Inside Job

As a U. of C. grad student, Sudhir Venkatesh talked his way inside a crack-dealing gang at the notorious Robert Taylor Homes and befriended its charismatic leader. Now, in a new book, this "rogue sociologist" tells of his up-close—at times perhaps too close—encounter with gang life

By Michael Stone

(page 4 of 6)

After a year or two under J.T.'s aegis, Venkatesh began cultivating other sources, most notably Mrs. Bailey, the formidable tenant leader who ran her building with the same ruthless efficiency that J.T. employed on the street. Gang Leader portrays her as both a pragmatic, hands-on executive who bent the law to protect her constituents and a bully who exploited her leverage with the CHA and the police to extort bribes from tenants needing building services and get kickbacks and rent from the squatters and prostitutes.

Q: You seemed conflicted about Mrs. Bailey and her role in the community. How do you feel about her in hindsight?
A: She was a very, very good Chicago politician. If that means I'm still unable to adequately resolve her selfishness vis-à-vis acting only on behalf of the constituents in her tribe—well, so be it. I want to either love or hate her, but I can't, for the same reason I can't either love or hate this city.

Q: In your book you describe Mrs. Bailey charging tenants for CHA services that are supposed to be free. How can that be the system's fault?
A: Because public housing was neglected by everybody. Bailey, and J.T., too, were filling a void, and there's no reason to expect that it would have been filled if they weren't there, because no one gave a damn. If Mrs. Bailey had become more selfish, she would not have been a leader. But if she had become more philanthropic, she would have been kicked out of the very structure that was giving her resources. So she got along to get along. There's an old Chicago expression: "Don't make no waves and don't back no losers."

The first time I got a glimpse of who these folks really were was when these street gang leaders told me they wanted to mow their lawns on Saturday mornings.

Gang Leader goes on to describe a world, reminiscent of some early immigrant communities, in which the gangs provide residents with their first line of security, and an underground economy, regulated and taxed by J.T. and Mrs. Bailey, predominates. Yet amid the discord and venality, Venkatesh depicts the subsistence of a strong, viable community—residents pooling resources, helping one another through family emergencies, and celebrating their lives together with a constant round of barbecues, picnics, and holiday fests.

Q: At times you seem to be describing a paradox. Just when you think the community is collapsing into chaos or gang war, it rises up and reasserts itself. Can you explain how that happens?
A: The best example of that was the drive-by shooting. A few years into my research, there was an incident in which an enemy of the Black Kings gang drove by in a beat-up old car, several shooters in the car, and shot randomly at the building. It was a hot summer day, and there were all these people outside on the lawn in front of the building, and one of the officers of the Black Kings gang named Price got hit. So I and a couple of other people actually ended up taking Price and dragging him inside and then also helping get mothers and children and everyone else inside the building. And it really rattled everybody. It rattled me because I still wasn't used to knowing what to do in these shootings, which is that you bend your knees and you duck. I just sort of stood there like a tree.

In the aftermath a number of things occurred. First, the residents did not make a 911 call to the police. Price was a gang leader. They had to find a way to take him to the hospital without involving the police. [A tenant drove him and he later recovered.] But I think there were a couple of other older women in the building who were traumatized, and they had to get them help. They were having panic attacks. So they called these empathetic police officers to call the ambulance to come and meet them.

Then the street gang and the community leaders got everyone inside and made sure that everyone had what they needed for the next 24 hours, because there was fear that the shooters were coming again. So they went to the store, got water and food for everyone in the building, and, mind you, all of this is occurring without the police.

[After 24 hours] they call the police and try to get them to have officers on patrol, so that the kids can get to school. And then they set up a meeting behind closed doors with the three gangs that are fighting and the tenant leaders, some of the empathetic police officers, and a pastor that has the respect of those three gangs—and they figure out why the gangs are fighting each other and what it's going to take to stop this war.

That made me wonder: OK, what is this place? Well, certainly it's gang infested, but that only tells us 25 percent of who these people are and what it's like to live there. [The residents are also] resilient, courageous, in some sense democratic. They're creating a place where they can debate each other and figure out how to protect their home community.

Q: But what difference does it make if they can't prevent these kinds of public shootings in the first place?
A: Most social scientists who look at this community just look at the fact that the crime occurred and say there's nothing we could do. We need to tear the community down. We need to get rid of the gangs and so forth. But what we could also do is find the people who in the days and weeks after the drive-by kept life relatively stable and use them as community leaders, as places to give money and to invest resources and to build programs.

But that's exactly what the Housing Authority did not do when they tore down J.T.'s building a few years later. I've been following 400 families who were relocated from the South Side projects. Ninety percent of them have been moved into equally poor segregated housing—but now they're isolated from former neighbors and helping networks—in the southern reaches of the city, where there's not even a hope of churches and settlement houses replacing the services they lost.