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?”
