Sudhir Venkatesh - Gang Leader for a Day

“You can still do things-” I started to say. But I stopped. The pain on her face was evident, and nothing I could say would console her. I just sat quietly with her until we’d finished our coffee.

I saw Ms. Bailey a few more times, but she was never again the same. For health reasons she moved into her nephew’s home in the middle of West Englewood, a poor black community about two miles from the projects. I visited her there. She had several ailments, she told me, but it was hard to sort out one from the other. “I stopped going to the doctor’s,” she said. “One more test, one more drug, one more thing I got to pay for. And for what? To live here?”

She waved her hands out at the miles and miles of poor tracts surrounding her nephew’s house, tracts that held far too few of the people from her old high-rise home, the people who’d once given her life meaning.

Winter in Chicago comes fast, and it comes hard. The cold delivers a wallop, making you shudder longer than you’d expect. The first blasts of chilling wind off the lake feel like an enemy.

It was a late Sunday morning in November 1998, and I was waiting outside J.T.’s building one last time. About a half dozen Robert Taylor buildings had already been torn down, and his was due for demolition within a year. Nearby businesses had started to close, too. The whole place was starting to feel like a ghost town. I had changed as well. Gone were the tie-dyed shirts and the ponytail, replaced by the kind of clothes befitting an edgy young Ivy League professor. And also a leather briefcase.

I leaned against my car, stamping my feet to keep warm while waiting for J.T. I was just about to get back into the car and turn on the heater when I saw his Malibu charge down Federal Street.

J.T. had called the night before to request a meeting. In his characteristically ambiguous way, he wouldn’t divulge any details. But he sounded excited. He did tell me that the federal indictments were probably over and that he wouldn’t be arrested. I wanted to know how and why he had escaped arrest, but I didn’t have the guts to ask. He’d always been secretive about his contacts in law enforcement. He also asked a few questions about what kind of research I’d be doing in New York. I mentioned some possible ideas, but they were vague at best.

We greeted each other with a handshake and a smile. I told him he looked like he’d put on a little weight. He agreed; between his work and the needs of his growing children, he said, there wasn’t as much time to exercise. He pulled a small piece of paper from his pocket and handed it to me. There were several names and phone numbers printed in J.T.’s scratchy handwriting. Among the names was that of Curtis, the gang leader in Newark we’d talked about before.

“You should call these people,” J.T. said. “I told Curtis that you wanted to see how things worked out there. He’ll take care of you. But Billy Jo, that’s the one who really knows what’s happening in New York. Here, give him this.”

J.T. had often talked about his friends who ran drug-dealing operations in New York. But what with the federal indictments, the demolition of Robert Taylor, and my own career moves, I had pretty much forgotten about them. Also, given how things had turned out with me and J.T.-it was pretty obvious by now that I wasn’t going to write his biography-I was surprised that he’d go out of his way to put me in touch with his contacts back east.

He took out another sheet of paper, tightly folded over in fours, the creases a bit worn, as if he’d been carrying it in his pocket for a while. His hands were so cold that they shook as he unfolded it. He gave the paper to me and blew on his hands to warm them up.

“Go ahead, nigger, read it,” he said. “Hurry up, it’s cold!”

I began to read. It was addressed to Billy Jo: Billy, Sudhir is coming out your way.Take care of the nigger… My eyes scanned down and caught a phrase in the middle of the page: He’s with me.

I could feel myself breaking into a wide smile. J.T. reached into his car and pulled out two beers.

“I’m not sure I’m ready for another big research project just yet,” I said.

“Oh, yeah?” he said, handing me one of the beers. “What else are you going to do? You can’t fix nothing, you never worked a day in your life. The only thing you know how to do is hang out with niggers like us.”

I nearly choked on my beer when he summarized my capacities so succinctly-and, for the most part, accurately.

J.T. leaned back on the car, looking up at the high-rises in front of us. “You think niggers will survive out there?” he asked. “You think they’ll be all right when they leave here?”

“Not sure. Probably. I mean, everything changes. You just have to be ready, I guess.”

“You hungry?” he asked.

“Starving.”

“Let’s go down to Seventy-ninth. There’s a new soul-food place.”

“Sounds good,” I said, chugging the beer quickly. “Why don’t you drive?”

“Oh, yeah,” he said, jumping into the car, “and I got one for you! What would you do if you were me? I got this new bunch of guys that think they know everything…”

He began telling me about his latest management dilemma with a gang he was running in Roseland, a neighborhood where a lot of the Robert Taylor families were relocating. As he spoke, I became lost in his voice. His steady and assured monologue comforted me; for a few moments anyway, I could feel as though little had changed, even though everything had. He turned on some rap music, opened up another beer, and kept on talking. The car screeched out of the parking lot, J.T. waved to a few women pushing strollers in the cold, and we sped down Federal Street.

Within a few years, J.T. grew tired of running a gang. He managed his cousin’s dry-cleaning business, and he started up a barbershop, which failed. He had put away enough savings, in property and cash, to supplement his lower income. Once in a while, he did consulting work for Black Kings higher-ups who tried to revive their citywide hold on the drug economy. But this effort never came to fruition, and with the crack market severely depleted, Chicago’s gangland remains fragmented, with some neighborhoods having little if any gang activity.

I still see J.T. now and then when I’m in Chicago. Although we’ve never discussed it explicitly, I don’t sense that he begrudges my success as an academic, nor does he seem bitter about his own life. “Man, as long as I’m not behind bars and breathing,” he told me, “every day is a good day.” It would be hard to call us friends. And I sometimes wonder if we ever were.

But he was obviously a huge part of my life. For all the ways in which I had become a rogue sociologist, breaking conventions and flouting the rules, perhaps the most unconventional thing I ever did was embrace the idea that I could learn so much, absorb so many lessons, and gain so many experiences at the side of a man who was so far removed from my academic world. I can still hear J.T.’s voice when I’m on the streets far away from Chicago, somewhere in the unruly Paris suburbs or the ghettos of New York, hanging around and listening to people’s stories.

Many of the names and some of the identities in this book have been changed. I also disguised some locations and altered the titles of certain organizations. But all the people, places, and institutions are real; they are not composites, and they are not fictional.

Whenever possible, I based the material on written field notes. Some of the stories, however, have been reconstructed from memory. While memory isn’t a perfect substitute for notes, I have tried my best to reproduce conversations and events as faithfully as possible.