Sudhir Venkatesh - Gang Leader for a Day

From Porter, C-Note, and others, I learned that the most profitable hustling jobs for men were in manual labor: you could earn five hundred dollars a month fixing cars in a parking lot or roughly three hundred dollars a month cleaning up at the local schools. The worst-paying jobs, meanwhile, often required the longest hours: gathering up scrap metal or aluminum (a hundred dollars a month) or selling stolen clothes or cigarettes (about seventy-five dollars a month). While just about every hustler I interviewed told me that he was hoping for a legit job and a better life, I rarely saw anyone get out of the hustling racket unless he died or went to jail.

One day, after I’d spent hours interviewing Porter and some of the other male hustlers, I was summoned to Ms. Bailey’s office. I’d been so busy that I hadn’t seen her in a while. It was probably a good idea, I thought, to have a catch-up session.

I said hello to Catrina on my way in, and she gave me a smile. She was assuming more and more duties and seemed to be acting nearly as a junior officer to Ms. Bailey. Inside, J.T. and Ms. Bailey were laughing together and greeted me heartily.

“Mr. Professor!” J.T. said. “My mother says you haven’t been by in a month! What, you don’t like us anymore? You found somebody who cooks better?”

“You better not piss off Ms. Mae,” Ms. Bailey said. “You’ll never be able to come back in the building again.”

“Sorry, all this interviewing has kept me really busy,” I said, exasperated. “I just haven’t had time to do much of anything else.”

“Well, then, sit down, baby,” Ms. Bailey said. “We won’t keep you long. We just wanted to know who you’ve been meeting. We’re curious about what you’ve learned.”

“Hey, you know what, I could actually use the chance to tell you what I’ve been finding,” I said, taking out my notebooks. “I’ve been meeting so many people, and I can’t be sure whether they’re telling me the truth about how much they earn. I suppose I want to know whether I’m really understanding what it’s like to hustle around here.”

“Sure,” J.T. said. “We were just talking about that. You used to ask us to find you people. Now you do it yourself. We feel like you don’t need us no more.” He started laughing, and so did Ms. Bailey.

“Yeah,” Ms. Bailey said. “Don’t leave us behind, Mr. Professor, when you start to be successful! Go ahead, tell me who you’ve been talking to. If you tell us who you met and what they’re doing, maybe we can check for you and see if folks are being straight.”

For the next three hours, I went through my notebooks and told them what I’d learned about dozens of hustlers, male and female. There was Bird, the guy who sold license plates, Social Security cards, and small appliances out of his van. Doritha the tax preparer.

Candy, one of the only female carpenters in the neighborhood. Prince, the man who could pirate gas and electricity for your apartment. J.T. and Ms. Bailey rarely seemed surprised, although every now and then one of them perked up when I mentioned a particularly enterprising hustler or a woman who had recently started taking in boarders.

I finally left, riding the bus home to my apartment. I was grateful for having had the opportunity to discuss my findings with two of the neighborhood’s most formidable power brokers. As I looked out the bus windows, I realized just how much I owed Ms. Bailey and J.T. If it weren’t for the two of them, and a few other people like C-Note and Autry, I wouldn’t ever have made any progress in learning how things really worked around Robert Taylor.

Ispent the next few weeks turning the information in my note-books into statistical tables and graphs that showed how much different hustlers made. I figured that J.T. would appreciate this data at least as much as my professors would, since he was always talking about the importance of data analysis within his managerial technique. So I headed over to Robert Taylor to show him my research.

In the parking lot, I ran into C-Note, who was in his usual spot with a few other squatters, fixing flat tires and washing cars.

“Hey, what’s up, guys?” I shouted out. “Long time-how you been?”

Nobody replied. They looked at me, then turned away. I walked closer and stood a few feet from them. “What’s up?” I said. “Everything all right?”

One of the men, Pootie, picked up a tool and started to loosen a tire from the rim. “Man, sometimes you just learn the hard way,” he said to no one in particular. “That’s life, isn’t it? Sometimes you realize you can’t trust nobody. They could be a cop, a snitch- who knows?”

C-Note simply shrugged. “Mm-hmm,” he said.

“Yup, you just learn you can’t trust nobody,” Pootie continued. “You tell them something, and then they turn on you. Just like that! You can’t predict it. Especially if they’re not from around here.”

Once again C-Note shrugged. “Mm-hmm,” he muttered. “You got that right.”

They kept ignoring me, so I walked over to J.T.’s building. A young woman I knew named Keisha was standing on the grass with her kids. They looked like they were waiting for a ride.

“Hey, Keisha,” I said. “How are you doing?”

“How am I doing?” she asked, shaking her head. “I was doing a lot better before I started talking to you.” She picked up her things and walked her kids a few yards away.

In the lobby some of J.T.’s gang members were hanging out. We shook hands and said hello. I went upstairs to see Ms. Bailey and J.T., but neither of them was home.

Down in the lobby again, I could feel people staring at me, but I couldn’t figure out why. I felt myself growing paranoid. Did people suddenly think I was a cop? What was up with Pootie, C-Note, and Keisha? I decided to go back home.

Ispent a few days trying to track down J.T., but nobody knew where he was. I couldn’t wait any longer, so I went back to Robert Taylor and found C-Note in the parking lot. He and two other men were working on a car.

“C-Note, please,” I begged, “what did I do? Tell me.”

C-Note stood up and wiped the oil off a wrench. He motioned for the two other men to leave us alone. One of them gave me a nasty look and muttered something that sounded equally nasty, but I couldn’t quite make it out.

“You need to learn to shut your mouth,” C-Note finally said.

“Shut my mouth? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Don’t play with me. All that shit I told you. All them niggers I introduced you to. If you told me you were going to tell J.T. they were making that money, I wouldn’t have told you nothing.”

My heart sank. I thought of my long debriefing with J.T. and Ms. Bailey. I had given them breakdowns on each hustler’s earnings: how much every one of them made, when and where they worked, what they planned for the future. I didn’t hand over my written data, but I’d done the next-best thing.

“J.T. is all over these niggers,” C-Note said. He looked disgusted and spit on the ground. I could tell he was angry but that he wasn’t comfortable expressing it to me. Until now our relationship had been based on trust; I rarely, if ever, spoke to anyone about what I learned from C-Note.

“He’s taxing every one of them now,” he said. “And he beat the shit out of Parnell and his brother because he thought they were hiding what they were doing. They weren’t, but you can’t convince J.T. of nothing. When he gets his mind to something, that’s it. And then he tells Jo-Jo and his guys that they can’t come around no more because they were hiding things from him. Jo-Jo’s daughter lives up in here. So now he can’t see her.” C-Note kept talking, getting angrier and angrier as he listed all the people that J.T. was cracking down on. “There’s no way he could’ve found out if you didn’t say nothing.”