Gang Leader for a Day (5 page)

J.T. and I often passed time together at a diner. He might sit quietly, working through the details of his gang’s operations, while I read for my sociology classes. Since he didn’t want to generate tangible evidence of his enterprise, J.T. didn’t write down very much, but he could keep innumerable details straight in his mind: the wages of each one of his two hundred members, the shifts each of them worked, recent spikes in supply or demand, and so on. Occasionally he drifted off, muttering calculations to himself. He didn’t share many details with me, but he did sometimes give me a sort of quiz.

“Okay, I got something for you,” he said one day over breakfast. “Let’s say two guys are offering me a great deal on raw product.” I knew enough to know that “raw product” meant powdered cocaine, which J.T.’s gang cooked up into crack. “One of them says if I pay twenty percent higher than the usual rate, he’ll give me a ten percent discount a year from now, meaning that if the supply goes down, he’ll sell to me before the other niggers he deals with. The other guy says he’ll give me a ten percent discount now if I agree to buy from him at the regular price a year from now. What would you do?”

“This all depends on whether you think the supply will be affected a year from now, right?” I said.

“Right, so . . . ?”

“Well, I don’t have any idea how this market works, so I’m not sure what to do.”

“No, that’s not how you need to think. You always take the sure bet in this game.
Nothing
can be predicted—not supply, not anything. The nigger who tells you he’s going to have product a year from now is lying. He could be in jail or dead. So take your discount now.”

As fascinating as I found such conversations, I rarely took notes in front of J.T., because I didn’t want to make him cautious about what he said. Instead I waited until I got back to my apartment to write down as much as I could recall.

We often met a few times a week, but only when he wanted. He would phone me to arrange our meetings, sometimes just a few minutes in advance. J.T. didn’t like to talk on the phone. In his soft voice, he’d tell me where and when to meet, and then he’d hang up. Once in a while, I didn’t even have time to answer that I couldn’t meet because I had a class—and then I’d cut class and meet him anyway. It was pretty thrilling to have a gang boss calling me up to go hang out with him. There were times I wanted to tell my professors the real reason I missed class now and then, but I never did.

Occasionally I hinted to J.T. that I would really, really like to learn more about gang life. But I was too meek to ask for any kind of formalizedarrangement. Nor did he offer. Every time he dropped me off in front of my apartment building, he’d just stare out the window. I didn’t know whether to say “Good-bye,” “Hope to see you again,” or “Call me sometime.”

 
 

One morning, after I’d been hanging out with him for perhaps eight months, J.T. said we’d be visiting a different housing development, the Robert Taylor Homes. I had heard of Robert Taylor;
everybody
had heard of Robert Taylor. It was the largest public housing project in the United States, about ten times bigger than the Lake Park projects, with twenty-eight drab high-rise buildings stretched along a two-mile corridor. It lay a few miles away from the U of C, but since it ran alongside the Dan Ryan Expressway, one of Chicago’s main arteries, pretty much everyone in the city drove past Robert Taylor at one time or another.

“I’m going to take you to meet somebody,” J.T. said, “but I don’t want you to open your mouth. Do you think you can do that?”

“Do I ever open my mouth?” I asked.

“No, but every so often you get a little excited, especially after you drink all that coffee. You open your mouth today, and that’s it— we’re through. Okay?”

Only once before had I heard such insistence in J.T.’s voice, and that was the night we first met in the stairwell of Building Number 4040 in the Lake Park projects. I finished my breakfast quickly, and then we jumped into his Malibu. The late-morning sky was overcast. J.T. was quiet except for asking me once in a while to see if any cops were following him. He had never asked this before. For the first time, I became fully conscious of just what I was doing: tagging along with the leader of a major crack-selling gang.

But I still hadn’t admitted to myself that the man I sat next to was, at bottom, a criminal. I was too caught up in the thrill of observing the thug life firsthand. In the halcyon suburb where I grew up, people didn’t even wash their cars on the street. In front of me here was a movie come to life.

There was something else, too, that helped me ignore the questionable morality of the situation. The University of Chicago scholars who helped invent the field of sociology, back when it first became a legitimate academic discipline, did so by venturing into the murkier corners of the city. They became famous through their up-close study of the hobo, the hustler, the socialite; they gained access to brothels and speakeasies and the smoky back rooms where politicians plied their art. Lately I’d been reading the works of these scholars. So even though I was hanging out with drug traffickers and thieves, at heart I felt like I was just being a good sociologist.

 
 
 

The street leading into the Robert Taylor Homes was lined with old, beat-up cars. A school crossing guard leaned on the hood of a car, her morning duty done, looking as if she’d been through a war. She waved knowingly at J.T. as we drove past. We pulled up in front of a high-rise, the lobby populated by a bunch of young men who seemed to stand at attention when they saw J.T.’s car. Unlike the Lake Park projects, which were nearly abandoned, Robert Taylor was thrumming with life. I could hear rap music blasting from a stereo. People stood around smoking cigarettes and, from the smell of it, marijuana. Every so often a parent and child passed through the loose crowd.

J.T. parked his Malibu and strode toward the building like a bad-ass cowboy swaggering into a bar. He stopped just short of the entrance, surveying the area and waiting as people came to greet him. As each young man made his way over, J.T. extended his hand graciously.Few words were spoken; most of the communication was in the form of subtle nods, signals familiar to everyone but me.

“When you gonna come and see me, baby?” one woman called out, and then another: “You gonna take me for a ride, sweetheart?” J.T. smiled and waved them off, playfully tapping their young children on the head as he passed. Two older women in bright blue jackets that read TENANT PATROL came up and hugged J.T., asked him why he didn’t come around more often. J.T. was obviously well known in these parts, although I had no idea why.

Just then someone emerged from the lobby. He was obese, roughly J.T.’s age, and he was breathing heavily. His name was Curly, and—as if in mockery of my stereotypical preconceptions—he was a ringer for Rerun from
What’s Happening!!
He and J.T. clasped hands, and then J.T. motioned for me to follow them.

“Your mama’s house or mine?” Curly asked.

“Mama’s pissed at me,” J.T. said. “Let’s go to your place.”

I followed them up a few flights of stairs. We stepped inside an apartment furnished with couches and a few reclining chairs that faced a big TV. There was a Christian show playing. The walls were hung with family photos and a painting of Jesus Christ. Toys were strewn about the floor, and the kitchen counter was crowded with boxes of cereal and cookies. I could smell chicken and rice on the stove. Balls of yarn and knitting needles sat atop a drab glass table. The domestic scene surprised me a bit, for I had read so much about the poverty and danger in Robert Taylor, how children ran around without parents and how drugs had overtaken the community.

J.T. gestured for me to sit on the sofa, and then he and Curly sat down to talk. J.T. didn’t introduce me, and before long I was forgotten entirely. Between their fast talk and the gangster vocabulary, I couldn’t understand much of what they were saying, but I did manage to pick out some key words: “tax,” “product,” “monthly dues,” “Cobras,” “Kings,” “police,” “CHA security.” They talked quickly and earnestly. After a while they began throwing numbers at each other in some kind of negotiation. A few times a young man arrived at the screen door and interrupted them, shouting “Five-Oh on Federal” or “Five-Oh in 26.” Later J.T. would explain that that’s how they communicated the whereabouts of the police: “Five-Oh” meant police, “26” was a building number in Robert Taylor, and “Federal” was a busy street flanking the projects. Cell phones hadn’t yet arrived—the year was 1989—so gang members had to pass along such information manually.

I felt a sudden urge to go to the bathroom, but I didn’t feel comfortable asking to use the one in the apartment. After some squirming I decided to stand up and walk around. As I made a move to get up, J.T. and Curly looked at me disapprovingly. I sat back down.

Their meeting had lasted at least two hours. “That’s it,” J.T. finally said. “I’m hungry. Let’s pick it up tomorrow.”

Curly smiled. “It’ll be good to have you back,” he said. “Ain’t the same since you left.”

Then J.T. glanced at me. “Oh, shit,” he said to Curly. “I forgot about him. This is Sudhir. He’s a cop.”

The two of them began laughing. “You can go ahead and take a piss now,” J.T. said, and they both laughed even harder. I began to sense that in exchange for access I was meant to serve as a source of entertainment for J.T.

On the car ride back to Hyde Park, J.T. told me what had just happened. He explained that he had grown up in the very Robert Taylor building we’d just visited. For the past couple of years, he’d been working out of the Lake Park projects because the Black Kings’ citywide leaders had wanted to increase productivity there. But since the Lake Park projects were now slated for demolition, J.T. was returning to Robert Taylor, where he would be merging his own Black Kings gang with the local BK faction, which was run by Curly. This merger was being executed at the behest of the gang’s higher-ups. Curly had been installed as a temporary leader when J.T. was sent to turn around the Lake Park operation. Curly apparently wasn’t a very good manager, which made the gang bosses’ decision to bring J.T. back a simple one.

Robert Taylor and the other projects on State Street, J.T. told me, were “easy money,” partly since thousands of customers lived nearby but also because of “the white folks who drive over to buy our shit.” They came from Bridgeport, Armour Square, and other predominantly white ethnic neighborhoods on the far side of the Dan Ryan Expressway, buying mostly crack cocaine but also some heroin and marijuana. In his new assignment, J.T. told me, he hoped to earn “a hundred times” what he currently earned and buy a house for his mother, who still lived in Robert Taylor. He also said he hoped to buy an apartment for his girlfriend and their children. (In fact, he mentioned several such girlfriends, each of whom apparently needed an apartment.)

At the Lake Park projects, J.T.’s income had been dropping from a peak of about thirty thousand dollars a year. But he told me that now, in Robert Taylor, he stood to make as much as seventy-five thousand dollars or a hundred thousand if business was steady, which would put him nearly in the same league as some of the gang’s higher-ups.

He made a few references to the gang’s hierarchy and his effort to rise within it. There were a few dozen Black Kings officers above him, spread throughout Chicago, who earned their money by managing several gang factions like J.T.’s. These men were known as “lieutenants” and “captains.” Above
them
was another level of gangsters who were known as the “board of directors.” I had had no idea how much a street gang’s structure mirrored the structure of just about any other business in America.

J.T. made it clear that if you rose high enough in the Black Kings dynasty, and lived long enough, you could make an awful lot of money. As he discussed his move up the ladder, I felt a knot in my stomach. Since meeting him I had entertained the notion that my dissertation research might revolve around his gang and its drug trafficking. I had spoken with him not only about his own gang “set” but about all the Black Kings sets in the city—how they collaborated or fought with one another over turf, how the crack-cocaine economy was fundamentally altering the nature of the urban street gang. Although there was a great deal of social-science literature on gangs, very few researchers had written about the actual business dealings of a gang, and even fewer had firsthand access to a gang’s leadership. As we pulled up to my apartment, I realized that I had never formally asked J.T. about gaining access to his life and work. Now it seemed I might be getting shut out just as things were heating up.

“So when you do you think you’ll be moving over to Robert Taylor?” I asked.

“Not sure,” he said absentmindedly, staring out at the panhandlers who worked the gas station near my apartment.

“Well, I’m sure you’ll be busy now—I mean, even busier than you’ve been. So listen, I just wanted to thank you—”

“Nigger, are we breaking up?” J.T. started laughing.

“No! I’m just trying to—”

“Listen, my man, I know you have to write a term paper—and what are you going to write it on? On me, right?” He giggled and stuck a cigar in his mouth.

It seemed that J.T. craved the attention. It seemed that I was more than just entertainment for him: I was someone who might take him seriously. I hadn’t thought about the drawbacks of having my research dependent on the whims of one person. But now I turned giddy at the prospect of continuing our conversations. “That’s right,” I said. “ ‘The Life and Times of John Henry Torrance.’ What do you think?”

“I like it, I like it.” He paused. “Okay, get the fuck out, gotta run.”

He offered his hand as I opened the car door. I shook it and nodded at him.

 
 
 

My short walk north to the Lake Park projects would now be replaced by a longer commute, usually by bus, to the Robert Taylor Homes. But as a result of his relocation, J.T. reported that he’d be out of touch for a few weeks. I decided to use that time to do some research on housing projects in general and the Robert Taylor Homes in particular.