Not long afterward T-Bone’s girlfriend left a message instructing me to meet him at dusk in a parking lot near the expressway. I did as I was told. “You were always interested in how we do things,” T-Bone said, “so here you go.” He handed me a set of spiral-bound ledgers that detailed the gang’s finances. He seemed remorseful-and anxious. He wondered aloud what his life would have been like if he’d “stayed legit.” I could tell he was expecting a bad ending.
The pages of the ledgers were frayed, and some of the handwriting was hard to decipher, but the raw information was fascinating. For the past four years, T-Bone had been dutifully recording the gang’s revenues (from drug sales, extortion, and other sources) and expenses (the cost of wholesale cocaine and weapons, police bribes, funeral expenses, and all the gang members’ salaries).
It was dangerous for T-Bone to give me this information, a blatantviolation of the gang’s codes, for which he would be severely punished if caught. T-Bone knew of my interest in the gang’s economic structure. He saw how delighted I was now, fondling the ledgers as if they were first editions of famous books.
I never shared the notebooks with anyone in law enforcement. I put them away for a few years until I met the economist Steven Levitt. We published several articles based on this rich data source, and our analysis of the gang’s finances easily received the most notoriety of all the articles and books I have written. T-Bone probably had no idea that I would receive any critical acclaim, but he certainly knew that he was handing me something that few others-in the academy or in the world at large-had ever seen. Looking back, I think he probably wanted to help me, but I also believe he wanted to do something good before meeting whatever bad ending might have been coming his way. Given his love of books and education, it is not altogether inconceivable that T-Bone wanted this to be a charitable act of sorts, helping the world better understand the structure of gangland.
Perhaps the most surprising fact in T-Bone’s ledgers was the incredibly low wage paid to the young members who did the dirtiest and most dangerous work: selling drugs on the street. According to T-Bone’s records, they barely earned minimum wage. For all their braggadocio, to say nothing of the peer pressure to spend money on sharp clothes and cars, these young members stood little chance of ever making a solid payday unless they beat the odds and were promoted into the senior ranks. But even Price and T-Bone, it turned out, made only about thirty thousand dollars a year. Now I knew why some of the younger BK members supplemented their income by working legit jobs at McDonald’s or a car wash.
So a gang leader like J.T. had a tough job: motivating young men to accept the risks of selling drugs despite the low wages and slim chance of promotion. It was one thing to motivate his troops in the Robert Taylor Homes, where BK lore ran deep and the size of the drug trade made the enterprise seem appealingly robust. It would be much harder to start up operations from scratch in a different neighborhood.
I got to witness this challenge firsthand one evening when I accompanied J.T., Price, and T-Bone to West Pullman, a predominantly black neighborhood on the far South Side. Although there were poor sections of West Pullman, it also had a solid working-class base, with little gang activity. That was where the three Black Kings were trying to set up a new BK franchise. J.T. had arranged a meeting with about two dozen young men, a ragtag group of high-school dropouts and some older teenagers, most of whom spent the majority of their time just hanging out. J.T. wanted to help them become “black businessmen,” he told them.
They sat on wooden benches in the corner of a small neighborhood park. Most of them had boyish faces. Some looked innocent, some bored, and some eager, as if attending the first meeting of their Little League team. J.T. stood in front of them like their coach, extolling the benefits of “belonging to the Black Kings family, a nationwide family.” He pointed to his latest car, a Mitsubishi 3000GT, as a sign of what you could get if you worked hard in the drug economy. He sounded a bit like a salesman.
A few of them asked about the particulars of the drug trade. Were they supposed to cook the crack themselves, or were they provided with the finished product? Could they extend credit to good customers, or was it strictly a cash business?
“My auntie said I should ask you if she could join also,” one teenager said. “She says she has a lot of experience-”
J.T. cut him off. “Your auntie?! Nigger, are you kidding me? Ain’t no women allowed in this thing.”
“Well, she said that back in the day she was into selling dope,” the teenager continued. “She said that you should call her, because she could help you understand how to run a business.”
“All right, we’ll talk about this later, my man,” J.T. said, then turned to address the rest of the young men. “Listen, you all need to understand, we’re taking you to a whole ’nother level. We’re not talking about hanging out and getting girls. You’ll get all the pussy you want, but this is about taking pride in who you are, about doing something for yourself and your people. Now, we figure you got nobody serving around here. So there’s a real need-”
“Serving what?” the same teenager interrupted.
J.T. ignored him. “Like I said, you got no one responding to the demand, and we want to work with you-all. We’re going to set up shop.”
“Is there some kind of training?” asked a soft, sweet voice from the back. “And do we get paid to go? I got to be at White Castle on Mondays and Thursdays, and my mama says if I lose that job, she’ll kick me out of the house.”
“ White Castle?!” J.T. looked over in disbelief at T-Bone, Price, and me. “Nigger, I’m talking about taking control of your life. What is White Castle doing for you? I don’t get it-how far can that take you?”
“I’m trying to save up for a bike,” the boy replied.
Hearing that, J.T. headed for his car, motioning for Price to finish up with the group.
“We’ll be in touch with you-all,” Price said assertively. “Right now, you need to understand that we got this place, you dig? If anyone else comes over and says they want you to work with them, you tell them you are Black Kings. Got it?”
As Price continued speaking to the teenagers, I walked over to J.T. and asked if this meeting was typical.
“This shit is frustrating,” he said, grabbing a soda from the car. “There’s a lot of places where the kids ain’t really done nothing. They have no idea what it means to be a part of something.”
“So why do you want to do this?”
“Don’t have a choice,” he said. “We don’t have any other places left to take over.” Most city neighborhoods, he explained, were already claimed by a gang leader. It was nearly impossible to annex a territory with an entrenched gang structure unless the leader died or went to jail. Even in those cases, there were usually local figures with enough charisma and leverage to step in. This meant that J.T. had to expand into working- and middle-class neighborhoods where the local “gang” was nothing more than a bunch of teenagers who hung out and got into trouble. If today’s meeting was any indication, these gangs weren’t the ideal candidates for Black Kings membership.
“I can’t believe I’m doing this shit,” J.T. said, walking around his car, kicking stones in the dirt. Between the dual threats of arrest and demolition, he seemed to be coming to grips with the possibility that his star might have peaked.
The Black Kings weren’t the only ones anxious about the threat of demolition. All the tenants of Robert Taylor were trying to cope with the news. Although demolition wouldn’t begin for at least two years, everyone was scrambling to learn which building might come down first and where on earth they were supposed to live.
Politicians, including President Clinton and Mayor Richard J. Daley of Chicago, promised that tenants would be relocated to middle-class neighborhoods with good schools, safe streets, and job opportunities. But reliable information was hard to come by. Nor would it be so easy to secure housing outside the black ghetto. The projects had been built forty years earlier in large part because white Chicagoans didn’t want black neighbors. Most Robert Taylor tenants thought the situation hadn’t changed all that much.
The CHA began to hold public meetings where tenants could air their questions and concerns. The CHA officials begged for patience, promising that every family would have help when the time came for relocation. But there was legitimate reason for skepticism. One of the most inept and corrupt housing agencies in the country was now being asked to relocate 150,000 people living in roughly two hundred buildings slated for demolition throughout Chicago. And Robert Taylor was the largest housing project of all, the size of a small city. The CHA’s challenge was being made even harder by Chicago’s tightening real-estate market. As the city gentrified, there were fewer and fewer communities where low-income families could find decent, affordable housing.
Information, much of it contradictory, came in dribs and drabs. At one meeting the CHA stated that all Robert
