Next, the unit builds its intelligence network. They bring in snitches, their tagger informants, and lean on them for Midway dope. They work the line itself, looking for neighbors, business people, security guards, anybody who can serve as lookouts. Some are given beeper codes to call at any sign of activity.
Then they pull what they call “the bums’ rush.” They visit points where the line runs near existing railroad tracks and desolate stretches of woods and junk-filled lots. They look for derelicts and hobos living in makeshift cardboard and plywood dens. Taggers pay no attention to the bums, so they are perfect scouts.
At 34th and Damen, an area they code-name Shantytown, Angone and Higgins are confronted by a ragged, tattooed man who jumps out of a tree and stumbles toward them. He seems to be the mayor of the woods people. When Angone and Higgins explain what they are about, the tattooed man offers to help. “Look at those kids,” he slurs without a trace of irony, “wasting their lives doing that crap.” It is an existential moment for the two officers, and they make a deal with the mayor. For a little cash, lots of doughnuts and the promise that police will not hassle them, the mayor and his fellow woods people-who have such names as J.R., Ooze, Wetpants and Big Gums-will be snitches. The mayor even gets a beeper code.
Mostly, however, the unit gets information at The Gallery. They return to the weedy hangout night after night. They make no pinches lest the data well dry up.
“Sometimes it hurts to leave them alone down there,” Higgins says.
July 5: Phase Two-Deployment
By early July, the full unit swings into the fray. Besides roving squads that respond to beeper calls, several two- and three-man teams are deployed up and down the line. The strategy now is to clean and burn. A crew from the Archer and Canal yard of the Department of Streets and Sanitation either repaints a wall or cleans it with a soda blaster, a high-pressure hose that removes graffiti with a baking soda mixture. Once clean, a wall is virgin territory. A team sits on it, ready to burn the first roach that unsheathes a nozzle.
Mopetown.
One of the worst fights is over the wall at Archer and Arch in an area between Ashland and Halsted called Mopetown. Besides the activities of the taggers, there is a gang skirmish going on, and the wall is bombed again and again for weeks. Angone’s unit goes in and develops neighborhood snoops. A team watches the wall from the roof of a nearby three-flat or from a parked van. They watch for hours on end, night after night, making several arrests. Still the wall is bombed. Streets and San comes in and cleans it, and again it goes down.
“We lose it. We take it back. We lose it,” Angone says.
More than 20 kids-taggers and gangbangers-are arrested. Still the wall is tagged. The battle wears on.
Assaults on other walls also rage.
The Great Wall
At 49th and Kedzie, code-named the Great Wall, a neighborhood tagging crew is striking night after night. This group of about 12 kids is not part of the bigger crews. The tags are not familiar. The group works the Great Wall only, using brushes and paint from gallon cans. The blight is monstrous.
Nabbing them is tough. The wall is in an open space, the backdrop of a wide, cleared field covering a quarter of a square-mile area. That makes the logistics of a counterattack difficult. There is no cover for surveillance. Taggers can see any approach and flee in all directions. To offset this, the youngest, fastest members of Angone’s unit dress as CTA workers and position themselves up and down the tracks. They try to blend in with the scenery, and wait. But the neighborhood kids are skittish. And good. They hit again and again.
The Pulaski Wall
Further west, at 49th and Pulaski stands the trophy wall, the Pulaski Wall. Located just behind Curie High School near the Archer/Pulaski station, code-named Saratoga, the wall is coveted by all the major crews. It is frequently mentioned at the Gallery. It is bombed unmercifully.
Angone’s unit calls in Streets and San, and the wall is made virgin. The three shaggiest members of the unit-Droopy, Jabba the Hut and Kid Shalleen-stake out the wall dressed as bums. Beginning at 8 each night and going until 4 in the morning, they camp along nearby railroad tracks, cooking with a makeshift grill, scratching, talking to themselves and watching, always watching.
July 10: Phase Three-Firefights
Now, in the dead of summer, the nights warm and muggy, the entire length of the Midway line is a working snare. Scouts and snitches, especially the bums, are beeping the unit at all hours. Taggers are pinched night after night. In two weeks, 47 are arrested with 150 cans of spray paint. Still, many of the same spots are hit over and over again, and with the opening of the line tentatively set for Sept. 1, Angone’s unit presses even harder.
A favorite hangout on the line is the high ground at 39th and Artesian. Weed-choked and remote, the run offers a half-mile of the favored sound-barrier walls. Tagging crews relentlessly coat both sides of them.
On a mid-July night, the unit plans an ambush. They decide to use the “hammer and anvil” military technique in which the enemy is set up and then slammed by rushing forces. Two young, quick officers, code names Bi and Ceps, are deployed north and south of the target area to nail any taggers who flee down the tracks. Officers Slo and Poke set up on Western Avenue to grab those who flee down there. Officer Muscle Puff is the tipoff man who lies in wait in the center of the area. On his signal, an unmarked car, the hammer, will hurtle down the path running along the wall and rush the vandals.
At 1 a.m., with every man in place, a half dozen 2-4-7’s, the hard-core taggers, appear and start to spray. Muscle Puff gives the tipoff, and suddenly Wizard and Kid Shalleen in the squad car gun down the weedy lane, headlights off then on, homing in on the taggers like kamikaze pilots bearing down on an aircraft carrier. The taggers run like hell, some down the tracks, some into the weeds. In no time they are intercepted, collared and lying face down in the dirt, hands tied behind them with flexible plastic handcuffs.
July 11: The Arsenal
For days the unit has noticed a new paint on the walls. It is metallic, almost sparkly and a superior grade to what the taggers usually spray. An informant says it comes from Maxwell Street. At 6 a.m. Sunday, July 11, Angone and Higgins watch a particular vendor whom they believe has been supplying tagging crews with ammunition for months. When they see a 13-year-old kid buy a can for $2, they move in and arrest the seller. And there it is: a truck full of the expensive, aluminum-based paint. The 65-year-old vendor is charged with selling spray paint to minors, and 600 cans are confiscated. It is a misdemeanor, and the offender will pay only a modest fine, but Angone and Higgins are ecstatic. They confiscate more than 600 cans. It is graffiti that will never be, an enemy arsenal detonated.
Aug. 3: The Clubhouse
Two weeks later they get another break. While driving the Stevenson Expressway on a Sunday afternoon, a team spots a fascinating barbecue in progress on the roof of a building at 3012 S. Archer Ave. Tending the grill are several familiar taggers. There is graffiti everywhere. The unit watches for most of the afternoon as several well-known taggers duck in and out of the second-floor rear entrance. At least 20 young people go in and out of the place, which looks more and more like a taggers’ clubhouse.
Two days later, the unit raids the apartment, and even they are appalled at what they find. Every inch of the unfurnished flat is covered with graffiti. Even the toilet is painted. The floor is littered with more than 100 paint cans, 125 heavy-duty markers, squeezable tubes of paint and hundred of photos that taggers took of their outside work. Most interesting to Angone’s unit are legal-size tablets with a scale-model drawing of a CTA car. Angone calls them tagger coloring books. The pads, the police learn, are used to plan bombing raids on “L” cars in which a crew sprays the entire side of the car in less than a minute.
Two young men, both prominent members of tagging crews, are arrested. One is wearing a home monitoring device as a result of a burglary conviction. Neighbors whose buildings and businesses have been repeatedly bombed by the taggers, are joyous.
Aug. 5: The Bums at Pulaski
After several nights of trackside campouts near the Pulaski Wall, the bums unit has come up empty. Tagger crews are especially careful here, canvassing the area for unmarked police cars before they approach. Backup units switch to different vehicles, including Cadillacs and Broncos. Access to the wall is a hole in a nearby cyclone fence near the Curie High parking lot, and the bums have a clear view of the break.
Finally, the bums make contact. At 2 a.m., they spot four 2-4-7’s crawling through the fence. With signal clicks on the radio, they alert their street backups, who take positions east and west of the wall. The taggers are wary but committed, and soon they have unpacked their bags and are spraying away.
On cue, the bums jump over the wall and grab a pair. The other two flee but are quickly pinched by the backups. The taggers are shocked, unconvinced the bums are police officers until they are shown badges and, of course, handcuffs.
Word of the arrests sweeps through taggers’ networks, and the Pulaski Wall stays clean.
Aug. 10: Combat
Night after night, snoops and lookouts planted along the line alert the unit to activity. The bums in Shantytown are prolific scouts, beeping the unit regularly, even leading police to caches of hidden paints. A stockboy at a grocery store across from the Great Wall on 49th and Kedzie is a big help. In a series of mad sprints, several neighborhood kids are run down and arrested by Slo, Poke and other runners on the unit. The Great Wall, the first and toughest wall to take back, stays clear.
In the third week of August, Angone is contacted by a member of the biggest South Side crew.
“We can’t do anything,” he moans. “We can’t go anywhere. We can’t even play ball in the park. What will it take to get things back to normal?”
“Stay off the Midway line,” Angone says.
That week a team spots a homemade flag between the tracks at 39th and Artesian. It banners a South Side crew name and has all the earmarks of a battle flag.
The cry goes up: “Ameliorate that thing!”
It is put on display in Angone’s office.
September: Phase Four-Zero Tolerance
The Midway line, now officially called the Orange Line, is set to open the first week of November. Angone’s unit is out every night, but business is down. Station walls, switch boxes and long stretches of sound barrier walls remain clean and repainted for days at a time. By mid-September the unit has arrested 253 taggers, taken 3,000 cans and hundreds of markers.
Officers now deploy beneath the platforms of the new stations. They use nightscopes, which enable them to see as far as 1,000 feet down tracks. When taggers jump over the sound-barrier walls, the lookout calls in mobile units.
The third rail is now activated, and maintenance and test trains run up and down the line. Officers with nightscopes ride them front and rear. When the train passes, taggers think the coast is clear and jump the walls. They are easily spotted by the scopes and picked off by mobile units.
As the days pass, Angone’s edict is “zero tolerance.” Nobody gets a pass. Anybody looking cross-eyed at a wall gets pinched. CTA and Streets and Sanitation crews are cleaning and repainting the line to where it is beginning to look brand new. The cooperation of Streets and San is crucial, and, to Angone, has been remarkable. “We can’t do it without them,” he says.
Oct. 24-31: Panic week
Complete with ceremony, dignitaries, and politicians-including Mayor Daley, who personally abhors graffiti-the opening of the Midway line is set for Nov. 3.
Angone dubs the period preceding it Panic Week. His men work long “ride and spot” shifts in which they eradicate anything they see. They even pitch in to help repaint an abandoned, two-story switching house at 49th and Oakley. In clear view of the 49th and Western station, it has been an eyesore for years.
Painting and soda-blaster crews have been put on midnight shifts in order to remove graffiti immediately. The 9.2 mile line, defaced unmercifully only three months earlier, is pristine. The cleaner it gets, however, the more nervous Angone becomes. He is worried about Halloween night and the night before the opening. Snitches tell the unit that several crews are hell bent on bombing the line.
Nov. 2: Opening day’s eve
The night before the line is to open, the skies are black with planes. The department gives Angone the use of marked squad cars, and he deploys them near the stretches of sound-barrier walls. All night the squads sit there with their Mars lights flashing. The patrolman assigned to Shantytown remarks, “Is there a place any more godforsaken than this?”
Angone’s unit, its members exhausted from the four-month crusade, watches hot spots. With nightscopes under platforms, they scan the barrier walls. They ride the test trains. Backup cars run up and down Archer Avenue.
Five hours before Mayor Daley and CTA bigwigs are to ride the line, Angone is beeped by the mayor of Shantytown. Four hardcore taggers have jumped the wall and begun bombing the line. Nightscope surveillance also spots the breakthrough there. A team swoops in and grabs the quartet along with 29 cans of paint, enough to deface hundreds of yards of sound-barrier wall.
The damage is photographed for the sake of prosecution, and a Streets and Sanitation crew immediately appears and starts removal. The taggers are stunned, crestfallen.
“You mean you’re taking it off?” one says.
They will take a pinch if they know their tags will stay. “Ameliorate it,” Angone growls.
Nov. 3: Opening day
On the official opening of the Orange Line, with press and camera crews and the glad-handing gaggles of politicians, the line glistens. The 9.2-mile stretch from the Loop to Midway has gone from a scrawl to showpiece. The stations-Enterprise, Kittyhawk, Lexington, Hornet, Yorktown, Saratoga and Midway-are shipshape.
Angone’s unit, however, is not around for the festivities. Wizard, Kid Shalleen, Droopy, Jabba the Hut and the all the others have assembled at a place called O’Malley’s and thrown a bash for themselves. Complete with homemade orange hats, the liberated tagger flag and trophies in the form of spray-paint cans with golden spikes through them, they revel in the success of their campaign. To a man they say they have never been involved in police work that gave them so much satisfaction. The department agrees and nominates the entire unit for the Superintendent’s Award of Merit.
“This Midway assault,” Angone says, beaming. “It’s the proudest thing I’ve ever done.”
Then he and the others, after a summer sacrificed, go on furlough.
January 1994: Update
The need for maintenance is constant. Surveillance of the line is constant. “Remember,” Angone says. “They are roaches.” A look at the walls of buildings adjoining the Orange line, and it is obvious what the taggers would do if they had free rein. Angone’s computer list of taggers and tags is updated daily. The unit presses each case in court. The worst offenders are charged with felonies. Some get house arrest and ankle bracelets; some get jail, as much as 10-month sentences.
Motormen, neighbors, and, of course, the woods people, call at the first sight of tagging. There are breakthroughs and throwups; the 2-4-7’s are still addicted. But the line remains clean.
The unit also goes after etchers, taggers who use etching tools instead of paint to do their damage on train and bus windows. They get one who has done $30,000 worth of damage. They pinch him at his house just minutes before his birthday party is to begin. It goes on without him.
June 3-6, 1942: The Battle of Midway
After three days of fighting entirely with aircraft, American forces destroy Japan’s first-line carrier strength. American fliers from Midway Island, Hawaii and from aircraft carriers attack and sink three heavy Japanese carriers and one heavy cruiser. The U.S. aircraft carrier Yorktown and an escort destroyer are sunk by Japanese torpedoes. But the loss of their major carriers so devastates the Japanese that they begin a general retreat. In just three days and nights of fierce fighting, their plans to capture the North Pacific have been dashed.
Midway Airport is named after that epic battle. In its north concourse is a bronze statue and plaques commemorating the event. One plaque reads, “Outnumbered and outgunned, the men of the Pacific Fleet and their comrades on Midway Island went in harm’s way and changed the course of the Pacific War and of history.” Another quotes Adm. Chester W. Nimitz, commander of the Pacific fleet, on the valor and bravery of his men.
Lt. Angone and his crew have read the plaque many times. They like the “outnumbered and outgunned” part, but wonder why Nimitz didn’t use the word “ameliorate.”
