There Are No Children Here (7 page)

The police speculate that Lee had been associated with the Vice Lords, which has over twenty factions, for possibly as long as twenty years. One of his first tussles with the authorities was when he was seventeen, charged with killing a fourteen-year-old boy who was found in the gangway of a building, shot through the heart. A jury found Lee not guilty. Two years later, Lee and some buddies robbed three men at gunpoint. A letter to the court from Lee’s counselor at the American Institute of Engineering and Technology, where he had received drafting instruction, noted: “While he was with us, Mr. Lee was quiet and passive. He lacked self-confidence and disparaged himself. He handled his conflicts by retreating.” But Lee went on to serve a little over four years in one of the Illinois prisons, which are notorious for their large and strong gang populations and where most gang leaders earn their rank.

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.
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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 mother, “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.