Sudhir Venkatesh - Gang Leader for a Day

One of the men put his arm around me warmly and escorted me into the dining room, where a poker game was being played. There must have been thirty thousand or forty thousand dollars in bills on the table. My guide introduced himself as Cliff. He was a senior BK, in his late forties, who acted as a sort of consigliere for the gang, providing advice to the up-and-coming leaders. “All right, folks, listen up!” he said, trying to gain the poker players’ attention. They glanced up briefly. “This is our new director of communications,” Cliff said. “The Professor is going to help us get our word out. Make sure you all talk with him before you leave.”

I shuddered. J.T. was sitting on the couch with a beer in his hand. He just smiled and shrugged. Two thoughts ran through my mind. On the one hand, I was impressed that J.T. had the confidence to invite me and nominate me for such an exalted position (although part of me felt like I was on the receiving end of a surreal practical joke; perhaps they were just testing my mettle?). On the other hand, knowing that these men managed an organized criminal enterprise, I was scared that I was falling into a hole I could never dig myself out of. I had repeatedly tried to distance myself from the gang, or at least stake out my neutrality. But J.T.’s warning from years earlier rang just as true today: “Either you’re with me or you’re with someone else.” In this world there was no such thing as neutral, as much as the precepts of my academic field might state otherwise.

I attended several of these high-level BK gatherings. Although I didn’t conduct any formal interviews, in just a few months I was able to learn a good bit about the gang leaders and their business by just hanging around. Over time they seemed to forget that I was even there, or maybe they just didn’t care. They rarely spoke openly about drugs, other than to note the death of a supplier or a change in the price of powder cocaine. Most of their talk concerned the burdens of management: how to keep the shorties in line, how to best bribe tenant leaders and police officers, which local businesses were willing to launder their cash.

I did harbor a low-grade fear that I would someday be asked to represent the BKs in a press release or a media interview. But that fear wasn’t enough to prevent me from attending as many parties and poker games as J.T. invited me to. I would joke on occasion with J.T.’s superiors that I really had no skills or services to offer them. They never formally appointed me as their director of communications- or even made such an explicit offer, so I just assumed that no such role really existed.

As a member of the younger set of leaders who had only recently been promoted to these ranks, J.T. was generally a quiet presence. He didn’t speak much with me either. But my presence seemed to provide him with some value. It signaled to the others that J.T. had leadership capacities and unique resources: namely, that he was using his link with a student from a prestigious university to help remake the gang’s image in the wider world. To that end, the gang leaders continued to approach me to discuss the gang’s history and its “community-building” efforts. I took most of this with a grain of salt, as I’d come to consider such claims not only blatantly self-serving but greatly exaggerated.

Watching J.T. operate in this rarefied club, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of pride in him. By now I had spent about six years hanging out with J.T., and at some level I was pleased that he was winning recognition for his achievements. Such thoughts were usually accompanied by an equally powerful disquietude at the fact that I took so much pleasure in the rise of a drug-dealing gangster.

Now that he’d graduated into the gang’s leadership, J.T. became even more worried about the basic insecurities of gang life-the constant threat of arrest and imprisonment, injury and death. This anxiety had begun to grow in the weeks after Price was wounded in the drive-by shooting. J.T. began asking me to review his life year by year so that I wouldn’t be missing any details for his biography. By this point my dissertation had little to do with J.T., and I believe he knew that, even though I’d been hesitant to say so outright. Still, the arrests were making him nervous, and he wanted to be sure that I was faithfully recording the events of his life. He also became obsessed with saving money for his mother and his children in case something happened to him. He even began selling off some of his cars and expensive jewelry.

At the same time, he started to make more money because of his promotion. Not only were there additional BK sales crews whose earnings J.T. could tax, but, as if in an investment bank or law-firm partnership, he also began receiving a share of the overall BK revenues produced by drug sales, extortion, and taxation. By now he was probably earning at least two hundred thousand dollars a year in cash.

His promotion also carried additional risk. At the suburban meetings I attended, the leaders spoke anxiously about which gang leaders had been named in federal indictments and who was most likely to cooperate with the authorities. I also heard about a young gang member who’d been severely beaten because his bosses thought he had turned snitch.

Amid the beer drinking, gambling, and carousing at these parties, there was a strong undercurrent of paranoia. For me it was a bizarre experience, since the leaders began voicing their fears to me privately, as if I were a confessor of some sort, knowledgeable about their trade but powerless to harm them. Cold Man, a forty-five-year-old leader who ran the BKs’ operation on the city’s West Side, asked me to step outside for a cigarette so we could talk. He tended to take the long view. “We need to be careful in these times of war,” he told me, alluding to the arrests and their potential to create turn-coats within the gang. “Don’t trust nobody, especially your friends. I love these niggers, they’re my family, but now is not the time to go soft.”

Pootchie, a smart thirty-year-old leader who’d recently been promoted along with J.T., one night asked me to sit with him in his car to talk. “I’m not going to do this forever,” he said. “I’m here to make my money and get the fuck out.”

“What will you do next?” I asked.

“I’m a dancer-tap, jazz, all of it. I’d like to get my own place and teach.”

I couldn’t help laughing. Pootchie looked sheepish. “Sorry!” I said. “I don’t mean to laugh, but it’s just surprising.”

“Yeah, my father used to dance, and my mother was a singer. I dropped out of school-stupidest thing I ever did-but I got a business sense about me. I probably saved a few hundred grand. And I ain’t getting arrested. No way. I got bigger things I’m into. Not like some of these jailhouse niggers. I ain’t one of them. I’m an operator.”

I learned that Pootchie’s distinction between “jailhouse niggers” and “operators” was an essential one. These were the two kinds of leaders within the Black Kings. The first was devoted to building solidarity and staying together during difficult times, like the present threat of widespread arrests. These leaders were known as “jailhouse niggers,” since they had learned from prison that you didn’t survive unless you formed alliances and loyalties. These men tended to be the older leaders, in their late thirties or forties, and they tended to speak more of the BK “family” as opposed to the BK “business.” The “operators,” meanwhile, were a more entrepreneurial breed, like Pootchie and J.T. They were usually younger-J.T. was about thirty by now-and saw the gang primarily as a commercial enterprise. J.T. wanted to be a respected “community man,” to be sure, but that was more of a practical gambit than an ideological one.