that person to learn his business. J.T. hardly knew every single person out of the roughly five thousand in his domain, but he usually managed to figure out whether someone was a local, and if he couldn’t figure it out, he had plenty of people to ask.
All of this was accomplished with little drama. “You folks need to move this activity somewhere else,” he’d say matter-of-factly. Or, “What did I tell you about hustling in the park when kids are playing?” Or, “You can’t stay in this apartment unless you deal with Creepy first.” I saw a few people resist, but none for any great length of time. Most of them seemed to respect his authority, or at least fear it.
In most of the sociological literature I’d read about gangs-they had been part of the urban fabric in the United States since at least the late nineteenth century-the gang almost always had heated relationships with parents, shopkeepers, social workers, and the police. It was portrayed as a nuisance at best, and more typically a major menace.
J.T.’s gang seemed different. It acted as the de facto administration of Robert Taylor: J.T. may have been a lawbreaker, but he was very much a lawmaker as well. He acted as if his organization truly did rule the neighborhood, and sometimes the takeover was complete. The Black Kings policed the buildings more aggressively than the Chicago police did. By controlling lobbies and parking lots, the BKs made it hard for tenants to move about freely. Roughly once a month, they held a weekend basketball tournament. This meant that the playgrounds and surrounding areas got thoroughly spruced up, with J.T. sponsoring a big neighborhood party-but it also meant that other tenants sometimes had to call off their own softball games or picnics at J.T.’s behest.
Over time J.T. became less reluctant to leave me alone in Robert Taylor. Occasionally he’d just go off on an errand and shout, “Hey, shorty, watch out for Sudhir. I’ll be back.” I generally didn’t stray too far, but I did start up conversations with people outside the gang. That’s how I first began to understand the complicated dynamic between the gang and the rest of the community.
One day, for instance, I ran into C-Note, the leader of the squatters, installing an air conditioner in Ms. Mae’s apartment. C-Note was a combination handyman and hustler. For five or ten dollars, he’d fix a refrigerator or TV. For a few dollars more, he’d find an ingenious way to bring free electricity and gas into your home. When it came to home repair, there didn’t seem much that C-Note couldn’t, or wouldn’t, do.
After he finished work at Ms. Mae’s, I sat with C-Note on the gallery and had a beer. He told me that he had lived in the building for years and held various legitimate blue-collar jobs, but after being laid off several times he had lost his lease and become a squatter. He always found a little work and a place to sleep in J.T.’s building. He stayed out of people’s way, he told me. He didn’t make noise, didn’t use drugs, and wasn’t violent. He got his nickname, he explained, because “I got a hundred ways to make a hundred bucks.”
I learned that a lot of tenants welcomed C-Note into their homes for dinner, let him play with their children, and gave him money for medicine or a ride to the hospital if he was hurt. But this began to change once J.T. moved his operations back into Robert Taylor. J.T. saw squatters as a source of income, not as charity cases. Nor was he pleased that C-Note was in the good graces of tenants, some of whom lobbied J.T. not to tax C-Note’s earnings. Even J.T.’s mother was on C-Note’s side in this matter.
But J.T. wasn’t one to compromise when it came to money. He had to pay for the upkeep of a few cars as well as several girlfriends, each of whom needed her own apartment and spending allowance. J.T. also liked to go gambling in Las Vegas, and he took no small amount of pride in the fact that he owned dozens of pairs of expensive shoes and lots of pricey clothing. But instead of acting charitably toward someone like C-Note, J.T. was openly resentful of the idea that he was getting a free ride.
One hot Sunday morning, I was hanging out with C-Note and some other squatters in the parking lot of J.T.’s building, across the street from a basketball court. The men had set up an outdoor auto-repair shop-changing tires, pounding out dents, performing minor engine repairs. Their prices were low, and they had lined up enough business to keep them going all day. Cars were parked at every angle in the lot. The men moved to and fro, hauling equipment, swapping tools, and chattering happily at the prospect of so much work. Another squatter had set up a nearby stand to sell soda and juice out of a cooler. I bought a drink and sat down to watch the underground economy in full bloom.
J.T. drove up, accompanied by four of his senior officers. Three more cars pulled up behind them, and I recognized several other gang leaders, J.T.’s counterparts who ran the other local Black Kings factions.
J.T. walked over to C-Note, who was peering into a car engine. J.T. didn’t notice me-I was sitting by a white van, partially hidden from view-but I could see and hear him just fine.
“C-Note!” J.T. yelled. “What the fuck are you doing?”
“What the fuck does it look like I’m doing, young man?” C-Note barked right back without looking up from his work. C-Note wasn’t usually quarrelsome, but he could be a hard-liner when it came to making his money.
“We have games running today,” J.T. said. He meant the gang’s monthly basketball tournament. “You need to get this shit out of here. Move the cars, get all this stuff off the court.”
“Aw, shit, you should’ve told me.” C-Note threw an oily cloth to the ground. “What the fuck can I do? You see that the work ain’t finished.”
J.T. laughed. He seemed surprised that someone would challenge him. “Nigger, are you kidding me?! I don’t give a fuck about your work. Get these cars out of here.” J.T. looked underneath the cars. “Oh, shit! And you got oil all over the place. You better clean that up, too.”
C-Note started waving his hands about and shouting at J.T. “You’re the only one who can make money, is that right? You own all this shit, you own all this land? Bullshit.”
He pulled out a cigarette, lit it, and kept muttering, “Bullshit.” The other squatters stopped working to see what would happen next. C-Note was drenched in sweat and angry, as if he might lose control.
J.T. looked down at his feet, then waved over his senior officers, who had been waiting by the car. A few of the other gang members also got out of their cars.
Once his henchmen were near, J.T. spoke again to C-Note: “I’m asking you one more time, nigger. You can either move this car or-”
“That’s some bullshit, boy!” C-Note yelled. “I ain’t going anywhere. I been here for two hours, and I told you I ain’t finished working. So fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!” He turned to the other squatters. “This nigger do this every time,” he said. “Every time. Fuck him.”
C-Note was still chattering when J.T. grabbed him by the neck. In an instant two of J.T.’s officers also grabbed C-Note. The three of them dragged him toward a concrete wall that separated Robert Taylor from the tracks where a commuter train ran. C-Note kept shouting, but he didn’t physically resist. The other squatters turned to watch. The gang leaders nonchalantly took some sodas from the cooler without paying.
“You can’t do this to us!” C-Note shouted. “It ain’t fair.”
J.T. pushed C-Note up against the concrete wall. The two officers, their muscular arms plastered with tattoos, pinned him in.
“I told you, nigger,” J.T. said, his face barely an inch away from C-Note’s, “but you just don’t listen, do you?” He sounded exasperated, but there was also a sinister tone to his voice I’d never heard before. “Why are you making this harder?”
He started slapping C-Note on the side of the head, grunting with each slap, C-Note’s head flopping back and forth like a toy.
“Fuck you!” C-Note shouted. He tried to turn to look J.T. in the eye, but J.T. was so close that C-Note butted the side of J.T.’s head with his own. This only irked J.T. more. He cocked his arm and pounded C-Note in the ribs. C-Note held his gut, coughing violently, and then J.T.’s henchmen pushed him to the ground. They took turns kicking him, one in the back and the other in the stomach. When C-Note curled up, they kicked him in the legs. “You should’ve listened to the man, fool!” one of them shouted.
C-Note lay in a fetal position, struggling to catch his breath. J.T. rolled him over and punched him in the face one last time. “Dumb nigger!” he shouted, then walked back toward us, head down, flexing his hand as if he had hurt it on C-Note’s skull.
J.T. reached into the squatter’s cooler for a soda. That’s when he finally noticed me standing there. He frowned when our eyes met. He quickly moved away, going toward the high-rise, but his look gave me a chill. He was clearly surprised to see me, and he seemed a little peeved.
I had been hanging around J.T. and his gang for several months by now, and I’d never seen J.T. engage in violence. I felt like his scribe, tailing a powerful leader who liked to joke with the tenants and, when he needed to be assertive, did so quietly. I was naive, I suppose, but I had somehow persuaded myself that just because I
