After his release, in July 1974, Lee was in and out of trouble with the law, including a conviction of unlawful use of a weapon. The preceding November, in 1986, the police caught Lee with fifty-six grams of heroin. He met the $50,000 bond and continued about his business. To the residents of Henry Horner, he seemed to operate with impunity.
A taciturn man, Lee, who was sometimes known as General Lee or by his middle name, Oswald, came from a long Chicago tradition of smart, sophisticated gang leaders. He was no youngster; he was thirty-eight years old.
The city’s black street gangs, of which there are three main ones—the Vice Lords, the Disciples, and the El Rukns (formerly known as the Blackstone Rangers)—originated in the early 1960s mostly as young kids duking it out over turf rights. At Henry Horner, the Vice Lords and Black Souls, a faction of the Disciples, fought fist to fist with white gangs whose turf lay just north of the complex. As the whites moved out, the Vice Lords and Black Souls fought among themselves. Eventually, the city’s gangs split into two main groupings known as the Nation and the Folks. The Vice Lords and El Rukns belonged to the Nation; the Disciples to the Folks.
By the late 1960s, the gangs had won some standing among the establishment, particularly with liberals who felt that these young hoodlums, given proper guidance, might turn their energies and enviable organizing and leadership abilities to bettering their neighborhoods. The gang leader who served as a prototype for others, Jeff Fort, the El Rukns’ head, managed to pull in over $300,000 in funds from federal agencies for ostensible job-training programs. During the riots following the death of Martin Luther King, Jr., the El Rukns took to the streets to calm the neighborhoods. Businessmen whose windows had DO NOT TOUCH posters signed by the El Rukns’ leadership later held a press conference to commend the El Rukns for helping protect their property. The gang had won such legitimacy that Fort was invited, at the behest of a United States senator, to President Nixon’s inauguration.
At Henry Horner, the Vice Lords gained a similar standing when a local hospital bequeathed a former Catholic boys’ school it owned, coupled with a grant of over $20,000, to local gang leaders in the hope that they would open a neighborhood center. The three-story, nine-year-old structure had oak floors, oriental rugs, chandeliers, and silver place settings.
Efforts, though, to convert the bad to the good failed miserably, some quicker than others. Within months, the gangs had gutted the Catholic school. The chandeliers and place settings were gone. The gang used much of the grant money to buy an old fire-engine-red ambulance, which they used to transport friends around the neighborhood, as well as new clothes, mostly army fatigues and jump boots.
The El Rukns’ good intentions unraveled, too, though not as quickly. In the early 1970s, a judge sentenced Jeff Fort to five years in Leavenworth for conspiring to misapply federal funds. He was released in 1976, but went back to prison again in 1983 for drug trafficking. And then, while in prison, he was sentenced to an additional eighty years as the first United States citizen to be convicted for conspiring to commit terrorist acts on behalf of a foreign government. Prosecutors contended that Fort had made a deal with Moammar Ghadhafi in which the El Rukns were to receive $2.5 million to bomb buildings and airplanes in the United States for the Libyan leader.
By the late 1970s, the city’s gangs, once organizations of neighborhood pride and turf rights, had turned to big business: the marketing and selling of narcotics. Ironically, the well-intentioned efforts of the late 1960s left the gangs with strong organizational structures, which they needed to have in place when applying for federal and local funding.
The gangs became so powerful in Chicago that they have managed to do what no big city police force has done: they kept crack out of the city. Not until 1988, long after the crack scourge had devoured entire neighborhoods in cities like New York and Washington, D.C., were there any crack-related arrests in Chicago. Even then, crack made up only 5 percent of all drugs seized. The police knew of only one extensive crack operation, which they swiftly closed down. If crack found its way to Chicago, the inexpensive, highly addictive drug would open the market to small entrepreneurs, and possibly break the gangs’ oligopoly over the drug trade.*
The gangs also became an institutional force in many of the city’s neighborhoods, so that even in recent years they have been used for seemingly legitimate political purposes. In 1983, a state representative, Larry Bullock, allegedly paid the El Rukns $10,000 to campaign for Jane Byrne in her quest for the mayoralty. Police say they pocketed the money and never worked for Byrne.
At Henry Horner, a young local politician recruited gang members from playgrounds to pass out leaflets and accompany campaign workers in his successful 1987 bid for Democratic ward committeeman. He paid each gang member $20 a day. Because of two threats on his life and because his campaign van had been riddled with bullets, he needed the protection.
Residents and police tell the story of one former west side alderman who announced that he would move into a public housing project for a few nights, à la former Mayor Byrne. He wanted to draw attention to the awful conditions there. The housing authority found him a vacant apartment in a high-rise, but it happened to be controlled by the Vice Lords. The gang eagerly awaited his arrival. The alderman, it seems, had previously aligned himself with the rival Disciples. He never moved in.
The city’s top gang leaders and drug lords have such standing in the community that every summer they throw a huge bash for friends at the Dan Ryan Woods on the south side. One summer, residents of many of the city’s poor black neighborhoods received mimeographed invitations to the “Players’ Picnic.” Fliers promised free food and drink, softball for the children, and a car show and wet T-shirt contest for the adults. The flier brazenly identified some of the sponsors of the party by their nicknames: Highsmith, Fat Cat, Bub, and Disco. About two thousand Chicagoans attended the get-together, dancing to the funk rock of a live band and grilling hot dogs and ribs. Cars were so backed up going into the park that the police had to assign extra traffic details. The kingpins showed off their glistening new Mercedes-Benzes, Rolls-Royces, and Jaguars. They danced and drank until ten P.M., when the police broke up the festivities.
At the age of ten, Lafeyette had his first encounter with death; he saw someone killed. It was the beginning of Henry Horner’s brutal drug wars, when Jimmie Lee and the Conservative Vice Lords made their move to take control of Henry Horner. By 1985, drugs had swept through Chicago’s west side. Big money was involved. And Lee began his efforts to establish his part of the trade.
The Vice Lords, with the aid of another gang, pushed to oust the Disciples from the east end of Horner, the more populated section of the complex and thus the more lucrative. They even brought in thugs from other parts of the city. The first victim was a young Disciple nicknamed Baby Al, who was shot with a .357 Magnum not far from the Riverses’ building. Wounded, he ran into the high-rise, where, while trying to climb the stairs, he fell backward and lost consciousness. Lafeyette came running out of his apartment to see what all the commotion was about. He watched as Baby Al bled to death. Two years later, his blood still stained the stairwell.
A couple of weeks later, as Lafeyette and Pharoah played on the jungle gym in midafternoon, shooting broke out. A young girl jumping rope crumpled to the ground. Lafeyette ran into his building, dragging behind him one of the triplets. Pharoah, then seven, panicked. He ran blindly until he bumped into one of the huge green trash containers that dot the landscape. He pulled himself up and over, landing in a foot of garbage. Porkchop followed. For half an hour, the two huddled in the foul-smelling meat scraps and empty pizza boxes, waiting for the shooting to stop, arguing about when they should make a break for their respective homes. Finally, the shooting subsided and they climbed out, smelling like dirty dishes. They watched as paramedics attended to the girl, who luckily had been shot only in the leg. Her frightened mother, who had fainted, was being revived. It was at that point that Pharoah first told his mot
her, “I didn’t wanna know what was happening.”
By late 1986, the Conservative Vice Lords occupied two of Horner’s high-rises just across the street from the Riverses’. Lee’s soldiers used the buildings’ four stairwells to escape from the police. They found refuge in several of the vacant apartments, some of which were connected by large holes knocked in the cinder-block walls, through which they could make their getaways. The gang also controlled three apartments. The tenants were young single women who in exchange for money or drugs rented out the entire unit or just a bedroom to Vice Lords. In these so-called safe houses, the gang’s lieutenants stored their drugs, guns, and money. In the underbelly of a refrigerator in one of the apartments, they hid a disassembled machine gun. The gang had also outfitted an eighth-floor vacant apartment with a sofa, lounge chair, and a television set; it was a sanctuary for members who needed a place to stay. No guns or drugs were allowed. Jimmie Lee lived farther west, outside Horner, with his wife and three children.
The Vice Lords added to the natural defenses—most notably the stairwells and the vacant apartments—the buildings provided. They knocked out all the lights in the open breezeways so that even during the day it was difficult if not impossible to see in. Wandering sentries warned of approaching unmarked squad cars, which even young children could identify on sight. They communicated through walkie-talkies, the kind used by football coaches. Their code word for police was “boppers.”
Most wore baseball caps with the bill turned to the left, an indication that they were Vice Lords. Many wore earrings in the left ear, and some hung such heavy gold jewelry from their necks that it seemed a wonder they could hold their heads upright. Also, the Playboy bunny had become a Vice Lord symbol, so a member might sport a gold one around his neck. The five-pointed star, the gang’s insignia, decorated the entrances to the two buildings, as did other items identifying the area as belonging to the Vice Lords. The top hat signified shelter, the cane stood for strength, the glove meant purity, and the champagne glass symbolized conservatism or propriety. Members often learned the meaning of these symbols while in prison, where the gangs did much of their recruiting.
Much of the business was with people in the neighborhood, but the bulk of it was with outsiders, who drove their cars up Wolcott Avenue and parked in front of the Vice Lords’ two buildings. Usually they didn’t have to get out of their cars; the young runners took their orders. The “soldiers” sold the cocaine and heroin and then returned a certain percentage of the proceeds to the bosses and kept the rest. Both the police and former gang members estimated that Lee’s business grossed $50,000 to $100,000 a week.
On December 13, 1986, there began a frenzy that would last through the summer. Four top Vice Lords chose to show their force against a rival drug gang, the Gangster Stones, that was encroaching on their turf. They had already successfully moved the Disciples farther west.
The four waited until after midnight to launch their attack. They knew that was when the tough plainclothes cops of the city’s gang crimes and public housing units went off duty. They had no third shift. The Vice Lords strolled into the breezeway of a nearby building, carrying with them an Uzi, two sawed-off shotguns, and a .25 caliber automatic handgun.
The first rival gang member they came on in the dark lobby was Larry Wallace, or Wild Child, a thirty-one-year-old heavy drinker who had recently moved from Horner but was back visiting friends. People in the neighborhood continue to dispute whether he was an active gang member at the time. The gunfire lasted maybe thirty seconds. Wallace was shot five times; one bullet pierced his chest and exited from the back, and another entered through the upper back and lodged in his left cheek. Buckshot pellets littered his buttocks. The Vice Lords had fired at him from just about every conceivable angle. Even at Horner, the viciousness of this slaying unnerved people. By summer’s end, as the Vice Lords established their dominance, the war had touched the lives of almost everyone living in Henry Horner. Lafeyette and Pharoah, as well as the adults, began talking of the “death train” that drove smack through their community.
* It should be mentioned that certain high-ranking officials of the Chicago Police Department dispute the theory that the gangs kept crack out of Chicago, though it is supported by, among others, the Drug Enforcement Agency and the U.S. Attorney’s Office. In a 1989 interview, Raymond Risley, then the commander of the police department’s narcotics unit, listed a number of reasons that crack had not enveloped Chicago. The reasons seem so naïve that one suspects the police want to diminish the impression that the city’s gangs are, in fact, very powerful. Commander Risley suggested that people in Chicago said no to crack after watching the devastation wreaked in other cities, including the much publicized death of the basketball star Len Bias. He also surmised that crack was easier to introduce in cities like Detroit and New York because, he contended, they had more abandoned buildings that could be used as crack houses. Chicago, needless to say, boasts a plethora of vacant buildings. What’s more, crack has become the drug of choice in a number of poor suburbs just south of the city, towns that certainly don’t contain more abandoned buildings than Chicago. The one plausible explanation proposed by Commander Risley is that cocaine prices have dropped so significantly in recent years that there has been little demand for cheaper drugs. A kilo of cocaine cost $55,000 in 1980; it dropped to between $17,000 and $19,000 nine years later. With such low prices, street dealers could sell bags of cocaine for as little as $10, enough for one snort. As a result, crack may not be as prized a drug.
Five
BIRD LEG LOVED DOGS. And for that reason, Lafeyette loved Bird Leg. His real name was Calvin Robinson, and though he was three years older than Lafeyette, he let the younger boy tag along with him, in part because he had few friends. The older boys made fun of his obsession with dogs; the younger ones seemed to understand it.
Bird Leg and Lafeyette hunted for German shepherds, mutts, and even pit bulls in the small, fenced-in back yards of the Hispanic and white neighborhoods just north of the housing project. Ordinarily, the dogs growled and fought with Lafeyette and other strangers, but Bird Leg could communicate with them in ways the other children found uncanny. As he climbed into the back yards, he talked to them, consoled them, cajoled them, lured them, until they sidled up to him, drooling on their newfound friend. Then he unchained them, lifted them over the yard fence, and brought them home.
“The dogs would always come with him,” recalls one boy, with a combination of amazement and respect. “He had more dogs than he did friends.”
With Lafeyette’s assistance, Bird Leg kept his assortment of canines—some stolen, some strays, some raised from birth—in an abandoned garage catty-corner from Lafeyette’s building. Bird Leg often got down on his hands and knees to speak to his companions. Sometimes he kissed them on their sloppy chops, a practice the other children shook their heads at in disbelief. A few nights a week, Bird Leg scrounged through the trash bins behind the nearby Kentucky Fried Chicken, and collected half-finished meals to feed his pets. Lafeyette often helped.
Bird Leg occasionally spent the night with his animals in the worn, leaning garage, huddling among them for warmth. On one unusually cold fall night, Bird Leg, only twelve at the time, built a fire by the garage door, fueling it with cardboard and rags. The heat, he hoped, would warm his shivering friends. Instead, the old wooden building, without much coaxing, quickly caught fire and burned to the ground. The police brought Bird Leg to his mother, who, though angry, couldn’t help laughing at her son’s misguided intentions. It was the first of what were to be many brushes with the law.
As Bird Leg got older, he became involved with the Vice Lords, and he and Lafeyette grew apart. Lafeyette was too young and too wary to join the gangs, but he cherished all that Bird Leg had taught him about dogs. And he missed him.
Bird Leg, his mother suspects, sought protection from the gang in the same way he sought love from his dogs. Jimmie Lee, said his mother, had become like a big brother,
though Bird Leg didn’t run drugs for him. In fact, many of Lee’s older workers didn’t even know Bird Leg. Also, a close relative was a Vice Lord, which meant that Bird Leg, who lived on the western edge of Horner, Disciples’ territory, frequently had to withstand a beating just to enter his building. Uncles’ and cousins’ associations with a particular gang can mark children too young to have chosen their own affiliation.
As a teenager, Bird Leg became increasingly reckless and hard-headed. By the age of fourteen, he had for all intents and purposes dropped out of school. Friends say he would sometimes borrow a shotgun from a friend and randomly shoot at Disciples, a practice not uncommon among the very young gang members. He also started raising his pit bulls to fight. His favorite was a light brown muscular terrier named Red. “I was scared of that dog,” Alberta Robinson said later. “I once went to hit Bird Leg for something he did and that dog just about bit me.” The police eventually confiscated the starving and scarred terrier; Bird Leg had used it to threaten an officer.
Bird Leg had always lived on the edge and, indeed, earned his nickname when at the age of four he chased a tennis ball into a busy street and was struck by a speeding, drunk driver. The doctors had to insert pins in one knee and ankle. When the chest-high cast came off after many weeks, his leg was so thin and fragile-looking that his grandmother started calling him Bird Leg.
In the summer of 1986, while shooting dice with some friends, he was approached by a man with a shotgun demanding his money, and Bird Leg, in his youthful defiance, ran. The man emptied a cartridge of buckshot into Bird Leg’s shoulder. That incident, added to the intensifying war between the gangs, caused his mother to move her family into an apartment on the city’s far north side. But, as is often the case when families move, Bird Leg and his brothers kept returning to Horner to visit friends.