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
