Sudhir Venkatesh - Gang Leader for a Day

Kris and Michael had set up shop on Federal Street, in the corner of a parking lot littered with garbage and broken glass. About twenty yards down the street, next to an open fire hydrant, they were also running a car wash. The Johnson brothers always attracted a crowd.

“You want me to talk?” Kris asked me. “Then you need to find me some work, find me a customer!”

I was happy to oblige. Walking into the middle of Federal Street, I helped them flag down cars. Then Kris would approach the driver. “You need a wash?” he’d ask. Or, “Looks like your brakes are squeaking, ma’am. Why don’t you step outside and let me take a look.” Kris and Michael would charm the drivers until they broke down and agreed to have their cars looked at. If that failed, one brother would let the air out of the tires while the other brother occupied the driver. The more beer they drank, the more creative they became.

Toward the end of one hot summer day, T-Bone, one of J.T.’s senior officers, drove up to the car wash in a bright green Chevy Malibu. The Malibu seemed to be the thug’s car of choice. Behind T-Bone was a line of cars waiting for a wash, most of them classic gang vehicles-Malibus, Caprices, Lincoln Town Cars-all with shiny rims and bright paint jobs.

“Every week we need to wash their shit,” Michael muttered. “What can you do?” The gang apparently taxed the brothers in the form of free car washes. He grabbed a bucket of soapy water and shouted for Kris to come help. But Kris, his head buried in the hood of a customer’s car, shouted back that he was busy. So I offered to help.

When T-Bone saw me jog over with some clean rags, he nearly fell down laughing. “Oh, shit! Next thing he’ll be moving in with them!” he said. “Hey, Sweetness, how much you paying the Professor?”

“Ain’t paying nothing,” answered Michael (a.k.a. Sweetness, apparently). “I’m giving him an education.”

This made T-Bone laugh even harder. T-Bone and I got along pretty well, and unlike other members of the gang, he would routinely strike up a conversation with me. He was attending Kennedy-King College, a South Side community college, majoring in accounting. That’s why J.T. had put him in charge of the gang’s finances. T-Bone had two talkative, precocious children and the appearance of a nerd: he wore big, metal-framed glasses, always carried a notebook (which contained the gang’s financial records, I would later learn), and constantly asked me about life at the U of C. “Hope it’s harder than where I’m at,” he’d say. “I’m getting A’s, and I haven’t had to pay nobody off yet!”

A commotion rose up from the parking lot where Kris was working: he had gotten into a fight with a customer. Even from afar I could see the veins popping on Kris’s face. He kept trying to grab the other man’s neck, and the other man kept pushing Kris backward. The other man kneed Kris in the stomach, sending him to the ground, and then Kris picked up a rock and hit his combatant in the head. Now both of them were on the ground, writhing and yelling.

Michael and T-Bone hurried over. “Nigger, not around here!” T-Bone said, laughing at the fairly pathetic display of fighting. “I told you about keeping this shit peaceful.”

“It will be peaceful as long as he pays up,” Kris said.

“Pays up?” the other man said. “He can finish, then I’ll pay. Twenty bucks to fix my radiator? Fuck that! He got to do more than that for twenty.”

“Nigger, I already washed the damn car,” Kris said. He stood up, wincing. “You took this shit too far. I’m not doing nothing else for twenty bucks.” Kris picked up a wrench and hit the man in the leg. The man groaned in pain, his face swollen with anger, and it looked as if he was going to go after Kris.

T-Bone grabbed Kris, even though he could barely keep himself from laughing. “Damn! What did I tell you? Lay that shit down. Now come over here.”

T-Bone walked the two men over to the edge of the parking lot. They were both limping. Soon after, Kris started washing T-Bone’s car while the other man sat on the ground, nursing his leg.

“I’ll teach that nigger!” Kris said to himself loudly. “No one messes with me.”

T-Bone walked over to Michael and me. “Nigger was right,” he said, pointing to Kris. “He washed the man’s car and fixed the radiator. And that costs twenty dollars. He don’t need to do nothing else. I got the money for you. And five bucks extra for the hassle.”

T-Bone handed Michael the money, slapped my face gently, winked, and hummed a song as he walked off. Michael didn’t say anything.

That night, once it was too dark to work on cars, I sat with Michael and Kris by their beat-up white Subaru, and we drank some beers. Michael told me that T-Bone often settled customer disputes for them.

“Why would he do that?” I asked.

“Because we pay him to!” Michael said. “I mean, we don’t have a choice.”

Michael explained that he and Kris paid T-Bone 15 percent of their weekly revenue. Just as J.T.’s foot soldiers squeezed a little money from squatters and prostitutes, his higher-ranked officers supplemented their income with more substantial taxes. In return, the gang brought Kris and Michael customers and mediated any disputes. This occasionally included beating up a customer who became recalcitrant or abusive. “That happens once a month,” Kris said with satisfaction. “Best way to teach people not to fuck with us.”

I asked Michael and Kris whether beating one customer might in fact deter other customers. The reply taught me a lot about the Black Kings.

“When you got a problem, I bet you call the police, right?” Michael said. “Well, we call the Kings. I call T-Bone because I don’t have anyone else to call.”

“But you could call the police,” I said. “I don’t understand why you can’t call them if something goes wrong.”

“If I’m out here hustling, or if you’re in the building hustling, there’s no police officer who’s going to do what T-Bone does for us,” Michael said. “Every hustler tries to have someone who offers them protection. I don’t care if you’re selling socks or selling your ass. You need someone to back you up.”

“See, we were both Black Kings when we were younger,” Kris said. “Most of the people you see, the older ones who live right here? They were Kings at one time. So it’s complicated. I mean, if you own a business on Forty-seventh Street, you pay taxes and you get protection-from the police, from the aldermen-”

I interrupted Kris to ask why they’d need protection from the aldermen. He looked at me as if I was naïve-which I was-and explained that the aldermen’s line workers, or “precinct captains,” liked to tax any off-the-books entrepreneurial activity. “So instead we pay the gang, and the gang protects us.”

“But it’s more than that,” Michael said. “I mean, you’re stuck. These niggers make your life hell, but they’re family. And you can’t choose your family!” He started to laugh so hard that he nearly spilled his beer.

“Just imagine,” Kris prodded me. “Let’s say another gang came by and started shooting. Or let’s say you got a bunch of niggers that get into the building and go and rob a bunch of people. Who’s going to take care of that? Police? They never come around! So you got J.T. and the Kings. They’ll get your stuff back if it was stolen. They’ll protect you so that no niggers can come and shoot up the place.”

Kris and Michael really seemed to believe, although with some reservations, that the gang was their extended family. Skeptical as I may have been, the gang plainly was looked upon as something other than a purely destructive force. I remembered what J.T. had told me a while back, a pronouncement that hadn’t made much sense at the time: “The gang and the building,” he had said, “are the same.”