It’s really quite remarkable that Slate’s Leon Neyfakh gets it, because he wasn’t around the last time it happened. But he gets it.
The first wave of convictions stemming from Operation Headache came in March 1996. But the biggest, most symbolically meaningful blow to the Gangster Disciples was delivered in May 1997, when Hoover was convicted of 42 counts of conspiracy to distribute drugs, received a sentence of six life terms, and was transferred to a supermax prison in Colorado, where his cell was located several stories underground and his ability to communicate with the remnants of his gang were severely constrained. Soon, the GDs in Chicago had been all but neutralized, and the authorities shifted their attention to decapitating the city’s other major drug organizations, the Black Disciples and the Vice Lords.
To the uninitiated, this would appear to be a huge success in the eradication of drugs and violence, a great success for law enforcement. And, indeed, it was. They took down an enormous enterprise by cutting off its head. So what’s the problem?
“Every time they hit these large street gangs, they’d focus on the leadership,” said Lance Williams, an associate professor at Northeastern Illinois University, and the co-author of a book about the rise and fall of the Black P Stone Nation, a gang that was eradicated in the 1980s. “It’s like cutting the head off a snake—you leave the body in disarray and everyone begins to scramble for control over these small little areas. And that’s where you get a lot of the violence, because the order is no longer there.” Williams added: “When you lose the leadership, it turns into chaos… What we’re dealing with now is basically the fallout of gang disorganization.”
Chaos fills the void left behind. This happened in the 80s, following the Supreme Court’s Mistretta decision upholding the federal Sentencing Guidelines, when the people who ran businesses that happened to sell narcotics on the streets found themselves staring at a million years after the kids they hired to hawk their wares were arrested, flipped and snitched to save themselves from the same million years.
But nature abhors a vacuum. While these early drug kingpins, and they were as they ran big operations selling a lot of drugs, were certainly committing crimes, they did so as a business. They sought to avoid violence, avoid needless confrontation with police or the communities. They just wanted to sell drugs and make money. They ran tight, highly disciplined operations and kept their people in line.
When they were gone, the desire to buy and use drugs remained, so somebody had to sell the drugs. The people importing the drugs into the country sought new people to handle the street sales, and these new people had a few unifying characteristics. They were young. They were greedy. They weren’t all that bright. They didn’t grasp business, but they did grasp street violence. Their hero was Tony Montana, and their grasp of how to become legend was at the end of a gun.
The irony is that they rarely lasted very long, as they lacked the ability to run a tight business and were obvious to law enforcement fairly quickly. The other irony is that for all the money they made, they pissed it away on the trinkets that created the appearance of importance on the street. The old-school dealers dressed low key, drove unobtrusive cars, lived quiet lives. These guys rushed out to spend every dime to show the other kids on the street how successful they were. When they were taken down, and they were always taken down, they couldn’t afford a lawyer, but they did have some very heavy gold chains around their neck.
What’s this have to do with the murder rate in Chicago?
Today, experts say, the crews that have replaced gangs like Hoover’s are driven by goals less tangible than money, and the conflicts that erupt between them are more often provoked by interpersonal conflict than disputes over drug territory. “Back then, if there was violence, they were fighting over something—they were fighting over drug turf,” said Bradley. “The violence you’re seeing now, it’s almost attitude-driven.”
“Drug money is a small percentage of the killing now,” said Tio Hardiman, one of the original members of the violence-prevention organization featured in the 2011 documentary The Interrupters. “The killing now is all about reputation, disrespect, revenge, and robbery. That’s what the killings are all about now. They’re not building no nations.”
This is the next wave of bad businessmen. While it may be somewhat misleading to suggest it’s not about drug money, as money informs all these other issues, the respect/disrespect spectrum ranks higher on the reasons to shoot, to kill. Respect is the currency of the streets, and when you eliminate the businessmen from the mix, you leave the streets in the hands of kids for whom killing becomes the tool of the trade.
It’s remarkably counterproductive, but it requires a disciplined business approach to realize that. New kids filling the vacuum left by yesterday’s new kids who are today’s convicts aren’t up to the task of thinking like businessmen.
There is an undeniable logic to the theory that today’s gang crisis in Chicago is the product of yesterday’s attempt at a solution: Having shattered the commercial structures that imposed order from above and made clear to would-be kingpins that taking on leadership positions in criminal enterprises would invite aggressive prosecution, the city’s law enforcement community is now looking at a messy, vicious war between the dangerous shards.
As Leon goes on to note, the “dangerous shards” didn’t materialize out of nowhere, but out of the detritus of life in bad neighborhoods. When your options appear to be live high and fast, or fade into miserable obscurity, because there aren’t any good options, it’s easy to understand why there is always someone around ready to fill the void. And that demand for drugs never went away, and “just say no” didn’t change it, made the void irresistible to many.
Was the solution to let the old-school dealers, the businessmen drug kingpins, control the streets so that they kept the hotheads under control? Or does it merely raise the perpetual problem of every solution creating unintended consequences, sometimes worse than the problem you set out to fix?
Some things are clear: until the options improve, there will be gangs, they will sell drugs, and they will resolve their petty issues with guns. And people will die. Whether it’s more or less will change, but when you take the businessmen out of crime, you’re left with chaos and violence.
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