Sudhir Venkatesh - Gang Leader for a Day

“Get Serena! Get Serena!” someone shouted down from an upper floor. “She’s out there with her baby!”

The BK helping me with Price ran over to help Serena and her children to a safe spot. I dragged Price the rest of the way by myself and made it to the lobby just as the second car emerged from the alley. I heard some shouts and some more gunshots. I saw that the BK who’d gone to help Serena had draped his body atop her and her kids.

In the dim light of the lobby, I could see that Price’s leg was bleeding badly, just above the knee. J.T.’s men pushed me out of the way. They carried Price farther inside the building, toward one of the ground-floor apartments. I wondered where J.T. was.

“Sudhir, get inside, go upstairs to Ms. Mae’s-now!” It was Ms. Bailey. I gestured toward Price, to show that I wanted to help. She just yelled at me again to get upstairs.

About five flights up the stairs, I ran into a group of J.T.’s men on the gallery, looking out. “I don’t see no more!” one of them shouted to some BKs on the ground outside. “It don’t look like there’s any more! Just get everyone inside and put four in the lobby.”

I heard a stream of footsteps in the stairwell. Parents yelled at their children to hurry up, and a few mothers asked for help carrying their strollers. I heard someone say that J.T. was in the lobby, so I hustled back downstairs.

He stood at the center of a small mob, taking reports from his men. There was a lot of commotion, all of them talking past one another:

“Niggers will do it again, I know they will!”

“We need to get Price to the hospital, he’s still bleeding.”

“No, we need to secure the building.”

“I say we drive by and shoot back, now!”

As instructed, four young men now stood armed guard in the lobby, two at each entrance. Under normal circumstances young gang members like these bragged about their toughness, their willingness to kill for the family. But now, with the danger real, they looked shaky, eyes wide and fearful.

J.T. stood calmly, wearing dark sunglasses, picking his teeth. When his eyes fell upon me, he fixed me with a glare. I didn’t know what he was trying to communicate. Then he pointed toward the ceiling. He wanted me upstairs, at his mother’s place, out of the way.

Instead I walked even farther into the lobby, out of his view. I asked a rank-and-file BK where Price was. He pointed down the hall. J.T. approached, patted me on the back, and pulled me in close. “Price isn’t doing so hot,” he whispered. “He’s bleeding real bad, and I need to get him to the hospital.”

“Call the ambulance,” I said instinctively.

“They won’t come. Listen, we need your car. If they see one of our cars come up to Provident, they may call the police. We need to borrow your car.”

“Sure, of course,” I said, reaching for my keys. I had recently bought a junker, a 1982 Cutlass Ciera. “Let me get it.”

“No,” J.T. said, grabbing my hand. “You can’t leave the building for a while. Go upstairs, but let me have the keys. Cherise will take him.”

I gave J.T. my keys and watched him walk toward the apartment where Price was being looked after. It was common practice to have a woman drive a BK to the hospital so that he wouldn’t immediately be tagged as a gangster. Cherise lived in the building and let the Black Kings use her apartment to make crack cocaine. J.T. sometimes joked that the young women in the projects would never turn on their stoves if it weren’t for his gang cooking up crack.

J.T. commandeered a vacant apartment on the fourteenth floor to use as a temporary headquarters. The scene was surreal, like watching an army prepare for war. I sat in a corner and watched as J.T. issued commands. Small groups of men would come inside, receive their orders, and hurry off. J.T. assigned several men to take up rifles and sit in the windows of the third, fifth, and seventh floors. He instructed other groups of men to go door-to-door and warn tenants to stay away from the west-facing windows.

He told one young BK that there probably wouldn’t be another shooting for at least a few hours. “Get some of the older people out of here,” he ordered. “Take them to 2325.” A BK foot soldier told me that Price had made it to the emergency room but was said to be still bleeding badly.

J.T. came over and told me what he knew. The first car, the beat-up Ford, was a decoy to lure some Black Kings out of the building. The attack appeared to be a collaboration between the MCs and the Stones. They were deeply envious, J.T. told me, that the BKs had been able to attract so many customers to their territory. The MCs and the Stones were a constant source of worry for J.T., since they were led by “crazy niggers,” his term for the kind of bad businessmen who thought that a drive-by shooting was the best way to competein a drug market. J.T. much preferred the more established rival gangs, since a shared interest in maintaining the status quo decreased their appetite for violence.

Every so often J.T. sent out an entourage to buy food for people in the building. A few tenants carried on as usual, paying little attention to the Black Kings’ dramatic show of security in the lobby. But except for a couple of stereos and some shouting in the stairwells, the building was eerily quiet. We all baked in the still, hot air.

Occasionally one of J.T.’s more senior members would throw out a plan for retaliation. J. T. listened to every proposal but was noncommittal. “We got time for all that,” he kept saying. “Let’s just see what happens tonight.”

Every half hour Cherise called from the hospital to report on Price’s condition. J.T. looked tense as he took these reports. Price was a friend since high school, one of the few people J.T. allowed in his inner circle.

I was just nodding off to sleep on the floor when J.T. walked over.

“Thanks, man,” he said quietly.

“For what?”

“You didn’t have to get mixed up in this shit.”

He must have heard that I’d helped drag Price into the lobby. I didn’t say anything. J.T. slapped my leg, asked if I wanted a Coke, and walked off to the fridge.

There were no more shootings that night, but the tension didn’t let up. I never went home.

Within a few days, once he figured out exactly who was responsible for the attack, J.T. rounded up T-Bone and several other officers and went after the shooters. J. T. personally helped beat them up; the BKs also took their guns and money. Because these young rivals had “no business sense,” as J.T. told me later, there was no hope of a compromise. Physical retaliation was the only measure to consider.

Price stayed in the hospital for a few days, but the bullet caused no irreparable damage, and he was soon back in action.

T-Bone called me one day with big news: J.T. was on the verge of receiving another important promotion within the citywide Black Kings organization. If all went according to plan, J.T., T-Bone, and Price would be responsible for taking on even more BK factions, which meant managing a considerably larger drug-trafficking operation. I could hear the excitement in T-Bone’s voice. For him, too, the promotion meant more money as well as a boost in status. “Two years, that’s it,” he told me. “Two more years of this shit, and I’m getting out of the game.” Ever practical, T-Bone was saving for his future-a house, full-time college, and a legal job.

J.T. wouldn’t be around Robert Taylor much for the next several weeks, T-Bone told me, since his new assignment required a lot of preparation and legwork. But he had asked T-Bone to give me a message: “J.T. wants you to go with him to the next regional BK meeting. You up for it?”

I had been waiting for this phone call for a few years. I desperately wanted to learn about the gang’s senior leadership, and now that J.T. was one of them, it looked like I’d finally have my chance.