Bored, Broke, and Armed: interview with Chicago gang members to find out how so many have died

CHICAGO — The young men who call themselves Gangster Disciples skirted by an empty lot. They marched past a “Stop the Violence” mural painted on a corner store, coming to a halt when they saw members of a rival gang, the Black Disciples.

It was late September on a busy South Side intersection, and now tensions were escalating, gang members who were there recalled.

There were glares, they said. Then words.

“You’re a rat,” a Black Disciple said to one of the Gangster Disciples who he believed had given the police information about him.

Things were about to blow.

It had been exactly 90 days since some of these same men had sat across from one another in an airy church hall to broker peace and confront a hard truth: The gang war they had inherited and were viciously continuing was helping to unravel parts of this city, where the levels of violence were reaching horrific new heights.

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With 739 murders as of Wednesday, 2016 has been Chicago’s deadliest year since 1997. Six fatalities came during Memorial Day weekend, when The New York Times tracked 49 shootings involving 64 victims over three days. One of the shooting survivors from that weekend was a Gangster Disciple known as Mexico, shot in his right leg on May 29 when tensions flared between the same factions that were about to square off in front of the store, New Food Inc.

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An overwhelming majority of the city’s 3,451 shootings this year were gang-related, the police say. What that means has become increasingly fuzzy, as the large, well-organized operations built around drug dealing have splintered, and are now little more than cliques or sets.




The Times spent several weeks this fall with gang members to get a better understanding of what it means to be in a gang. They were often days of boredom, punctuated by bursts of drama and bravado. Gang life means animated debates over whether the guys on the next block meant to insult you or not. It means worrying over how to make enough for your next meal or your next high. And it means mourning the loss of loved ones, retaliating in their honor, yet wanting the cycle to stop.

Ron, a 23-year-old Black Disciple who uses the nickname Kaos, and for safety reasons asked that his last name not be used, explained the relentless cycle of violence: I’ve already lost friends. If we are making money, I can ignore the urge to retaliate. “But if we’re sitting here bored, getting high and we got guns around, it ain’t nothing else to do,” he added.

Still, these are young men who defy easy caricature. They are the sales associates who help you find shoes at a sportswear store or factory workers next to you on the assembly line. They kiss their young children on the lips and cry when someone close to them dies.

And, yes, they do use and sell drugs, and sometimes lash out in inexplicable bursts of violence over disputes like a battle for a girl’s attention, or disrespectful words uttered on a rap video posted to YouTube.

Or, as was the case in front of the corner store in late September, over an insult hurled on a busy intersection.

There was supposed to be a mechanism to stop this from escalating. During the peace talks at Pastor Corey Brooks’s New Beginnings Church in June, the rival factions had brokered a truce. They had agreed to run their disputes up the ladder to gang elders, who would work to quash them.

But now things moved fast, said the two gang members who were there. After the insult, the Gangster Disciples left the block, but then returned, and the verbal jabbing continued. Then, the Gangster Disciples claim, the Black Disciple who had called one of them a rat reached into his pocket and pulled out his cellphone, pretending it was a gun. The Black Disciples denied that.

Whatever the truth, a Gangster Disciple whipped out a pistol and opened fire, witnesses said. The busy block scattered. And the Black Disciple with the phone was shot in his foot. The truce established in the church hall had been broken.

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Kings of Corners and Blocks
After the shooting, dozens of Black Disciples gathered at their home base: the Parkway Garden Homes, a complex of brick mid-rise buildings stretching three blocks along South Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, built in the 1950s to house black middle-class families. Michelle Obama lived there as a toddler.

But over time, the middle-class families left, and mostly low-income families moved in. More than half of the population lives in poverty in Parkway and the surrounding neighborhood, which is 95 percent black. An abandoned Walgreens sits on King Drive, along with cellphone stores and fast food shops that moved in when many businesses picked up and left.

Parkway earned a reputation as one of Chicago’s most violent areas. It was, however, considered a safe zone for the Black Disciples who controlled the complex — a faction known as O’Block, named after a fallen ally, Odee Perry.

Now they were debating how to respond to the shooting at New Food.

Some people wanted to respect the truce, in large part because it allowed them to make money by selling drugs in peace. That was why many had advocated for it in the first place.

Others, however, turned to the man who had been shot, Kaos recalled.

“We’re with whatever you’re with — however you feel about it because you got shot,” he recalled some people saying. “If you want to push, we’re going to push.”

Black gangs began sprouting in Chicago in earnest in the 1950s during a second wave of northward migration of black Southerners. The migrants came looking for opportunity, but were crammed into overcrowded, segregated pockets on the city’s South and West sides where industry and jobs were dwindling.

Conditions were ripe for what followed: Boys, with little supervision, money or education, formed cliques. They hung out socially, and got into fights and other petty trouble.

The rabble-rousing evolved into extortion of local businesses, much as it did with the existing white ethnic gangs and local mobsters. Then came the heroin and crack epidemics that turned gangs into lucrative drug-trafficking organizations that fought over territory. For a while, though, the gangs in Woodlawn also helped keep calm and avoid riots after the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and helped with a federally funded job training program in the area.

But those highly organized operations have fizzled over the last 25 years as prosecutors swept up gang leaders, and the city demolished public housing projects, dispersing gang members primarily to minority neighborhoods on the West and South Sides.

Now they were everywhere and nowhere — gangsters by name, but kings only of corners and blocks.

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And instead of turf and money, they fought over personal slights.

Kaos was coy about how O’Block responded to the shots fired by the Jaro City member at New Food. Violence did, however, continue that week.

Two days after the New Food shooting, two Gangster Disciples were shot at night in a drive-by about a block from the store, but people on both sides said that particular shooting was unrelated to the feud.

A day later, the two sides clashed again near New Food, firing shots at each other. The mother of a Black Disciple was caught in the crossfire, shot in her left foot.

By late that afternoon, Sept. 22, alarm bells were going off at New Beginnings Church. Pastor Brooks huddled with some of the gang elders. The truce seemed to be falling apart.

Lavondale Glass, 43, a former Gangster Disciple who was helping to broker peace, saw the young men falling into the dangerous logic of revenge.

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