Gang Leader For A Day Part 2

"Okay, I got something for you," he said one day over breakfast. "Let's say two guys are offering me a great deal on raw product." I knew enough to know that "raw product" meant powdered cocaine, which J.T.'s gang cooked up into crack. "One of them says if I pay twenty percent higher than the usual rate, he'll give me a ten percent discount a year from now, meaning that if the supply goes down, he'll sell to me before the other n.i.g.g.e.rs he deals with. The other guy says he'll give me a ten percent discount now if I agree to buy from him at the regular price a year from now. What would you do?"

"This all depends on whether you think the supply will be affected a year from now, right?" I said.

"Right, so . . . ?"

"Well, I don't have any idea how this market works, so I'm not sure what to do."

"No, that's not how you need to think. You always take the sure bet in this game. Nothing Nothing can be predicted-not supply, not anything. The n.i.g.g.e.r who tells you he's going to have product a year from now is lying. He could be in jail or dead. So take your discount now." can be predicted-not supply, not anything. The n.i.g.g.e.r who tells you he's going to have product a year from now is lying. He could be in jail or dead. So take your discount now."

As fascinating as I found such conversations, I rarely took notes in front of J.T., because I didn't want to make him cautious about what he said. Instead I waited until I got back to my apartment to write down as much as I could recall.

We often met a few times a week, but only when he wanted. He would phone me to arrange our meetings, sometimes just a few minutes in advance. J.T. didn't like to talk on the phone. In his soft voice, he'd tell me where and when to meet, and then he'd hang up. Once in a while, I didn't even have time to answer that I couldn't meet because I had a cla.s.s-and then I'd cut cla.s.s and meet him anyway. It was pretty thrilling to have a gang boss calling me up to go hang out with him. There were times I wanted to tell my professors the real reason I missed cla.s.s now and then, but I never did.

Occasionally I hinted to J.T. that I would really, really like to learn more about gang life. But I was too meek to ask for any kind of formalizedarrangement. Nor did he offer. Every time he dropped me off in front of my apartment building, he'd just stare out the window. I didn't know whether to say "Good-bye," "Hope to see you again," or "Call me sometime."

One morning, after I'd been hanging out with him for perhaps eight months, J.T. said we'd be visiting a different housing development, the Robert Taylor Homes. I had heard of Robert Taylor; everybody everybody had heard of Robert Taylor. It was the largest public housing project in the United States, about ten times bigger than the Lake Park projects, with twenty-eight drab high-rise buildings stretched along a two-mile corridor. It lay a few miles away from the U of C, but since it ran alongside the Dan Ryan Expressway, one of Chicago's main arteries, pretty much everyone in the city drove past Robert Taylor at one time or another. had heard of Robert Taylor. It was the largest public housing project in the United States, about ten times bigger than the Lake Park projects, with twenty-eight drab high-rise buildings stretched along a two-mile corridor. It lay a few miles away from the U of C, but since it ran alongside the Dan Ryan Expressway, one of Chicago's main arteries, pretty much everyone in the city drove past Robert Taylor at one time or another.

"I'm going to take you to meet somebody," J.T. said, "but I don't want you to open your mouth. Do you think you can do that?"

"Do I ever open my mouth?" I asked.

"No, but every so often you get a little excited, especially after you drink all that coffee. You open your mouth today, and that's it- we're through. Okay?"

Only once before had I heard such insistence in J.T.'s voice, and that was the night we first met in the stairwell of Building Number 4040 in the Lake Park projects. I finished my breakfast quickly, and then we jumped into his Malibu. The late-morning sky was overcast. J.T. was quiet except for asking me once in a while to see if any cops were following him. He had never asked this before. For the first time, I became fully conscious of just what I was doing: tagging along with the leader of a major crack-selling gang.

But I still hadn't admitted to myself that the man I sat next to was, at bottom, a criminal. I was too caught up in the thrill of observing the thug life firsthand. In the halcyon suburb where I grew up, people didn't even wash their cars on the street. In front of me here was a movie come to life.

There was something else, too, that helped me ignore the questionable morality of the situation. The University of Chicago scholars who helped invent the field of sociology, back when it first became a legitimate academic discipline, did so by venturing into the murkier corners of the city. They became famous through their up-close study of the hobo, the hustler, the socialite; they gained access to brothels and speakeasies and the smoky back rooms where politicians plied their art. Lately I'd been reading the works of these scholars. So even though I was hanging out with drug traffickers and thieves, at heart I felt like I was just being a good sociologist.

The street leading into the Robert Taylor Homes was lined with old, beat-up cars. A school crossing guard leaned on the hood of a car, her morning duty done, looking as if she'd been through a war. She waved knowingly at J.T. as we drove past. We pulled up in front of a high-rise, the lobby populated by a bunch of young men who seemed to stand at attention when they saw J.T.'s car. Unlike the Lake Park projects, which were nearly abandoned, Robert Taylor was thrumming with life. I could hear rap music blasting from a stereo. People stood around smoking cigarettes and, from the smell of it, marijuana. Every so often a parent and child pa.s.sed through the loose crowd.

J.T. parked his Malibu and strode toward the building like a bad-a.s.s cowboy swaggering into a bar. He stopped just short of the entrance, surveying the area and waiting as people came to greet him. As each young man made his way over, J.T. extended his hand graciously.Few words were spoken; most of the communication was in the form of subtle nods, signals familiar to everyone but me.

"When you gonna come and see me, baby?" one woman called out, and then another: "You gonna take me for a ride, sweetheart?" J.T. smiled and waved them off, playfully tapping their young children on the head as he pa.s.sed. Two older women in bright blue jackets that read TENANT PATROL came up and hugged J.T., asked him why he didn't come around more often. J.T. was obviously well known in these parts, although I had no idea why.

Just then someone emerged from the lobby. He was obese, roughly J.T.'s age, and he was breathing heavily. His name was Curly, and-as if in mockery of my stereotypical preconceptions-he was a ringer for Rerun from What's Happening!! What's Happening!! He and J.T. clasped hands, and then J.T. motioned for me to follow them. He and J.T. clasped hands, and then J.T. motioned for me to follow them.

"Your mama's house or mine?" Curly asked.

"Mama's p.i.s.sed at me," J.T. said. "Let's go to your place."

I followed them up a few flights of stairs. We stepped inside an apartment furnished with couches and a few reclining chairs that faced a big TV. There was a Christian show playing. The walls were hung with family photos and a painting of Jesus Christ. Toys were strewn about the floor, and the kitchen counter was crowded with boxes of cereal and cookies. I could smell chicken and rice on the stove. b.a.l.l.s of yarn and knitting needles sat atop a drab gla.s.s table. The domestic scene surprised me a bit, for I had read so much about the poverty and danger in Robert Taylor, how children ran around without parents and how drugs had overtaken the community.

J.T. gestured for me to sit on the sofa, and then he and Curly sat down to talk. J.T. didn't introduce me, and before long I was forgotten entirely. Between their fast talk and the gangster vocabulary, I couldn't understand much of what they were saying, but I did manage to pick out some key words: "tax," "product," "monthly dues," "Cobras," "Kings," "police," "CHA security." They talked quickly and earnestly. After a while they began throwing numbers at each other in some kind of negotiation. A few times a young man arrived at the screen door and interrupted them, shouting "Five-Oh on Federal" or "Five-Oh in 26." Later J.T. would explain that that's how they communicated the whereabouts of the police: "Five-Oh" meant police, "26" was a building number in Robert Taylor, and "Federal" was a busy street flanking the projects. Cell phones hadn't yet arrived-the year was 1989-so gang members had to pa.s.s along such information manually.

I felt a sudden urge to go to the bathroom, but I didn't feel comfortable asking to use the one in the apartment. After some squirming I decided to stand up and walk around. As I made a move to get up, J.T. and Curly looked at me disapprovingly. I sat back down.

Their meeting had lasted at least two hours. "That's it," J.T. finally said. "I'm hungry. Let's pick it up tomorrow."

Curly smiled. "It'll be good to have you back," he said. "Ain't the same since you left."

Then J.T. glanced at me. "Oh, s.h.i.t," he said to Curly. "I forgot about him. This is Sudhir. He's a cop."

The two of them began laughing. "You can go ahead and take a p.i.s.s now," J.T. said, and they both laughed even harder. I began to sense that in exchange for access I was meant to serve as a source of entertainment for J.T.

On the car ride back to Hyde Park, J.T. told me what had just happened. He explained that he had grown up in the very Robert Taylor building we'd just visited. For the past couple of years, he'd been working out of the Lake Park projects because the Black Kings' citywide leaders had wanted to increase productivity there. But since the Lake Park projects were now slated for demolition, J.T. was returning to Robert Taylor, where he would be merging his own Black Kings gang with the local BK faction, which was run by Curly. This merger was being executed at the behest of the gang's higher-ups. Curly had been installed as a temporary leader when J.T. was sent to turn around the Lake Park operation. Curly apparently wasn't a very good manager, which made the gang bosses' decision to bring J.T. back a simple one.

Robert Taylor and the other projects on State Street, J.T. told me, were "easy money," partly since thousands of customers lived nearby but also because of "the white folks who drive over to buy our s.h.i.t." They came from Bridgeport, Armour Square, and other predominantly white ethnic neighborhoods on the far side of the Dan Ryan Expressway, buying mostly crack cocaine but also some heroin and marijuana. In his new a.s.signment, J.T. told me, he hoped to earn "a hundred times" what he currently earned and buy a house for his mother, who still lived in Robert Taylor. He also said he hoped to buy an apartment for his girlfriend and their children. (In fact, he mentioned several such girlfriends, each of whom apparently needed an apartment.) At the Lake Park projects, J.T.'s income had been dropping from a peak of about thirty thousand dollars a year. But he told me that now, in Robert Taylor, he stood to make as much as seventy-five thousand dollars or a hundred thousand if business was steady, which would put him nearly in the same league as some of the gang's higher-ups.

He made a few references to the gang's hierarchy and his effort to rise within it. There were a few dozen Black Kings officers above him, spread throughout Chicago, who earned their money by managing several gang factions like J.T.'s. These men were known as "lieutenants" and "captains." Above them them was another level of gangsters who were known as the "board of directors." I had had no idea how much a street gang's structure mirrored the structure of just about any other business in America. was another level of gangsters who were known as the "board of directors." I had had no idea how much a street gang's structure mirrored the structure of just about any other business in America.

J.T. made it clear that if you rose high enough in the Black Kings dynasty, and lived long enough, you could make an awful lot of money. As he discussed his move up the ladder, I felt a knot in my stomach. Since meeting him I had entertained the notion that my dissertation research might revolve around his gang and its drug trafficking. I had spoken with him not only about his own gang "set" but about all the Black Kings sets in the city-how they collaborated or fought with one another over turf, how the crack-cocaine economy was fundamentally altering the nature of the urban street gang. Although there was a great deal of social-science literature on gangs, very few researchers had written about the actual business dealings of a gang, and even fewer had firsthand access to a gang's leadership. As we pulled up to my apartment, I realized that I had never formally asked J.T. about gaining access to his life and work. Now it seemed I might be getting shut out just as things were heating up.

"So when you do you think you'll be moving over to Robert Taylor?" I asked.

"Not sure," he said absentmindedly, staring out at the panhandlers who worked the gas station near my apartment.

"Well, I'm sure you'll be busy now-I mean, even busier than you've been. So listen, I just wanted to thank you-"

"n.i.g.g.e.r, are we breaking up?" J.T. started laughing.

"No! I'm just trying to-"

"Listen, my man, I know you have to write a term paper-and what are you going to write it on? On me, right?" He giggled and stuck a cigar in his mouth.

It seemed that J.T. craved the attention. It seemed that I was more than just entertainment for him: I was someone who might take him seriously. I hadn't thought about the drawbacks of having my research dependent on the whims of one person. But now I turned giddy at the prospect of continuing our conversations. "That's right," I said. " 'The Life and Times of John Henry Torrance.' What do you think?"

"I like it, I like it." He paused. "Okay, get the f.u.c.k out, gotta run."

He offered his hand as I opened the car door. I shook it and nodded at him.

My short walk north to the Lake Park projects would now be replaced by a longer commute, usually by bus, to the Robert Taylor Homes. But as a result of his relocation, J.T. reported that he'd be out of touch for a few weeks. I decided to use that time to do some research on housing projects in general and the Robert Taylor Homes in particular.

I learned that the Chicago Housing Authority had built the project between 1958 and 1962, naming it after the agency's first African-American chairman. It was the size of a small city, with forty-four hundred apartments housing about thirty thousand people. Poor blacks had arrived in Chicago en ma.s.se from the South during the great migrations of the 1930s and 1940s, which left a pressing need for the city to accommodate them.

In the beginning, the project was greeted with considerable optimism, but it soon soured. Black activists were angry that Chicago politicians put the project squarely in the middle of an already crowded black ghetto, thereby sparing the city's white ethnic neighborhoods. Urban planners complained that the twenty-eight buildings occupied only 7 percent of the ninety-six-acre plot, leaving huge swaths of vacant land that isolated the project from the wider community. Architects declared the buildings unwelcoming and practically uninhabitable from the outset, even though the design was based upon celebrated French urban-planning principles.

And, most remarkably, law-enforcement officials deemed Robert Taylor too dangerous to patrol. The police were unwilling to provide protection until tenants curbed their criminality-and stopped hurling bottles or shooting guns out the windows whenever the police showed up.

In newspaper headlines, Robert Taylor was variously called "Congo Hilton," "h.e.l.lhole," and "Fatherless World"-and this was when it was still relatively new. By the end of the 1970s, it had gotten worse. As the more stable working families took advantage of civil-rights victories by moving into previously segregated areas of Chicago, the people left behind lived almost uniformly below the poverty line. A staggering 90 percent of the adults in Robert Taylor reported welfare-cash disburs.e.m.e.nts, food stamps, and Medicaid- as their sole form of support, and even into the 1990s that percentage would never get lower. There were just two social-service centers for nearly twenty thousand children. The buildings themselves began to fall apart, with at least a half dozen deaths caused by plunging elevators.

By the time I got to Chicago, at the tail end of the 1980s, Robert Taylor was habitually referred to as the hub of Chicago's "gang and drug problem." That was the phrase always invoked by the city's media, police, and academic researchers. They weren't wrong. The poorest parts of the city were controlled largely by street gangs like the Black Kings, which made their money not only dealing drugs but also by extortion, gambling, prost.i.tution, selling stolen property, and countless other schemes. It was outlaw capitalism, and it ran hot, netting small fortunes for the bosses of the various gangs. In the newspapers, gang leaders were commonly reported as having multimillion-dollar fortunes. This may have been an exaggeration, but it was true that some police busts of the leaders' homes netted hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash.

For the rest of the community, the payout of this outlaw economy-drug addiction and public violence-was considerably less appealing. Combine this menace with decades of government neglect, and what you found in the Robert Taylor Homes were thousands of families struggling to survive. It was the epitome of an "undercla.s.s" urban neighborhood, with the poor living hard and virtually separate lives from the mainstream.

But there was surprisingly little reportage on the American inner city-and even less on how the gangs managed to control such a sprawling enterprise, or how a neighborhood like Robert Taylor managed to cope with these outlaw capitalists. Thanks to my chance meeting with J.T. and his willingness to let me tag along with him, I felt as if I stood on the threshold of this world in a way that might really change the public's-if not the academy's- understanding.

I wanted to bring J.T. to Bill Wilson's attention, but I didn't know how. I was already working on some of Wilson's projects, but these were large, survey-based studies that queried several thousand people at a time. Wilson's research team included sociologists, economists, psychologists, and a dozen graduate students glued to their computers, trying to find hidden patterns in the survey data that might reveal the causes of poverty. I didn't know anyone who was walking around talking to people, let alone gang members, in the ghetto. Even though I knew that my entree into J.T.'s life was the stuff of sociology, as old as the field itself, it still felt like I was doing something unconventional, bordering on rogue behavior.

So while I devoted time to hanging out with J.T., I told Wilson and others only the barest details of my fieldwork. I figured that I'd eventually come up with a concrete research topic that involved J.T., at which point I could share with Wilson a well-worked-out set of ideas.

In late spring, several weeks after his meeting with Curly, J.T. finally summoned me to Robert Taylor. He had moved in with his mother in her apartment, a four-bedroom unit in the northern end of the complex. J.T. usually stayed in a different neighborhood, in one of the apartments he rented for various girlfriends. But now, he said, he needed to be in Robert Taylor full-time to get his gang firmly transplanted into its new territory. He told me to take the bus from Hyde Park down Fifty-fifth Street to State Street, where he'd have a few gang members meet me at the bus stop. It wasn't safe to walk around by myself.

Three of J.T.'s foot soldiers picked me up in a rusty Caprice. They were young and affectless and didn't have anything to say to me. As low-ranking members of the gang, they spent a lot of their time running errands for J.T. Once, when J.T. was a little drunk and getting excited about my writing his biography, he offered to a.s.sign me one of his gang members as a personal driver. I declined.

We drove up State Street, past a long stretch of Robert Taylor high-rises, and stopped at a small park in the middle of the complex. It was the sort of beautiful spring day, sunny, with a fresh lake breeze, that Chicagoans know will disappear once the brutal summer settles in. About fifty people of all ages were having a barbecue. There were colorful balloons printed with HAPPY BIRTHDAY CARLA tied to picnic tables. J.T. sat at one table, surrounded by families with lots of young children, playing and eating and making happy noise.

"Look who's here!" J.T. shouted. "The Professor. Welcome back."

His hands were sticky with barbecue sauce, so he just nodded, then introduced me to everyone at the table. I said hi to his girlfriend, whom I knew as Missie, and the young son they had together, Jamel.

"Is this the young man you've been telling me about?" said an older woman, putting her arm on my shoulder.

"Yes, Mama," J.T. said between bites, his voice as obedient as a young boy's.

"Well, Mr. Professor, I'm J.T.'s mother."

"They call her Ms. Mae," J.T. said.

"That's right," she said. "And you can call me that, too." She led me to another table and prepared a large plate of food for me. I told her I didn't eat meat, so she loaded me up with spaghetti, mac and cheese, greens, and cornbread.

We sat around for a few hours while the kids played. I spoke mostly to J.T.'s mother, and we forged a bond immediately. Sensing my interests, she began talking about the challenges of raising a family in public housing. She pointed to different people at the barbecue and filled in their stories. Carla, the birthday girl, was a one-year-old whose father and mother were both in jail for selling drugs. The adults in her building had decided to raise the child. This meant hiding her from the Department of Child and Family Services, which would have sent Carla into foster care. Different families took turns keeping Carla, shifting her to a new apartment whenever they caught wind that the social workers were snooping around. Ms. Mae talked about how teenage girls shouldn't have children so early, about the tragedy of kids getting caught up in violence, the value of an education, and her insistence that J.T. attend college.

J.T. came over to tell me about a big party the Black Kings were hosting later that afternoon. His gang had won a South Side basketball tournament, and everyone would be celebrating. He and I took a walk toward his building. Again I had so many questions: What did his mother think of the life he had chosen? How much did she even know? What did the typical Robert Taylor resident think about his organization?

Instead I asked a pretty tame one: "Why is everyone partying with you tonight? I thought you said it was a gang gang tournament." tournament."

"See, around here each building has an organization," he said.

"Organization," I knew, was one of the words that gang members sometimes used to refer to the gang; other words were "set" and "folks."

"And we don't just fight each other. We have basketball tournaments, softball tournaments, card games. Sometimes it's just people in the organization who play, but sometimes we find the best people in the building-like, we sometimes call Darryl, who used to play ball for Wisconsin, but he's not in the organization. So it's a building thing."

"So people in your building actually root for you?" I was puzzled as to how non-gang members viewed the Black Kings.

"Yeah! I know you think this sounds funny, but it's not like everyone hates us. You just have to see, it's a community thing."

He wasn't kidding. The party was held in a courtyard surrounded by three buildings, and several hundred people showed up to eat, drink beer, and party to the music of a DJ. All expenses were paid by the Black Kings.

I stayed close to J.T., sitting on the hood of his car, taking in all the activity. I watched young black men drive up in expensive sports cars, trailed by posses and girlfriends. They all greeted J.T. and congratulated him on winning the tournament.

J.T. explained that it was courtesy for leaders of some of the losing gangs to drop by. "The ones that are shooting at us won't come anywhere near us," he said, "but sometimes you got other organizations that you don't fight, that you just have a rivalry with." He told me that the various gangs' higher-ranking leaders tended to interact peacefully, since they often did business together-unlike the teenagers, or "shorties," he said. "They mostly just beat the s.h.i.t out of each other in high school or at parties."

J.T. didn't introduce me to many people who stopped by, and I didn't feel comfortable leaving my spot. So I just sat and watched until the beers began making me drowsy. By dusk the party was dying down. That's when J.T. had one of his "shorties" drive me back to my apartment.

After about a month of commuting to his building, I managed to convince J.T. that I didn't need an escort to meet me at the bus stop. If the weather was okay, I'd even walk, which gave me a chance to see some of the neighborhoods that surrounded Robert Taylor. They were all poor, but even with their mixture of dilapidated homes and abandoned lots, not nearly as intimidating.

I always got nervous as I approached Robert Taylor, especially if J.T. wasn't there to meet me. But by now I was known to the gang members stationed out front. So instead of searching me-which they often did to strangers, even if it was an ambulance driver or a utility worker-they let me go up to Ms. Mae's apartment on the tenth floor. She'd fix me a plate of food, and then we would sit and talk.

I felt self-conscious that Ms. Mae had to entertain me while I waited for J.T. I also figured she couldn't really afford to feed another mouth. I once tried to give her a few dollars for my meal. "Young man, don't ever do that again," she scolded, pushing the bills back at me. "Let me tell you something about us. We may be poor, but when you come over here, don't pity us, don't pardon us, and don't hold us to a lower standard than you hold yourself up to."

Ms. Mae was a heavyset woman in her late fifties who, unless she was off to church, always wore an ap.r.o.n. She always seemed to be in the middle of housework. Today's ap.r.o.n was flowery, yellow and pink, with MS. MAE and G.o.d BLESS printed on it. She wore thick gla.s.ses and a warm, inviting look on her face. "You know, I came here with the clothes on my back," she said. "Arkansas. Mother said there was no life for me down there no more. She said, 'Go see your auntie in Chicago, get yourself a man and a job, and don't turn around.' And I didn't. I raised six children in Chicago. Never looked back."

I sat and ate as she spoke, trying to keep up with the stories she was telling as well as the food she kept heaping on my plate.

"We live in a community, community, understand? Not the understand? Not the projects- projects-I hate that word. We live in a community. community. We need a helping hand now and then, but who doesn't? Everyone in this building helps as much as they can. We share our food, just like I'm doing with you. My son says you're writing about his life-well, you may want to write about this community, and how we help each other. And when I come over to We need a helping hand now and then, but who doesn't? Everyone in this building helps as much as they can. We share our food, just like I'm doing with you. My son says you're writing about his life-well, you may want to write about this community, and how we help each other. And when I come over to your your house, you'll share with me. You'll cook for me if I'm hungry. But when you're here, you're in my home and my community. And we'll take care of you." house, you'll share with me. You'll cook for me if I'm hungry. But when you're here, you're in my home and my community. And we'll take care of you."

I felt nervous as she spoke. Her warmth and her notion of community certainly challenged what I had read about Robert Taylor. Ms. Mae spoke to me as though she were teaching a child about life, not giving an academic researcher answers to scientific questions. Indeed, the time I was spending with families felt less and less like research. People who knew nothing about me nevertheless took me inside their world, talked to me with such openness, and offered me the food that they had probably budgeted for their own children.

No one back at the U of C had prepared me to feel such strong emotional connections to the people I studied. None of the ethnographicstudies I'd read offered much guidance about the relationships a researcher formed during fieldwork and how to manage them. The books talked about the right way to ask a question or address a respondent during an interview, but little about managing relationships with the people you hung out with. In time I would meet the anthropologist Jean Comaroff, who taught me about the benefits and dangers of getting personally attached to sources, but that was still a few years away.

Nor was Ms. Mae's description of "community" something I was accustomed to from my own background. I don't think I could name more than a few people who lived on the nearby streets in the suburb where I grew up, and we certainly never borrowed from one another or planned activities together. Suddenly I envisioned Ms. Mae coming to my apartment someday for a visit and eating bland pasta and steamed vegetables, the only meal I could conceivably cook for her.

She and I kept speaking. I learned that Ms. Mae was the daughter of sharecroppers, had spent two decades as a nanny and a domestic worker, and was forced to move into public housing when her husband, J.T.'s father, died of heart disease. He had been a quiet, easy-going man who worked for the city's transportation department. Moving into Robert Taylor, she said, was her last-ditch effort to keep the family intact.

Finally J.T. walked into the apartment. He took one look at me and laughed. "Is that all all you do around here?" he said. "I'm beginning to think the only reason you come over here is to eat!" you do around here?" he said. "I'm beginning to think the only reason you come over here is to eat!"

His mother told him to hush and brought over some more sweet potato pie for me.

"C'mon, Mr. Professor, finish your food," J.T. said. "I need to survey the building."

J.T had by now firmly established his reign over a group of three buildings, one on State Street and two on Federal, each of which he liked to walk through at least once a week. "You have the CHA, the landlord, but then we also try to make sure that people are doing what they're told," he explained as we walked. "We can't have this place go crazy with n.i.g.g.e.rs misbehaving. Because that's when police come around, and then customers stop coming around, and then we don't make our money. Simple as that."

As we entered the lobby of one of his buildings, 2315 Federal Street, he grabbed a few of his foot soldiers and told them to follow us. The August heat made the lobby's concrete walls sweat; they were cool to the touch but damp with humidity, just like all the people hanging around.

"I always start with the stairwells," J.T. said. There were three stairwells per building, two on the sides and one running up the middle, next to the elevator. "And I usually have my guys with me, just in case." He winked, as if I should know what "just in case" meant. I didn't, but I kept quiet. The foot soldiers, high-school kids with glittery, cheap necklaces and baggy tracksuits, walked quietly about five feet behind us.

We began climbing. It was only eleven on a weekday morning, but already the stairwells and landings were crowded with people drinking, smoking, hanging out. The stairwells were poorly lit and unventilated, and they smelled vile; there were puddles whose provenance I was happy to not know. The steps themselves were dangerous, many of the metal treads loose or missing. Who were all these people? Everybody we pa.s.sed seemed to know J.T., and he had a word or a nod for each of them.