Sudhir Venkatesh - Gang Leader for a Day

“Are these meetings always so crazy?” I asked Ms. Bailey.

“This is how it goes,” she said. “We yell at them, they say nothing. Everyone goes back to doing what they were doing.”

“I don’t see what you get out of this. It seems like a waste of time.”

Ms. Bailey just patted my knee and said, “Mm-hmm.”

“I mean it,” I said. “This is ridiculous. Where I grew up, you’d have an army of cops all over the place. But nothing is going on here. Doesn’t that upset you?”

By now the room had cleared out except for Ms. Bailey and a few other tenant leaders, Autry, and one policeman, Officer Johnson, a tall black man who worked out of a nearby precinct. He was well groomed, with a short mustache and graying hair. They were all checking their watches and speaking quietly to one another.

I was about to leave when Ms. Bailey walked over. “In two hours come back here,” she said. “But now you have to go.”

Autry smiled and winked as he passed. What was he up to? I knew that Autry was still trying to groom himself as a local power broker, but I didn’t know how much power, if any, he had actually accrued.

As instructed, I left for a while and took a walk around the neighborhood. When I returned to the club, Autry silently pointed me toward the room where the earlier meeting had been held. Inside, I saw Ms. Bailey and some other building presidents; Officer Johnson and Autry’s friend Officer Reggie, a well-liked cop who had grown up in Robert Taylor; and Pastor Wilkins, who was said to be a long-standing expert in forging gang truces. Autry, I knew, saw himself as Pastor Wilkins’s eventual successor.

They were all milling about, shaking hands and chatting softly before settling into the folding metal chairs Autry had arranged. A few of them looked at me with a bit of surprise as I sat down, but no one said anything.

And then, to my great surprise, I saw J.T., sitting with a few of his senior officers along one wall. Although our eyes didn’t meet, I could tell that he noticed me.

Even more surprising was the group on the other side of the room: a gang leader named Mayne, who ran the Disciples, accompanied by his officers, leaning quietly against the wall.

I took a good look at Mayne. He was a heavyset man with a crumpled face, like a bulldog’s. He appeared bored and irritated, and he kept issuing instructions to his men: “Nigger, get me a cigarette.” “Boy, get me a chair.”

Autry walked into the room. “Okay!” he shouted. “The club is closed, let’s get going. Kids are going to come back at five.”

Officer Reggie stood up. “Let’s get moving,” he said. “Ms. Bailey, you wanted to start. Go ahead.” He walked toward the back of the room.

“First, J.T., get the other men out of the room,” she said. “You, too, Mayne.”

Mayne and J.T. both motioned for their senior officers to leave, and they did, walking out slowly with stoic faces. Ms. Bailey stood silently until they were gone. Then she took a deep breath. “Pastor, you said you had an idea, something you wanted to ask these young men?”

“Yes, Ms. Bailey,” Pastor Wilkins said. He stood up. “Now, I know how this began. Shorties probably fighting over some girl, right? And it got all the way to shooting each other. That’s crazy! I mean, I can understand if you were fighting over business, but you’re killing people around here because of a spat in school!”

“We’re defending our honor,” Mayne said. “Ain’t nothing more important than that.”

“Yeah,” said J.T. “And it is about business. Those guys come shooting down on our end, scaring people away.”

Pastor Wilkins asked Mayne and J.T. to describe how the fight had escalated. Pastor Wilkins’s original guess was mostly right: two teenage boys at DuSable High School got into a fight over a girl. One boy was in J.T.’s gang, the other in Mayne’s. Over the course of a few weeks, the conflict escalated from unarmed to armed-first a knife fight and then the drive-by shooting. The shooting occurred during the afternoon, while kids were playing outside after school.

J.T. said that because his customers had been scared off since the shooting, and because tenants in his buildings were angry about their lives being interrupted, he wanted Mayne to pay a penalty.

Mayne argued that the shooting took place at the border of the two gangs’ territory, near a park that neither gang claimed. Therefore, he argued, J.T. was ineligible for compensation.

My mind raced as they spoke. I couldn’t believe that a religious leader and a police officer were not only watching this mediation but were actually facilitating it. What incentive did they have to do so- and what would happen if people from the community found out they were helping gang leaders settle their disputes? I was also struck by how levelheaded everyone seemed, even J.T. and Mayne, as if they’d been through this before. These were the same two gang leaders, after all, who had been trying to kill each other, quite literally, with drive-by shootings. I wondered if one of them might even pull a gun here at any moment. Perhaps the very strangest thing was how sanguine the community leaders were about the fact that these men sold crack cocaine for a living. But at this moment it seemed that pragmatism was more important than moralism.

After a while the conversation got bogged down, with J.T. and Mayne merely restating their positions. Autry jumped in to try to refocus things. “How much you think you lost?” he asked J.T. “I mean, you don’t need to tell me the amount, but how many days did you lose business?”

“Probably a few days, maybe a week,” J.T. said.

“Okay, well, we’re going to bank this,” Autry said. “Put it in the bank.”

“What the fuck does that mean?” Mayne asked.

“Nigger, that means you messed up,” Autry told him. “J.T. didn’t retaliate, did he? I mean, he didn’t shoot over at you. It was just you shooting down at his end, right? So J.T. gets to sell his shit in the park for a week. The next time this happens, and J.T. fucks up, you get to sell your shit in the park for a week.”

Ms. Bailey spoke up. “You-all do not get to sell nothing when the kids are there, okay? Just late at night.”

“Sounds fine to me,” J.T. said. Mayne nodded in agreement.

“Then we have a truce,” Pastor Wilkins said. He walked over to J.T. and Mayne. “Shake on it.”

J.T. and Mayne shook hands, not warmly and not willing to look at each other. The pastor and Ms. Bailey each let out a sigh.

As J.T., Mayne, and Pastor Wilkins sat down to work out the details of the deal, I walked out front. There was Autry, smoking a cigarette on the sidewalk. He shook his head; he looked fatigued.

“This stuff is hard, isn’t it?” I asked.

“Yeah, I try to block out the fact that they could get pissed at me and kill me if I say something they don’t like. You never know if they’ll go home and think you’re working for the other side.”

“You ever get hurt before?”

“I got my ass kicked a few times-one time real bad-’cause they thought I wasn’t being fair. I’m not sure I want to have that happen again.”

“You don’t get paid enough,” I said.

J.T. came out of the club and stopped beside me. His head was lowered. Autry moved away.

“You wanted this, right?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said, “this is what I’m looking for.” He knew I’d been eager to see how the community and the gang worked out their differences. But he’d also made it clear that I could do so only if I had a patron, and I had to choose between J.T. and Autry. I chose J.T.

“Just remember, you wanted this,” he said. “I didn’t make you come here today. I didn’t tell you about this. You wanted this.” He pressed his finger into my chest every time he said “you.” I sensed that despite our last conversation J.T. felt I was slipping from his grasp.