There Are No Children Here (21 page)

It took the jury one hour to find Jackson guilty on four counts of murder; he was sentenced to death. In a second trial, Driskel was sentenced to life in prison. Urica had been the only witness to the crimes. Were it not for her testimony, the police might never have found the killers. The prosecution argued that Jackson and Driskel, looking for money to buy cocaine, robbed the family of a television set and a videocassette recorder. They pawned the two items for $120. Driskel was a cousin of Urica’s mother’s boyfriend.

Mothers at Horner called Urica “the miracle child.” Not only had she survived the attack, but she had had the courage to testify, something many people at Horner wouldn’t or couldn’t do.

Many children had seen the bodies carried out of the building. Lafeyette and Pharoah heard the tale at school and later learned the details on the evening news. LaJoe told them to put it out of their minds. She couldn’t tell them it wouldn’t happen again. It could. Besides, she warned them, what happened that night was between family. They shouldn’t talk about it. The wrong person might overhear. Other mothers did the same.

After the trial, there was no community celebration. People just whispered among themselves about an eight-year-old girl having such strength, perhaps more than they might have under similar circumstances. And they marveled at—and were at the same time saddened by—Urica’s continuing to live at Horner with her grandmother, just two floors above the apartment
where the attack occurred. The family had been offered a new apartment house in Cabrini-Green, but they turned it down. At least at Horner, they knew people.

Even in victory, the silence was deafening.

A few weeks earlier, in a courtroom two floors above where Urica’s testimony was heard, Jimmie Lee stood and faced Judge Robert Boharic. To the judge’s left hung a hand-drawn smiley face.

Unlike the attendance at Urica’s case, only a few spectators sat in the hard-back wooden seats. Sophisticated gang leaders like Lee knew better than to have their members attend trials; the judge might take it as an attempt to intimidate the court. Lee looked impassive, as he had throughout the two-day trial. Nothing seemed to unsettle him. Boharic, a former prosecutor who was known for his toughness as a judge, had decided early on, when he learned that Lee was a known gang leader, that if he found him guilty he would give him a long sentence. He would set an example with Lee.

Lee, Lee’s wife Geraldean, and another woman, Donna Scoyners, had been charged with possession of sixty-nine grams of heroin. It had an estimated street value of $7500, not an unusually large amount, but enough to incur up to a thirty-year sentence under Illinois law. Lee had also been charged with unlawfully possessing an automatic weapon.

The police officers in the city’s gang crimes unit are some of the most streetwise and savviest among the city’s cops. Their job is to keep track and detail the workings of the city’s street gangs. On the west side, Michael Cronin, a seventeen-year police veteran who had lost his left foot in Vietnam, was one of the best. He followed the Vice Lords. He probably knew the organization as well as its members, if not better. He knew, in great detail, of Lee’s operations—and he knew Lee. But even Cronin hadn’t been able to catch him with any weapons or drugs. Lee never carried a gun or, for that matter, drugs. He always had intermediaries do the dirty work.

Lee so frustrated the police that Charlie Toussas, the plainclothes cop who had stopped Lee from retaliating after Bird Leg’s death, reached a kind of agreement with Lee’s gang after one of his squad car’s windows had been busted while parked in
front of a Vice Lords’ building. He told Lee’s second-in-command that if it happened again, he would sit in the building’s breezeway through his entire shift and disrupt the drug trafficking. From then on, whenever Toussas parked his car on Wolcott, the gang had two or three young Vice Lords watch the sedan. Toussas liked to say that he could leave his wallet on the car seat with the doors unlocked and it would be there when he returned.

Cronin and others in the gang crimes unit were somewhat constrained. Because of the police department’s own internal workings, the gang crimes cops couldn’t launch extensive narcotics investigations, even though selling drugs was the major activity of the gangs. Such efforts were reserved for the department’s narcotics unit. But Cronin had obtained a warrant to search Lee’s apartment on the tip that he kept an automatic weapon there.

On November 1, 1986, Cronin and five other officers raided Lee’s second-floor west side apartment. After forcing open the door with a sledgehammer, they found Lee standing in the hallway, shirtless and barefoot. Cronin discovered more than he had bargained for. On the bedroom and kitchen floors and in the toilet were hundreds of packets of heroin plus various items of drug-packaging equipment, including two triple-beam scales, blenders, strainers, two beepers, two walkie-talkies, and three Daisy sealers. From an open window, Cronin spotted at the bottom of the air shaft a nine-millimeter assault rifle with a banana clip. It held twenty-eight live rounds.

Cronin also found Lee’s clothes in a closet, which would help prove in court that this was, indeed, his residence. In one suit pocket were the obituaries of two gang members, one of whom, Neal Wallace, Cronin remembered. A leader of the Traveling Vice Lords, Wallace had only recently been killed. When Cronin had searched Wallace’s apartment after his death, he found an essay the gang leader had written to himself. The handwritten composition explained that he sold drugs to make it easier for the next generation of black children to become lawyers and doctors. Like many of the others, Wallace, who used to give out Easter baskets every year filled with food and candy, clearly saw himself as a hero.

Despite the arrest and his previous record, Lee was released.
He raised the $5000 in bail money. For a year, including the warring summer of 1987, he continued about his business. But, again in 1987, he was arrested for the alleged attempted murder of a policeman, a charge of which he was eventually acquitted. He again got the necessary bond money and was released.

At the trial, Lee’s attorneys raised doubts that the semi-automatic rifle belonged to him. His wife and the other woman were acquitted of all charges. Judge Boharic, however, found Lee guilty of possession of a controlled substance with intent to deliver.

In a presentencing report, Lee stated that he had supported himself by working as a manager of a car wash and that his wife received assistance from Public Aid. He also said his plans included the possibility of opening his own car wash.

But in the presentencing hearing in front of Judge Boharic, the prosecution attempted to establish Lee’s high ranking in the Vice Lords. Charlie Toussas told about the time Bird Leg had been shot and Lee led a band of his soldiers over to the Disciples’ turf. Cronin testified that the Vice Lords had expanded their operations to Iowa, Minnesota, and Mississippi. Another police officer estimated that the Conservative Vice Lords, the faction controlled by Lee, sold “thousands of dollars a day in both heroin and cocaine.”

The prosecutor, William O’Brien, in his closing statement asked that Lee be sent to prison for a long time. “The people would stress that we wish that this court would listen to the people at Henry Horner Homes, listen to the people of Chicago, and remove Jimmie Lee … to weaken the grip of gangs upon the public housing projects as well as the neighborhoods in Chicago.” O’Brien went on to suggest that a long sentence would send a message “that this court and the people of Cook County will not tolerate the type of behavior.”

Lee’s attorney, Maurice Scott, was the last person to address the judge that day. “I think that this man is on trial as an individual, not as a symbol of all that is wrong with out society,” he told the court. “To treat this case as a cause célèbre, to give this man some long, long term in prison, is not going to change the narcotics problem. I wish I knew the answer—maybe some form of legalization, something to take the profit out of it. I don’t know. But I know it doesn’t stop it by giving people long
terms in prison.” Scott also argued that the heroin that had been found was far from pure and therefore was nowhere near as much as it seemed.

The judge then asked Lee whether there was anything he wanted to say before he was sentenced. “No, sir,” he replied.

“Organized evildoers cannot expect mercy from this court,” Judge Boharic told Lee and the assembled attorneys. “I feel that under the circumstances here there is a need to deter others from committing the same type of crime and from entering into the same path of life that the defendant apparently has chosen. It is all too often pointed out that persons who grow up in the area where the defendant lives are given tough choices in life and one of the very attractive aspects of being a gang member and being involved in the dope selling is the money and prestige that that brings. But I’m here to enforce the law and I’m here to show that there is a downside and a big cost involved sometimes when a person is caught with those very serious crimes that this defendant was involved in. We must teach people in the community here that society will deal harshly with those who prey upon the weaknesses of those people in the community. In the long run we must teach the youth of this community the old aphorism that crime does not pay.”

Judge Boharic then announced Lee’s sentence: the maximum term possible, thirty years. “If I could give him more years in the penitentiary under the law, I would,” the judge told the attorneys.

Word of Lee’s extraordinarily long sentence traveled fast. Gang members stationed at the courthouse inquired about the outcome of various trials and then, like eager stockbrokers, got on the telephone to deliver the news. By the time Cronin drove the four miles to Horner, people there had already heard of Lee’s sentence.

A neighbor delivered the news to LaJoe. “What?” Lafeyette asked, overhearing the hushed conversation.

“Shut up,” LaJoe told him. “I don’t want to hear it. You don’t talk about them peoples. They still got peoples out here.”

“Why?” asked Pharoah.

“He might be gone but there’s always someone out here. They could get the family hurt.”

A few days later,
The Chicago Tribune
ran a story on the front
page of its Metro section about Lee’s sentence. In the accompanying picture, a teenage boy, maybe thirteen or fourteen, had his arms raised. He didn’t want to answer a question posed by the reporter, so he shrugged his shoulders and thrust his arms into the air. The Vice Lords thought he was celebrating Lee’s sentencing. The next day, they beat him up, badly enough that the boy’s father went to the police. Even without their leader, there was discipline among the ranks—and some ready to fill in for Lee. Jimmie Lee, it was clear, wouldn’t be missed long.

Fifteen

   
THE WHITE GYPSY CAB pulled up to the back of 1920 West Washington, its back seat and trunk loaded down with bags of groceries. LaJoe and Rochelle sat squeezed in the front seat. Once a month, when LaJoe received her public aid check, she hired a cab to take her shopping; it was nearly impossible to persuade a licensed taxi to come into the neighborhood. Rochelle often joined LaJoe so that she had some help. LaJoe would have the cab take them to three different stores—Jewel, Aldi, and a discount butcher store—all of which charged less than the hiked-up
prices of the closer markets. Some local markets charged 30 percent more for food than other stores did. It was July and she had just received her restored benefits, and she resumed her routine as if it had never been disrupted.

LaJoe bought enough to feed herself, Lafeyette, Pharoah, the triplets, and LaShawn, LaShawn’s boyfriend and his brother, LaShawn’s two children, Terence, and Weasel, who had moved back home. LaShawn contributed her food stamps to this monthly venture. LaJoe never needed a shopping list and always came within dollars of the $542 she had in the combined sets of food stamps. The food was almost always the same—and because there was so much, LaJoe stored some of the meat in the freezers of two neighbors.

15 packs of bacon