The room once held a biker’s club called the Western Warriors, but that was before Jimmie began renting the place in 1997, two years after he got out of prison. He rechristened it the Night Prowler, and it became a social club, mostly for old-timers, or OGs as they’re known on the street: Original Gangsters. It’s not a particularly large space. There’s a faux-marble bar to the left lined with red stools, their plastic cushions cracked and ripped. To the right sits a big-screen TV fronted by a worn couch so low to the ground that it takes some work to rise from it. In the middle of the rectangular room, Jimmie has placed a round table for card playing, mostly poker and spades. And in the back he’s positioned a homemade green, felt-lined craps table atop a pool table, which Jimmie says has seen better days. Along one wall is an electric stove, which Jimmie uses to cook for parties and repasts, of which there have been many in recent years. Attached to the same wall is a karaoke machine which a friend gave to Jimmie and which as far as I can discern is rarely used.
Jimmie comes here every day, to relax, to get away from what he calls the “craziness” of the streets. The neighborhood around the Night Prowler is rough, and so Jimmie has installed a kind of security system; in exchange for watching over the place, a friend who’s homeless sleeps in the club, in a loft, a cavelike room over the bathroom which you wouldn’t notice except that Bobby, who has trouble sitting still, is often crawling either in or out of it, contorting his body to avoid the strip of flypaper hanging from the ceiling.
Jimmie has a healthy anxiety about the neighborhood. Every Halloween he holds a party for children of friends and neighbors, as he worries about them trick-or-treating, especially at dusk. It began as just a gathering for children who were kin to him, but these gatherings have expanded, bringing in children of friends, so that some Halloweens over a hundred costumed boys and girls come by. Jimmie says he spends well over $700 at Sam’s Club for candy. Twenty years, and Jimmie’s had only one fight in the club, years ago, fisticuffs over a woman. Otherwise he’s had no trouble, mostly because the clientele is older men who have tired of the streets and who are just looking, like Jimmie, for a place they can retire to, a place which feels unbothered by the goings-on outside.
Jimmie and I sat at the bar, both of us sipping bottled water. Jimmie doesn’t drink. He’s dressed casually in T-shirt and jeans, along with white socks and a pair of black Crocs. He has a black knit skullcap atop his head, a nod to his conversion to Islam.
I first heard of Jimmie Lee nearly thirty years ago, when I began work on my book There Are No Children Here. Jimmie headed a faction of the Conservative Vice Lords, the street gang that controlled the half of the Henry Horner Homes where Lafeyette and Pharoah lived. He was, to the say the least, a complicated man. He ran a robust drug business—heroin and cocaine—and so his members were heavily armed, with pistols, Uzis, and even grenades. Jimmie often could be seen in a bulletproof vest. But he also provided for elderly residents too poor to afford groceries and insisted on a sense of decency on his turf. He once punched a drunken father who had publicly berated his daughter outside a project building, calling her “a bitch.”
I never met Jimmie while I was working on the book, since in the midst of my reporting he was arrested and convicted of possession of a controlled substance and intent to deliver. I wrote to him in prison requesting an interview, but he, understandably, declined. My portrait was based on interviews with gang members, with residents, and with the police. (In all the police stations on the West Side, pictures of Jimmie—along with four other high-ranking Vice Lords—hung on the walls with the warning “They are known to be involved in drug traffic, home invasions of dope flats, extortion and other crimes. They have been known to employ fully automatic weapons, travel in car caravans, usually with tail cars for protection.”) Jimmie also had an enforcer, Napoleon English, whom everyone called Nap Dog and who was known to carry a .38 revolver in his waistband and a small derringer in his back pocket. He was so feared that I was warned not to engage with him during my time at Horner. So I didn’t.
In 2010, while I was visiting an antiviolence organization housed at the University of Illinois at Chicago, a gray-haired gentleman approached me. He was smiling as if he knew something I didn’t. “Alex,” he said. I apologized and told him I couldn’t place where I knew him from. He laughed, so restrained that I thought maybe he was mocking me. He extended his hand. “Jimmie Lee.” All I could think to say was, “At least you’re willing to shake my hand.” Jimmie was wearing his usual inscrutable expression, one that never seems to waver, somewhere between stern and more stern. “I have one request,” he said. I thought to myself, Whatever you want, it’s yours, but I just nodded. “Can I get a copy of There Are No Children Here? Signed?”
Jimmie and I became friends after that. We’d periodically get together and talk about his time at Henry Horner, when he pretty much ran his end of the projects, holding more authority than either the police or the Chicago Housing Authority. When I first arrived at Horner, I spent my afternoons at the Boys Club as a way of getting to know the kids in the community, and Jimmie told me that Major Adams, the club’s head, had asked him to keep an eye out for me, to ensure my safety, which he had, though I had had no idea at the time.
Jimmie was in prison when the book was published, and he told me that when word got out that he was a major character in a book, he got placed in segregation. He said it was clear the prison authorities were trying to make a point: You may be a big shot in the outside world, but not in here. Don’t let it go to your head. I apologized, and Jimmie shrugged. “It’s the system,” he said. Once we were having lunch at a small spot, Ruby’s, on the West Side, and an older man sauntered up to Jimmie and introduced himself. It happens a lot, that people who know Jimmie, sometimes just by reputation, approach him like he’s a local celebrity, not because of the book but because of who he was on the street. Sometimes they buy him a meal. On this occasion Jimmie made small talk and then introduced me, telling the man that I’d authored this book that Jimmie’s in. The man was vaguely familiar with the book and asked Jimmie, “You were one of those boys?” Jimmie shook his head. “No, I was the villain.” He looked my way, as if to say, Hey, that’s the truth. He invited me then to visit him at the Night Prowler.
* * *
—
As we sat on the cracked red stools, a group of four men played hearts at the round table. Jimmie wouldn’t tell me much about them except that he said they, too, had all been players at one point. One of them, I noticed, had lost a leg. “Shot,” Jimmie explained. “They trailed him. Knew he carried money. They tried to rob him.”
Jimmie is now sixty-four, and as for many involved in the street, it got old, it got too dangerous, it got too foolish. When Jimmie got out of prison in 1996, he chose to settle down. He had a bevy of grandkids, and he wanted to be there for them. One of them, Deshon McKnight, gained some fame in Chicago for his poetry. Another became a highly recruited high school football player, a defensive end. Jimmie settled into a routine. In the mornings he goes to the gym to work out, mostly with the stationary bike and light weights. Into his seventh decade, he’s still barrel-chested (his grandson, Deshon, boasted that when his grandfather was younger he had such a full chest he could balance a can of pop on it), but his shoulders are hunched, and when he walks he lists to one side, like a ship caught in the crosscurrents. In the afternoons he’ll often take a long stroll, walking his daughter’s shih tzu, Cotton. And in the evenings, well, he ends up here at his club, and if he’s lucky a few old friends might wander in to play cards or shoot dice. But often he’s by himself, holed up, away from the unpredictability of the outside.
“That killing stuff, there ain’t no sense to it,” he told me. “Forty years ago I wasn’t in my right mind.” I asked what changed for him, and before he could answer, the one-legged gentleman at the card table piped up, “He wanted to live longer. A lot longer.” Jimmie smiled, though ev
en when he smiles it feels like there’s a lot going on in there.
In one corner a jovial-looking bear of a man played dominoes with Bobby, and he soon joined us. He is one of Jimmie’s closest friends, Napoleon English, his former enforcer, who unlike Jimmie is always laughing and who has the ebullience of a little kid, seeming to bounce instead of walk. In the summer of 1986, Napoleon was ambushed by a rival gang and in the ensuing skirmish was shot twice, in the right shoulder and in the left wrist. Recovering in the hospital, he heard that a rival gang, the Gangster Disciples, thought they had killed him and had celebrated outside one of the buildings, chanting We killed Nap. We killed Nap. That didn’t sit well with Napoleon, and when he got healthy he sought revenge. He walked into a high-rise at Horner and saw someone standing in the corner. Gangster Stone, Nap declared, falsely representing his affiliation. Gangster Stone to the world, the young man replied. Nap shot Wild Child, who was thirty-one, and as he lay there dying, his voice fading, he asked Nap, Why you doing this? I ain’t never done anything to you. Nap didn’t really have an answer for Wild Child, or for himself. And during his twenty-two years in prison he had trouble sleeping, reliving that moment again and again and again. He also had a recurring dream where he’d find himself shooting at people, but no matter how carefully he aimed, he couldn’t hit anyone. He’d wake up in a panic, sweating. “When you start changing for the better and your perspective changes,” he told me, “you start wrestling with good and evil. Ain’t no murder got no credibility to it. Any murder is madness.”
Napoleon joined us. Neither apologizes for his activities when he was younger. They felt they had no choice, though of course that was due in large part to the fact that they were making money in the drug trade, and protecting their enterprise sometimes required the use of force. Both have trouble, though, explaining these present times. “You can’t make no sense of it,” Napoleon said. “It’s like trying to understand God. When we’re dead and gone there’s gonna be violence. It is what it is. It’s the order of the day.” What’s particularly frustrating to them is that now no one seems in charge.
In the late 1990s and the early 2000s, law enforcement went after the gang chiefs, locking up one after another after another. Cut the snake off at the head. And it worked, for a while. It disrupted the street-corner drug trade and seemed to reduce the violence. But it had unintended consequences, as public policy so often does. In the vacuum, the gangs—at least the African-American gangs—fractured, shattered really, into scores of cliques or crews, organized from block to block. It became virtually impossible not to be associated with one group or another, simply because of where you lived. The police estimate there are 625 different cliques in the city. The names seem pulled out of a comic book: Killer Ward, Bang Bang, Smashville, Suwus, Lamron (“normal” spelled backwards), Hit Squad, Winchester Boys. A former big-time drug dealer, James Highsmith, once shook his head in wonderment at one clique’s name. “What the hell you gonna call yourself Brain Dead for?” he asked.
“Now they don’t have any kind of structure,” Napoleon told me. “Nobody listens to nobody.” He and Jimmie seemed perplexed by what’s going on. The disputes, they say, are over petty things. “People get into it over nothing,” Jimmie says. Someone’s stepped on someone’s new shoes. An argument over a girlfriend. Someone butting in line at a club. Someone asked to leave a party. Or one clique wars against another clique for reasons no one can explain. Just because, is what so many will say. Jimmie Lee and Napoleon English, once feared and revered in their neighborhood, no longer carry the weight they once did, at least among the younger generation. Jimmie tells me the teens in the area call him “old man” or “granddad.” Not long ago Jimmie’s grandson got into it with others on a nearby block, and despite Jimmie’s efforts to intervene, they came around one day looking for his grandson, shooting up Jimmie’s front porch. Jimmie’s daughter was shot in the hand. “They do their own thing,” he explained. “They don’t listen to the old-timers.” Napoleon gently punched Jimmie in the shoulder, telling him to speak for himself. Napoleon is eighteen years younger.
There’s some romanticizing of the past. When Jimmie, Napoleon, and their gang were active in the streets, in the late 1980s and 1990s, the violence was considerably worse. In 1991 the city recorded 927 homicides, more than double what it is some twenty-two years later. I mentioned this to them, and Jimmie shook his head, not in disagreement but in puzzlement. “You say there were more killings back then?” he asked. “But it feels like it’s worse now.” It does. It may be because then much of the violence occurred in the city’s vast acreage of public housing complexes, which were completely out of sight, out of mind. And since those high-rises have been razed, the shootings take place in the neighborhoods and so get more attention. Or it may be because then most of the shootings were over drug turf, clearly directed at opposing gangs, and now it feels more arbitrary, more random. Also, when the organized gangs fought over terrain, they often gave warning to residents, and now the shootings just happen, like a summer rain shower, and so more victims are unintended targets.
I ask them what they think can be done. “That I wish I knew,” Jimmie said. “Only thing I can do is, a lot of it start at home. You got to get into the families. If people at home aren’t trying to change them, nothing will change them.” Both he and Napoleon believe it’s considerably easier to get guns these days. In fact, every year for the past ten years the police have taken somewhere in the neighborhood of 7,000 illegal guns off the street, or a gun every seventy-five minutes. “They want that respect,” Napoleon explained. I hear this a lot, and while it may seem like an oversimplification, it makes sense. You grow up in a community with abandoned homes, a jobless rate of over 25 percent, underfunded schools, and you stand outside your home, look at the city’s gleaming downtown skyline, at its prosperity, and you know your place in the world. And so you look for ways to feel like you’re someone, ways to feel like people look up to you, ways to feel like you have some standing in your city. “Like Michael Jordan, he gets power through basketball,” Napoleon said. “You don’t let nothing get in the way of getting that power…It’s the fear that make people respect you. I used to love people shutting their doors when they see me coming. Hey, Jimmie, I loved carrying your guns. I loved that power. I couldn’t get it anywhere else.”
It was getting late, and so we said our goodbyes. Jimmie smiled and cautioned me, “Alex, you’re gonna bust your head trying to figure this all out.” Napoleon chimed in, “Take a person like me. How can a guy be so sweet and have a dark side?” Napoleon is married now, to an accountant, and he tells me he wants to find time for simple things, like baking, mostly peanut butter and chocolate chip cookies. Both still try to defuse disputes when they can, but they’re at an age where they realize, given all that they were involved in, they’re just lucky to have made it through. At the end of the bar, a laptop open in front of him, there’s an older man in a Dr. Seuss T-shirt watching a video of a friend’s funeral. He’s half listening to our conversation. “Dinosaurs,” he mutters of Jimmie and Napoleon, loud enough for us to hear.
A couple days later I text Jimmie and Napoleon to thank them for their time. I don’t hear back from Napoleon, and so I call. He apologizes. “I was driving and didn’t want to text while driving,” he tells me.
Chapter 4
The Tightrope, part two
MAY 30…MAY 31…JUNE 1…
I first met Marcelo at a second bond hearing, in a courtroom attached to a South Side police station. Some in county government had become outraged by the unusually high bonds handed down by judges, often arbitrarily, without reason, and Marcelo’s case popped out to them because Marcelo had no previous criminal record and yet had no chance of bonding out of prison while he awaited his trial. Prosecutors—along with the police—had come to believe that robberies were a gateway crime to more violent acts, and so they requested exceptionally high bonds. Marcelo, unable to come up
with the necessary 10 percent, or $30,000, found himself in the county jail, locked in his cell much of the day because he was so much younger than everyone else on the tier. He was so terrified that he refused to take a shower.
At 10:15 that morning Marcelo shuffled into the courtroom, a deputy sheriff by his side. Dressed in the drab tan uniform of jail inmates, which hung off his scrawny frame like sheets on a clothesline, Marcelo had in his couple of weeks in detention grown a wisp of a mustache and goatee, but he looked unusually young and jittery—so much so that two years later the court reporter would tell me that she couldn’t get him out of her mind, that she always wondered what had become of him. Marcelo’s eyes darted around the courtroom, briefly catching the gaze of his mom, who sat toward the rear, a hand wiping away a tear. He was represented by a public defender, Bob Dwyer, who with his closely cropped hair and chiseled features looked like he could be ex-military. Hearings to reconsider bonds are unusual, but Marcelo had an unusual bevy of supporters, many of whom were present, something which the judge noticed. There was his family: his mother, his older brother, Elio, Elio’s wife, and their young daughter. There were also four people from Mercy Home for Boys & Girls, where Marcelo lived, along with an investigator who had been looking into the inequities of bond court and stumbled across Marcelo’s case. Of Marcelo’s bond, the investigator told me, “It’s fuckin’ crazy.”
This in many ways is what makes Marcelo’s story unusual, and in large part what drew me to spend time with him. Marcelo had a lot of people in his corner, so many, in fact, that it took me a while to sort everyone out. Marcelo, who had just turned seventeen, had straddled two worlds, and it now appeared that maintaining that highwire balancing act had proved perilous.
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