, even in hot weather. He loved to cut people up and give them a scar. And he didn’t like me at all.
This acrimony stemmed from a basketball game several months earlier. I regularly attended the gang’s midnight games at the Boys & Girls Club. If Autry came up one referee short, he sometimes pressed me into service. I had played basketball growing up, but not how it was played in the ghetto. In my neighborhood we set picks, passed the ball-and, perhaps most important, called fouls, even in pickup games. In the gang games, if you called even half the fouls that were actually committed, you’d run out of players by halftime. But during one game I refereed when Otis was playing, I called five quick fouls on him because… well, because he fouled somebody five times. He had to leave the game.
From the bench, with a cheap bottle of liquor in his hand, Otis shouted at me, “I’m going to kill you, motherfucker! I’m going to cut your balls off!” It was pretty hard to concentrate for the rest of the game.
I left the gym immediately afterward, but Otis chased me down in the parking lot. He was still in his uniform, so he didn’t have his machete with him. He picked up a bottle from the asphalt, smashed it, and pressed the jagged edge to my neck. Just then Autry hustled into the parking lot, pulled Otis back, and told me to run. I stood there in shock while Autry kept yelling, “Run, nigger, run!” After about thirty seconds, he and Otis both started laughing, because my feet simply wouldn’t move. They laughed so hard that they crumpled to the ground. I nearly threw up.
I was thinking of this incident now, as Otis walked toward us, and I wondered if he was, too. I got out of the car along with J.T. and Price.
“Okay, let’s hear what happened,” J.T. said. “I need to know who fucked up last week. Billy, you first.”
J.T. seemed preoccupied, maybe a little upset. I didn’t know why, and it wasn’t the time to ask. It certainly didn’t seem as if I had much chance of leading the conversation.
“Like I already said,” Billy began, “ain’t nothing to say. Otis got a hundred-pack and was a hundred dollars short. I want my money.” He was stubborn and defiant.
“Nigger, please,” Otis said. “You ain’t paid me for a week. You owed me that money.” Otis’s eyes were bloodshot, and he looked as if he might reach out and hit Billy at any moment.
“Didn’t pay?” said Billy. “You’re wrong on that. I paid you, and you went out that night partying. I remember.”
The director of a sales team-in this case, Billy-usually gave his street dealers an allotment of prepackaged crack. A “100-pack” was the standard. A single bag sold for ten dollars, so once the dealer exhausted his inventory, he was supposed to give his director one thousand dollars. Billy was saying that Otis had turned over just nine hundred dollars. Otis’s only defense seemed to be that Billy owed him money from an earlier transaction-a charge that Billy denied. Otis and Billy kept arguing with each other, but they were looking at J.T., Price, and me, pleading their cases.
“Okay, okay!” J.T. said. “This ain’t going nowhere. Get the fuck out of here. I’ll be back with you later.”
Billy and Otis walked away, joining the rest of their crew near some Dumpsters where they stored their drugs and money. Once they were out of earshot, J.T. turned to me: “Well, what do you think? You heard enough?”
“Yes, I did!” I said proudly. “Here’s my decision: Otis clearly took the money and pocketed it. You notice that he never actually denied taking something. He just said that he was owed the money by Billy. Now, I can’t tell whether Billy never paid Otis for the day’s work, but the fact that Otis didn’t deny stealing the money makes me feel that Billy forgot to pay Otis-or maybe he didn’t want to. But all that doesn’t matter, because Otis did steal some money. And, I bet, Billy didn’t pay.”
There was silence for about thirty seconds. Finally Price spoke up. “Hey, I like it. Not bad. That was the smartest thing you said all day!”
“Yeah,” said J.T. “Now, what’s the penalty?”
“Well, in this case we borrow from the NFL and invoke the offsetting-penalty rule,” I said. “Both guys screwed up, so the two penalties cancel each other out. I know that Otis’s crime is more serious because he stole, but both of them messed up. So no one gets hurt or pays a fine. How about that?”
More silence. Price watched J.T. for his reaction. I did the same. “Tell Otis to come over here,” J.T. finally said. Price went to fetch him.
“What are you going to do?” I asked J.T. He said nothing. “C’mon, tell me.” He ignored me.
Price returned with Otis.
“Wait for me over there,” J.T. told me quietly, nodding toward the car.
I did as he said. I climbed into the backseat, which faced away from J.T. and the others. Still, I was close enough to hear J.T. tell Otis to put his hands behind his back. Then I heard a punch, fist hitting cheekbone, and after about ten seconds another one. Then, slowly, two more punches. I looked behind me through the back window and saw Otis, bent over, holding his face. J.T. was slowly walking back toward the car, shaking his fist. He got in, and then Price did, too.
“You can’t let them steal,” J.T. told me. “I liked your take on what happened. You’re right, they both fucked up. Since we don’t really know if Billy didn’t pay, I can’t beat him. But like you said, we do know that Otis stole something, because he didn’t deny it. So I had to punish him. I let him off easy, though. I told him he only had to work free for a week.”
I could hear Otis moaning in pain, like a sick cow. I asked quietlyif he was okay. Neither J.T. nor Price answered. As we drove past Billy and Otis, I was the only one who looked over. Otis still had his head down, and he turned away as we passed. Billy just watched us drive by, completely expressionless.
We spent the next several hours driving around the South Side, covering the great swath of territory controlled not just by J.T.’s faction of the Black Kings but by other gangs within the BK nation.
As J.T. rose within the BKs’ citywide hierarchy, part of his broader duty was to monitor several BK factions besides his own to make sure that sales proceeded smoothly and that neighboring gangs cooperated with one another. This meant that he now oversaw, directly or indirectly, several hundred members of the Black Kings.
There was a constant reshuffling and realignment of gang factions. This typically had less to do with dramatic events like a gang war and more to do with basic economics. When one local gang withered, it was usually because it was unable to supply enough crack to meet the demand or because the gang leader set his street dealers’ wages too low to attract motivated workers. In such cases a gang’s leadership might transfer its distribution rights to a rival gang, a sort of merger in which the original gang got a small cut of the profits and a lower rank in the merged hierarchy. If running a drug gang wasn’t quite business as usual, it was nevertheless very much a business.
Today was the day that J.T. needed to visit all the four- and six-man sales teams occupying the street corners, parks, alleyways, and abandoned buildings where the Black Kings sold crack. He did this once a week. Because these visits were perhaps J.T.’s most important work, it was pretty obvious that I wasn’t going to have much input.
But as J.T. drove to his first stop, he told me that I could at least tag along.
By now a second car had joined us, occupied by four junior gang members. They were J.T.’s security detail, driving ahead to each location and paging him to say it was safe from rival gangs.
As I watched J.T. question his sales teams, one after the next, I began to realize that he truly was an accomplished manager. All his members knew the drill. As soon as J.T. reached a site, the sales team’s director would approach him alone and instruct his troops to stop all sales activity. One member, taking all the cash and drugs, left the area entirely so that the police couldn’t link J.T. directly to the drug sales. It was unclear to me whether this was J.T.’s idea or standard practice in gangland, but when it came to avoiding the police, J.T. was meticulous.
In order to keep himself clear, he never carried a gun, drugs, or large amounts of cash. Even though he occasionally alluded to cops he knew personally, men who’d grown up with him in the neighborhood, he was always sketchy as to whether he held any real influence among the police. Whatever the case, he didn’t seem all that concerned about getting arrested. In his view the police could come after him whenever they wanted, but it was in their best interest to let familiar faces run the drug businesses. “They just want to control shit,” he told me, “and that’s why they really only come after us maybe once in a while.”
His street dealers, however, were constantly getting arrested. From a legal standpoint this was mostly a nuisance; from a business standpoint, however, it posed a disastrous disruption of J.T.’s revenue flow. If a dealer went to prison, J.T. sometimes sent money to his family, but he was also worried that the dealer might decide to give testimony to the police in exchange for a reduced sentence. J.T. was more generous when it came to dealers killed in the line of duty. He nearly always paid their families a generous cash settlement.
As he met now with each sales director, J.T. would begin by grilling him with a standard set of questions: You losing any of your regulars? (In other words, customers.) Anybody complaining? (About the quality of the crack.) You heard of people leaving you for others? (Customers buying crack from other dealers.) Anybody watching you? (The police or tenant leaders.) Any new hustlers been hanging around? (Homeless people or street vendors.) You seen any niggers come around? (Enemy gangs.)
After answering these questions, the director had to report on the sales activity over the past week: a summary of the week’s receipts, any drugs that had been lost or stolen, the names of any gang members who’d been causing trouble. J.T. was most concerned with the weekly drug revenues-not just because his own salary derived from these revenues but because of the tribute tax he had to send each month to his superiors. J.T. had told me earlier that his bosses occasionally changed their tax rate, even doubling it, for no good reason (at least no good reason that J.T. was ever told about). When this happened, J.T. had to dip into his own pocket. A few months before, he’d had to contribute five thousand dollars to help build up the gang’s arsenal of weapons, and he wasn’t at all happy about it.
These pressures, combined with his constant fear that his junior members were planning a coup d’état, made J.T. paranoid about being ripped off. He had told me of several such coups in other neighborhoods. So he practically interrogated his sales directors, asking the same question in a variety of ways or otherwise trying to trip them up.
“So you sold fifty bags, okay, that’s fine,” J.T. might start.
“No, I said we sold twenty-five,” the director would answer.
“No, you said fifty, I could have sworn you said fifty. Everyone else heard fifty, right?”
“No, no, no. I said twenty-five.”
Invariably J.T. and the young man directing his sales team-these directors were usually in their late teens or early twenties-would go back and forth like this for several minutes, often over a trivial detail, until J.T. felt confident that he was getting the truth. On this day, as the cold afternoon stretched into night, I watched several of these young men sweat under J.T.’s questioning. Surely they all knew by now what to expect of him. But even a hint of suspicion could earn them a “violation”: J.T. was quick to physically punish them or suspend their privileges-the right to carry a gun, for instance, or the right to earn money.
J.T. also asked his directors about any behavior in the past week that might have attracted the attention of the police-a dispute between a customer and a dealer, perhaps, or any gunfire. If one of his members had been suspended from high school or had drawn complaints from a tenant leader, he would have to submit to even tougher questioning from J.T.
For the directors, the worst part of this interrogation was that J.T. maintained his own independent sources. He kept a roster of informants in every neighborhood where the Black Kings operated. He had begun this practice when he first became responsible for monitoring neighborhoods that he didn’t know as well as his own. While he may have been familiar with the streets and stores in these neighborhoods, he didn’t know every pastor, tenant leader, police officer, and hustler as he did in his own.
Most of his informants were homeless people, squatters, or other hard-up adults. They came cheap-J.T. paid most of them just ten or fifteen dollars a day-and these ghetto nomads could easily hang out in drug areas and spy on J.T.’s gang members without raising suspicion.J.T. generally dispatched his senior officers to debrief these informants, but sometimes he met with them personally. Although they couldn’t tell him if his own members were stealing from him, they were valuable for reporting problems like street fights or customer complaints.
As we drove through the neighborhood, past the blighted store-fronts on Forty-seventh Street, J.T. told me that one of his sales groups was selling diluted product. The BKs’ crack-selling chain began with J.T.’s senior officers buying large quantities of powder cocaine from a distributor in the outlying suburbs or a neighborhood at the city’s edge. The officers usually cooked up the cocaine into crack themselves, using a vacant apartment or paying a tenant perhaps a hundred dollars a month to use her kitchen. Then the officers would deliver the prepackaged allocations to the sales directors.
Sometimes, however, the street crews were allowed to cook up the crack themselves. In such a case, J.T. explained, they might surreptitiously use an additive to stretch their cocaine allotment into more crack. They could turn each 100-pack of $10 bags into a 125-pack, which meant earning an extra $250. This money obviously wouldn’t be susceptible to collection by J.T., since he could account only for 100-packs.
I was surprised that J.T. would give anyone a chance to rip him off like this. But he now had so many crews under management, with such overwhelming volume, that he occasionally farmed out the production. It was a relatively simple process: you mixed together powder cocaine with baking soda and water, then boiled off the water until all that remained were the crystallized nuggets of crack. Subcontracting the production also provided J.T. a hedge of sorts: even if the police raided one of the apartments where the crack was being processed, he wouldn’t lose his entire supply of cocaine.
The sale of diluted crack troubled J.T. for reasons beyond the obviousfact that his members were stealing from him. Such entrepreneurial energy could be infectious. If other factions of the gang thought up schemes to increase their revenues, not only would J.T. lose taxable receipts but his sales directors might feel empowered to try to knock him off his throne. He was also concerned about the physical dangers of diluted crack cocaine. Not long ago a teenager in Robert Taylor had nearly died of an overdose, and rumor had it that one of J.T.’s dealers had sold him crack that had been processed with a dangerous additive. As a result the building president got the police to post a twenty-four-hour patrol for two weeks, which shut down drug sales. J.T.’s superiors nearly demoted him because of this incident, out of concern that he couldn’t control his members.
J.T.’s other worry about altered crack was a simple matter of competitive practice: if word got out that the Black Kings were selling an inferior product, they would lose customers to other gangs. This was what troubled him most, J.T. told me now as we drove to meet with Michael, a twenty-year-old gang member who had recently been promoted to run a six-man sales team.
One of J.T.’s informants had told him that Michael’s crew was selling diluted product. The informant was in fact a crack addict; J.T. had him buy the crack and turn it over to J.T., who could tell from its color and brittle texture that the crack had indeed been stretched.
J.T. asked me what I would do if I were the gang boss and had to deal with Michael.
“Kick him out!” I said.
J.T. explained that this decision couldn’t be so straightforward. “Most guys wouldn’t even think of these ways to make money,” he said. “Here’s a guy who is looking to make an extra buck. I have hundreds of people working for me, but only a few who think like that. You don’t want to lose people like that.” What he needed to do, J.T. told me, was quash Michael’s tactic but not the spirit that lay at its root.
When we reached Michael, J.T. told his officers and security detail to leave him alone with Michael. He asked me to stay. We went into the alleyway behind a fast-food restaurant.
“See this?” J.T. said, holding up a tiny Ziploc bag to Michael’s face. “What is it?”
“It’s mine,” Michael said. I had no idea how he could tell that the crack was his, and I wondered if he said so simply as a reflex.
Michael had a stoic look about him, as if he were expecting to be punished. The rest of his crew watched from perhaps ten yards away.
“Yeah, that’s right, and it’s half what it should be,” J.T. said.
“You want us to fill it up with more than that?”
“Don’t play with me, nigger. I know you been putting some shit in the product. I have the shit with me right here. How are you going to deny it?”
Michael was silent.
“I’m going to tell you what we’re going to do,” J.T. said. “I’m not going to put you on the spot. You’re going to finish selling this, and next week you’re not earning shit. Your take goes to all the other guys. And you know what? You’re going to tell them, too. You’re going to tell them why it’s no good to make this weaker. You know why, right?”
Michael, his head down, nodded.
“Okay, then, you’re going to tell them it’s not right because we lose customers and then we don’t have no work. And you’re going to tell them that it was your idea, that you fucked up, and that as a way of dealing with it, you want them to have the money you would have made.”
Michael was by now visibly upset, his face set in a sort of angry mope. Finally he looked up, groaned, shook his head, glanced away, kicked a few stones on the ground. It seemed as if he wanted to challenge J.T., but he had obviously been caught. So he said nothing. After a while J.T. called over the other members of Michael’s group and finished obtaining his weekly report.
It had been dark for a few hours now. My stint as gang leader for a day-albeit in a very limited capacity-was finally over. It was both more banal and more dramatic than I could have envisioned. I was exhausted. My head was spinning with details, settled and unsettled. I never did manage to decide how much the Black Kings should pay Pastor Wilkins for the use of his church.
I had accompanied J.T. on site visits to roughly twenty Black Kings sales teams. Two sales directors had been taken off to a secluded area and given mouthshots for their transgressions. Another one, who had failed to make his weekly payment to J.T., was levied a 10 percent fine and a 50 percent deduction of his next week’s pay. But J.T. used the carrot as well as the stick. The workers in one group who had done particularly well were allowed to carry guns over the weekend. (J.T. usually didn’t let his members walk around armed unless there was a war going on; he also required that members buy guns directly from the gang.) And he gave a $250 bonus to the members of another group that had several weeks of above-average sales.
There seemed to be no end to the problems that J.T. encountered during this weekly reconnaissance, problems he’d have to fix before they spun out of control. There were several incidents of customers fighting in public with a BK member who sold them drugs; in each case the customer complained that the bag of crack was too small or that the product was not of suitable quality. A store owner reported to J.T. that several gang members demanded he give them his monthly “protection” payment; this couldn’t have been a legitimate request, since J.T. allowed only his senior officers to pick up extortion receipts. A pastor called the police on one of J.T.’s members who used the church parking lot to receive oral sex (in lieu of cash payment) from a local drug user. And two gang members had been suspended from school for fighting, one of them for having a gun in his locker.
The next day I would wake up free of the hundreds of obligations and judgments I’d been witness to. But J.T. wouldn’t. He’d still bear all the burdens of running a successful underground economy: enforcing contracts, motivating his members to risk their lives for low wages, dealing with capricious bosses. I was no less critical of what he did for a living. I also wanted to know more about his professed benevolence and how his gang acted on behalf of Robert Taylor’s tenants. And I still knew very little about J.T.’s bosses.
But all that would take some time. My next set of answers about life in Robert Taylor came from the second-most-powerful force in my orbit, the woman known to one and all as Ms. Bailey.