Gang Leader for a Day (29 page)

They were right. Within a day the “classroom” had descended into anarchy. In one corner a few guys were admiring a gun that one of them had just bought. (He was thoughtful enough to remove the bullets during class.) In another corner several teenagers had organized a dice game. The winner would get not only the cash but also the right to rob the homeless people sleeping in a nearby vacant apartment. One kid brought in a radio and improvised a rap song about their “Injun teacher,” replete with references to Custer, Geronimo, and “the smelly Ay-Rab.” (It never seemed to occur to anyone that “Arab” and “Indian” were not in fact interchangeable; in my case they were equally valuable put-downs.) The most harmless kids in the room were the ones who patiently waited for their friends to return from the store with some beer.

Things got worse from there. Some of my students started selling marijuana in the classroom; others would casually leave the building to find a prostitute. When I conveyed all this to J.T., he said that as long as the guys showed up, they weren’t hanging out on the street and getting into any real trouble.

Given that they were using my “classroom” to deal drugs, gamble, and play with guns, I wondered exactly what J.T. meant by “real” trouble.

My role was quickly downgraded from teacher to baby-sitter. The sessions lasted about two weeks, until news came that the teachers’ strike was being settled. By this time my admiration for Autry’s skill with the neighborhood kids had increased exponentially.

 
 

Despite my utter failure as a teacher, Autry called me again for help. The stakes were a little higher this time—and, for me, so was the reward.

Autry and the other staffers at the Boys & Girls Club wanted me to help write a grant proposal for the U.S. Department of Justice, which had advertised special funds being allocated for youth programs. The proposal needed to include in-depth crime statistics for the projects and the surrounding neighborhood, data that was typically hard to get, since the police didn’t like to make such information public. But if I took on the project, I’d get direct access to Officer Reggie Marcus—“Officer Reggie” to tenants—the local cop who had grown up in Robert Taylor himself and was devoted to making life there better. I jumped at the chance.

I had met Reggie on several occasions, but now I had an opportunity to work closely with him and cultivate a genuine friendship. He was about six feet tall, as muscular and fit as a football player; he always dressed well and carried himself with a quiet determination. I knew that Reggie often dealt directly with gang leaders in the hopes of keeping violence to a minimum and that he was a diplomatic force among the project’s street hustlers. Now I would be able to ask as many questions as I wanted about the particulars of his work.

Why, for instance, did he try to reduce gun violence by making sure that the
gangs
were the only ones who had guns?

“They don’t like gun violence any more than the tenants, because it scares away customers,” he explained. “So they try to keep things quiet.”

One wintry afternoon I met Reggie at the police station in the Grand Boulevard neighborhood, a few blocks from J.T.’s territory. When I arrived, he told me he still had some phone calls to make, so I went to find a water fountain. The police station was drab, row after row of bland gray cubicles; the air was cold and damp, the tile floor slippery from the tracked-in snow.

Near the water fountain, I came upon a wall covered with Polaroid pictures. They were all of black men in their teens and twenties, most of them looking dazed or defiant. Beneath each photo was a caption with the person’s name and gang affiliation.

Taped next to the photos was a party flyer headlined “MC Southside Fest.” J.T.’s gang hung similar flyers all around the buildings when they were sponsoring a party or a basketball tournament. On the MC flyer, there were several names handwritten along the right margin, as if it were a sign-up sheet: “Watson,” “O’Neill,” “Brown.”

Reggie came by as I was inspecting the flyer.

“Let’s not hang out here,” he said, looking concerned. “And let’s not talk about that. I’ll explain later.”

We were heading over to the Boys & Girls Club to talk to Autry about the Department of Justice grant. As we walked to Reggie’s SUV, parked behind the police station, I was still thinking about the MC flyer.

I recalled a party the Black Kings had thrown a few years back, having rented out the second floor of an Elks Lodge. The women were dressed up, and the men wore spiffy tracksuits or pressed jeans. They drank beer and wine coolers, danced, and passed marijuana joints around the room.

As J.T. and I stood talking in a corner, a group of five men suddenly busted into the room, all dressed in black. One of them held up a gun for everyone to see. The other four ran to the corners of the room, one of them shouting for everyone to get up against the wall. Four of the men were black, one white. J.T. whispered to me, “Cops.” He and I took our places against the wall.

One of the partying gangsters, a huge man, at least six foot two and 250 pounds, started to resist. “Fuck you, nigger!” he shouted. Two of the men in black promptly yanked him into the bathroom— where, from the sound of it, they beat him brutally. We all stood silently against the wall, listening to his grunts and groans.

“Who’s next?” shouted one of the men in black. “Who wants some of this?”

Two of them pulled out black trash bags. “Cash and jewels, I want everything in the bag!” one shouted. “Now!”

When the bag reached us, J.T. calmly deposited his necklace and his money clip, fat with twenties. I put the cash from my pocket, about fifteen dollars, into the bag. As I did so, the man holding the bag looked up and stared at me. He didn’t say anything, but he kept glancing over at me as he continued his collection rounds. He seemed puzzled as to what I, plainly an outsider, was doing there.

When they were done, the five men dropped the bags out the window and calmly filed out. After a time J.T. motioned for me to follow him outside. We walked to his car, parked in the adjoining lot. Some other BK leaders joined him, commiserating over the robbery.

“Fucking cops do this all the time,” J.T. told me. “As soon as they find out we’re having a party, they raid it.”

“Why? And why don’t they arrest you?” I asked. “And how do you know they were cops?”

“It’s a game!” shouted one of the other BK leaders. “
We
make all this fucking money, and they want some.”

“They’re jealous,” J.T. said calmly. “We make more than them, and they can’t stand it. So this is how they get back at us.”

I had a hard time believing that the police would so brazenly rob a street gang. But it didn’t seem like the kind of thing that J.T. would lie about; most of his exaggerations served the purpose of making him look
more
powerful, not less so.

I had forgotten the incident entirely until I saw the MC flyer at the police station. I wondered if the names written in the margin were the cops who had signed up to raid the party. So I told Reggie about the BK party and J.T.’s claim that the robbers were cops.

He took a deep breath and looked straight ahead as he drove. “You know, Sudhir, you have to be careful about what you hear,” he said. Reggie drove fast, barreling over the unplowed snow as if he were off-roading. Our breath was fogging up the windshield. “I’m not going to say that all the people I work with are always doing the right thing. Hell,
I
don’t do the right thing all the time. But—”

“You don’t have to tell me anything if you don’t want to.”

“I know that, I know that. But you
should
know what’s going on. Yes, some of the people I work with raid the parties. And you know, sometimes I feel like I should do it, too! I mean, guys like J.T. are making a killing off people. And for what?
Peddling
stuff that kills. But it’s not for me. I don’t participate—I just don’t see the point.”

“I’ve ridden along with J.T. and a few of his friends in their sports cars,” I said. “Sometimes a cop will pull us over for no reason. And then—”

“He asks to see a paycheck stub, right?”

“Yeah! How did you know I was going to say that?”

“Think about how frustrating it is to do policing,” Reggie said. “You’ve been hanging out with these guys. You know that they never hold the cash that they make. They have all these investments in other people’s names. So what can we do? We can’t arrest their mothers for living in a nice house. But when we stop them in their fancy cars, we can legitimately ask whether they stole the car or not. Now, again, I don’t do that stuff. But some other people do.”

“But
I
don’t have to carry around a paycheck stub. Why should they?” I knew this was a naïve-sounding question, and I was fully aware that there was a big difference between me and the gang members. But because naïveté had worked in the past, I’d stuck with this strategy.

“
You
are not peddling that shit,” Reggie said, stating the obvious. I wasn’t sure if his explanation was meant to be sarcastic, whether he was humoring me, or whether he just wanted to make sure I understoodprecisely the police officers’ rationale. “
You
aren’t making millions by killing people. Sometimes we’ll take their car away.”

“What do you do with it?” I asked. I knew Reggie didn’t believe that the drug dealers were each “making millions,” but some of their earnings were still sufficiently greater than the cops’ to make Reggie upset.

“A lot of times, we’ll sell it at the police auction, and the money goes to charity. I figure it’s a way of getting back at those fools.”

On a few occasions, I’d been riding in a car with some gang members when a cop stopped the car, made everyone get out, and summarily called for a tow truck. On a few other occasions, the cop let the driver keep the car but took everyone’s jewelry and cash. To me the strangest thing was that the gang members barely protested. It was as if they were playing a life-size board game, the rules of which were well established and immutable, and on this occasion they’d simply gotten a bad roll of the dice.

 
 

A few weeks later, Reggie invited me to a South Side bar fre-quented by black cops. “I think you’re getting a real one-sided view of our work,” he said.

His offer surprised me. Reggie was a reserved man, and he rarely introduced me to other police officers even if they were standing nearby. He preferred to speak with me behind closed doors—in Ms. Bailey’s office, inside the Boys & Girls Club, or in his car.

We met at the bar on a Saturday afternoon. It was located a few blocks from the precinct and Robert Taylor. It was nondescript on the outside, marked only by some neon beer signs. On either side of it lay fast-food restaurants, liquor stores, and check-cashing shops. Even Reggie didn’t know the bar’s actual name. “I’ve been coming here for fifteen years,” he said, “and I never even bothered to ask.” He and the other cops just called it “the Lounge.” The place was just as nondescript inside: a long wooden bar, several tables, dim lighting, some Bears and Bulls posters. It had the feel of a well-worn den in a working-class home. All the patrons were black and at least in their mid-thirties, with a few old-timers nursing an afternoon beer.

Reggie sat us down at a table and introduced me to three of his off-duty colleagues. From the outset they seemed wary of speaking about their work. And since I never liked to question people too much until I got to know them, the conversation was stiff to say the least. In a short time, we covered my ethnic background, the Chicago Bears, and the strange beliefs of the university crowd in Hyde Park. The cops, like most working-class Chicagoans, thought that Hyde Park liberals—myself included, presumably—held quaint, unrealistic views of reality, especially in terms of racial integration. To these men Hyde Park was known as the “why can’t everyone just get along?” part of town.

One of the cops, a man named Jerry, sat staring at me the entire time. I felt sure I’d seen him before. He was quietly drinking whiskey shots with beer chasers. Once in a while, he’d spit out a question: “So you think you know a lot about gangs, huh?” or “What are you going to write about, Mr. Professor?” I got a little nervous when he started calling me “Mr. Professor,” since that’s how I was known in J.T.’s building. Was this just a coincidence?

The more Officer Jerry drank, the more belligerent he became. “You university types like to talk about how much you know, don’t you?” he said. “You like to talk about how you’re going to solve all these problems, don’t you?”

Reggie shot me a glance as if to say that I’d better defend myself.

“Well, if you think I don’t know something, why don’t you teach me?” I said. I’d had a few beers myself by now, and I probably sounded more aggressive than I’d intended.

“Motherfucker!” Jerry leaned in hard toward me. “You think I don’t know who you fucking are? You think we
all
don’t know what you’re doing? If you want to play with us, you better be real careful. If you like watching, you may get caught.”

A shiver ran over me when he said “watching.” Now I knew exactly where I’d seen him. In J.T.’s buildings Officer Jerry was well known, and by my estimation he was a rogue cop. Some months earlier, I’d been sitting in a stairwell interviewing a few prostitutes and pimps. I heard a commotion in the gallery. The stairwell door was partially open; looking out, I could see three police officers busting open an apartment door. Two of them, one black and one white, ran inside. The third, who was black, stayed outside guarding the door. He didn’t seem to notice us.

A minute later the cops hauled out a man and a teenage boy. Neither of them resisted, and neither seemed very surprised. The teenager was handcuffed, and they forced him to the floor. The mother was screaming, as was the baby in her arms.

Then a fourth cop showed up, swaggering down the hall. It was Officer Jerry. He wore black pants, a black and blue fleece jacket, and a bulletproof vest. He started to beat and kick the father violently. “Where’s the money, nigger?” he shouted. “Where’s the cash?”