How Chicago reclaimed the projects, but lost the city.
By Kevin Williamson
Chicago – Hey, man.
Hey, man. What you need?” The question is part solicitation, part
challenge, and the challenge part is worth paying attention to in a city
with more than 500 murders a year. The question comes from a young,
light-skinned black guy with freckles. We’re in the shadow of what used
to be the infamous Cabrini-Green housing projects, only a 15-minute walk
from the Hermès and Prada boutiques and the $32 brunch at Fred’s that
identify Chicago’s Gold Coast as highly desirable urban real estate, a
delightful assemblage of Stuff White People Like. Just down Division
Street from the boutique hotels and the more-artisanal-than-thou Goddess
and Grocer, Cabrini-Green is still in the early stages of
gentrification, though it does have that universal identifier of urban
reclamation: a Starbucks within view of another Starbucks.
All that remains of Cabrini-Green is sad stories and the original
section of row houses around which the projects grew up. Those row
houses are being renovated as part of the foundations-up effort to
rebuild the neighborhood. Even the name “Cabrini-Green” is being
scrubbed from memory: The new mixed-income development on the site of
the old Cabrini-Green Extension heaves under the unbearably pretentious
name “Parkside of Old Town.” But some of the old commerce remains, and
Freckles is pretty clearly an entrepreneur of the street. “You buying?” I
ask what he’s selling, and he explains in reasonably civil terms that
he is not in the habit of setting himself up for entrapment on a
narcotics charge.
Cabrini-Green has had its share of tourists — in 1999, the film Whiteboyz
found a group of Wonder Bread–colored hip-hop fans from Iowa visiting
the site. But real estate and the scarcity thereof is the ruling fact of
urban life, and once downtown Chicago began to evolve from a place in
which people worked in factories and warehouses into a place in which
people work in litigation offices and university classrooms, Chicago’s
near north began to fill up with the sort of people who prefer urban
lofts to suburban picket fences, public transit to car commutes, and $32
Sunday brunches to church, all of them living in the orbit of
Cabrini-Green. Chicago is a very liberal place, but it’s a very liberal
place in which about half of the very liberal public-school teachers
preach the virtues of the city’s very liberal public schools while
sending their own kids to private schools. Chicago may vote for the
party of housing projects, but nobody wants to live next to one, or even
drive past one on the way to Trader Joe’s. One local tells of the
extraordinary measures he used to take to avoid driving by
Cabrini-Green, where children would pelt his car with bottles and trash
whenever he stopped. And eventually, he learned not to stop at all,
blowing through red lights on the theory that it was better to risk a
moving violation than risk what the locals might do to him.
So they tore down Cabrini-Green. And they tore down the Robert Taylor
Homes and the Henry Horner Homes and practically every other infamous
housing project in the city. And in doing so, Chicago inadvertently
exacerbated the crime wave that now has the city suffering more than
twice as many murders every year as does Los Angeles County or Houston.
You cannot really understand Chicago
without understanding the careers of Larry Hoover, David Barksdale, and
Jeff Fort, the three kings of the modern Chicago criminal gang. Chicago
has a long history of crime syndicates, of course, including Al Capone
and his epigones. In the 1950s it had ethnic street gangs of the West Side Story variety,
quaint in pictures today with their matching embroidered sweaters and
boyish names: the Eagles, the Dragons. But in the 1960s, marijuana began
to change all that. Marijuana, that kindest and gentlest of buzzes, was
a major moneymaking opportunity, both for the international syndicates
that smuggled it and for the street criminals at the point of purchase.
Inspired partly by Chicago’s long mob history, partly by the nascent
black-liberation ethic of the day, and a great deal by the extraordinary
money to be made, Chicago’s black gangs came to dominate the marijuana
business — an enterprise model that would soon become supercharged by
cocaine and heroin. David Barksdale built a tightly integrated top-down
management structure for his gang, the Black Disciples, while Larry
Hoover and Jeff Fort did the same thing for their organizations, the
Gangster Nation and the Black P-Stone Rangers, respectively. Barksdale
and Hoover would later join forces as the Gangster Disciples, a group
that, though faction-ridden, remains a key player on the Chicago crime
scene today, with thousands of members — 53 of whom were arrested for
murder in 2009 alone.
Fort had real organizational flair and transformed the P-Stones, a gang
dating back to the 1950s, into one of the first true modern gangs,
combining racialism, neighborhood loyalties, a hierarchical management
structure complete with impressive-sounding titles, and the shallow
self-help rhetoric of the 1960s into something new — and holding the
whole thing together with great heaping piles of money. His audacity was
something to be wondered at: He formed a nonprofit organization and
managed to convince city and federal officials that he was engaged in
efforts to help disadvantaged urban youth. Government grant money was
forthcoming, and soon the Gangster Disciples got in on the action,
founding their own project, called “Growth and Development” — note the
initials. Bobby Gore and Alfonso Alfred of the rival Vice Lords secured a
$275,000 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. Like the Mafiosi of
old, Chicago’s new generation of gangsters learned to recycle some of
that money into political campaigns and donations to influential
ministers.
In fact, though they trafficked in narcotics and murder with equal
ease, as often as not it was financial crimes ranging from
misappropriation of federal money to mortgage fraud that brought down
many of the top Chicago gangsters. Fort went to Leavenworth in the early
1970s for misuse of federal funds and continued to run his operations
from federal custody until just a few years ago, when he was shipped off
to the ADX Florence supermax lockup in Colorado and his communication
with the outside world severely curtailed. Hoover got 200 years for
murder and a life sentence for a federal narcotics charge but also
continued to run his organization from prison.
Those government grants may not have amounted to very much, drops in
the roaring river of money that the drug business was generating, but
government contributed mightily to the growth of the modern gang by
providing the one key piece of infrastructure that the Barksdales and
Hoovers of the world could never have acquired for themselves: the
high-rise housing project. The projects not only gave the gangs an
easily secured place to consolidate their commercial activities, they
helped to create the culture of loyalty and discipline that was the
hallmark of the Chicago street gang in its golden age. With most members
living and working under the same roof, the leaders could quickly quash
intra-gang disputes or freelance criminality. Fort, Hoover, and
Barksdale were children of the 1940s and 1950s, men who came of age
before the cultural rot of the 1960s — practically Victorians by the
standards of the modern gangster. They were (and are) brutes and
killers, but they managed to maintain some semblance of cohesion and
structure. Barksdale went so far as to collect taxes — fees from
unaffiliated drug dealers operating on his streets.
When the towers came down, Chicago’s organized crime got a good deal
less organized, and a number of decapitation operations run by the
Chicago police and federal authorities had the perverse effect of making
things worse: Where there once were a small number of gangs operating
in a relatively stable fashion under the leadership of veteran
criminals, today there are hundreds of gangs and thousands of gang
factions. Chicago police estimate that there are at least 250 factions
of the Gangster Disciples alone, with as many as 30,000 members among
them. Vast swathes of Chicago are nominally under the black-and-blue
Disciples flag, but in reality there is at least as much violence
between those Disciples factions as between the Disciples and rivals.
Some are one- and two-block operations, many with young teens in charge.
The Barksdales and Hoovers may not have been Machiavellian in their
subtlety, but they were far-seeing visionaries compared with the kids
who came streaming out of the projects in their wake.
Mr. Butt is dearly missing his AK-47.
He’s a native of Pakistan, where Mikhail Kalashnikov’s best-known
invention is as common as the deer rifle is in the United States, but in
Chicago he cannot possess even a pea-shooter, which has him slightly
nervous in his role as my ghetto tour guide, chauffeuring me through the
worst parts of Englewood and Garfield, the biggest battlegrounds in
Chicago’s 21st-century gangland warfare.
“In Pakistan, everybody has an AK-47,” he says. “But it’s not like
here. They don’t go walking into a school and shooting people.” I ask
him if he thinks that applies to the case of 15-year-old Malala
Yousafzai, the Pakistani girl who was shot by Islamists for the crime of
wanting to go to school. He allows that this is a fair point. He points
out Bridgeport, home of the venerable Daley clan, and informs me
wistfully that in the old days blacks simply were not allowed to cross
the bridge into Bridgeport, a social norm enforced with baseball bats
and worse. Mr. Butt is a big, big Daley fan — “He was very strong,
strong with the mob!” — and no fan at all of Chicago’s new breed of
gangsters. “On the South Side, it is just like Afghanistan. Every square
mile has its own boss, and everybody has to answer to him. From the
business district through 31st Street, everything is perfect.” Perfect may not be the word, but I get his point. “Below 31st Street, everything is jungle.”
Mr. Butt locks the doors, and we cruise through Englewood and environs.
Martin Luther King Drive, like so many streets named for the Reverend
King, is a hideous dog show of squalor and dysfunction, as though Daniel
Patrick Moynihan’s depressing reportage in 1965’s The Negro Family
had been used as a how-to manual. Mr. Butt points out the dealers, who
don’t really need pointing out. It’s about 8 degrees outside, and the
Windy City is living up to its name. In the vicinity of Rothschild
Liquors, grim-faced men in heavy coats smoke cigarillos and engage in
commerce. Mr. Butt’s habit of pointing out miscreants by literally
pointing them out brings scowls from the street. Lying low is not Mr.
Butt’s strong suit.
Mr. Butt informs me that for many years the South Side dealers
favored gas stations as bases of operation, which makes sense: Cars have
a legitimate reason to be pulling in and out. Plausible deniability
keeps probable cause at bay. Nobody is flying any obvious gang colors,
no gold bandanas for the Four Corner Hustlers or crowns for the Latin
Kings. But maybe that is simply because it is so godawful cold and even
the proudest gangster is bundled up. I’ve been told to look for
Georgetown gear to identify the Gangster Disciples, but it may be that
the Hoyas have become passé.
Commerce is impossible to hide completely,
however, and in truth it doesn’t look like the locals are trying
particularly hard to hide it. A maroon Cadillac sedan of Reaganite
vintage comes slowly rumbling around the corner with four very
serious-looking young men inside. Another young man in a heavy coat,
carrying a plastic grocery bag that I suspect is full of commerce, comes
out of a house to parley. Maybe they’re talking about the weather, but
probably not.
Mr. Butt takes me to see the sights: In front of Alexander Graham
Bell Elementary School, there’s commerce. On Garfield Boulevard, at 58th
and Ashland, in front of the various storefront churches, pawn shops,
tax-refund-loan outlets, the mighty wheels of endless commerce roll on
and on.
“They do this to their own neighborhood,” Mr. Butt says, exasperated.
“They make it a place no decent person would want to be. Why do they do
that? It’s very bad, very scary at night.” This from a guy who
vacations in Lahore.
Malala Yousafzai was a 15-year-old
schoolgirl who got shot for a reason — a terrible, awful, evil reason,
but a reason. (Say what you like about Islamic radicalism, at least it’s
an ethos.) All of Chicago is aghast at the story of 15-year-old Hadiya
Pendleton, who was shot — and, unlike Malala Yousafzai, killed —
apparently for no reason at all, at 2:20 in the afternoon in a public
park. Miss Pendleton was a student at King College Prep, and a majorette
in the school’s band, which had the honor of performing at President
Obama’s first inauguration. Miss Pendleton had just recently returned
from a trip to the president’s second inauguration when she took shelter
from the rain under a canopy at Harsh Park. Miss Pendleton was not
known to have any gang connections — in fact, she appeared in a 2008
video denouncing gang violence.
The shooting of Miss Pendleton commanded the attention of the White
House and, naturally, that of President Obama’s former chief of staff,
Rahm Emanuel, now mayor of Chicago and fecklessly reshuffling the
organization chart of the police department. The usual noises were made
about gun control, and especially the flow of guns from nearby Indiana
into Chicago, though nobody bothered to ask why Chicago is a war zone
and Muncie isn’t. But the mayor’s latest promises did not impress
17-year-old Jordyn Willis, who organized a march in Miss Pendleton’s
memory. “He can’t control his city,” Miss Willis told the Chicago Tribune.
It’s not clear that anybody can. Chicago has had three police
superintendents since 2007. Current superintendent Garry McCarthy,
formerly the head of the Newark police, has instituted the data-driven
CompStat system first developed by the NYPD. But in a city in which
15-year-olds are running criminal enterprises and shooting each other
over the slightest of slights, it’s not clear that even the best
policing practices will be sufficient.
“Some gangs require a shooting as part of the initiation,” explains
Art Bilek of the Chicago Crime Commission. Mr. Bilek is a wonderful
anachronism, a very old-fashioned gentleman who uses the word
“wisenheimer” without a trace of irony and refers to his former
colleagues in the Chicago Police Department as “coppers.” Now in his
80s, he joined the police force with a master’s degree in hand at a time
when it was unusual for a cop to have an undergraduate degree. He
eventually rose to the rank of lieutenant in Chicago and chief of the
Cook County sheriff’s police, and founded the academic discipline of
criminal-justice studies along the way.
“The purpose of tearing down the projects was to regentrify the
neighborhoods. And now, where there had been projects, you have chain
stores, exclusive restaurants, delis, everything people want. But it
also sent those gangs out into the neighborhoods, into new places in the
city and the suburbs, places where they had not been.” He estimates
that about 80 percent of Chicago’s homicides are gang-related.
He sketches a pyramid. “In the old days, you had a Jeff Fort or a
David Barksdale at the top of the pyramid. You had a very rigid
structure, like the old Mafia, with a boss at the top, enforcers, and
advisers. There was very strict enforcement of the rules — they’d beat
you, maybe even kill you. And to an extent, the gangs could cooperate,
because you had some structure. And you had it all going on in the
projects, in those tall towers of criminality. And life was terrible for
the people who had to live there. At the same time, you have a strong
incentive to take those projects and do something else with them, to
create revenue-producing lands — public housing pays no taxes. You can
get rid of the towers, but the gangs that were in them don’t just go
away.”
Worse, the move out of the projects has made it easier to bring
juveniles into the gangs. “In the homes, they had a limited number of
juveniles at any given time. Now, it’s unlimited,” he explains. “You
have juveniles rising to positions of power, and they just don’t have
the street smarts or wisdom that even a Jeff Fort would. They’re doing
impulsive things that the old guard just wouldn’t have dreamt of. And
the money is bigger now, too. Before, the money went straight up to
Hoover, Barksdale, or Fort, but now you have 1,000 leaders all competing
for that. And you have the street gangs, the Mexican cartels, the
narcotics, and the violence forming a unitary cultural phenomenon.” He’d
like to see stricter gun control and stiffer sentences — “burying them”
— for violent offenders. He cites procedural changes in the legal
system making it more difficult to secure charges as a factor in the
growing violence.
Chicago was the only U.S. city to break 500 murders last year, and
that is a spike — but a spike only over the past few years. Chicago has
seen these waves before: In 2008 the city saw 516 murders, and it had
nearly 1,000 in 1974, the year David Barksdale’s past finally caught up
with him and he died of kidney failure resulting from a gunshot wound
suffered years before. Things have been worse in the past, but there is a
sense that Chicago is moving in the wrong direction. New York City had
nearly 2,000 murders in 1974, and more than 2,000 the year before. But
those numbers are unthinkable today: New York City finally got control
of itself, which is a big part of the reason why Rudy Giuliani, a
thrice-married recreationally cross-dressing pro-choice big-city
liberal, was taken seriously as a candidate for the Republican
presidential nomination. Rahm Emanuel would need a miracle worthy of his
surname to follow a similar path, to get Freckles to give up commerce
and to get Mr. Butt to regard him as something other than a municipal
joke. Chicago may have torn down the projects, but building the city is a
different thing altogether.
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