What made Leon Dread change?
If we can figure out the answer to that question, we just might have a chance to reduce the violence in our community because, by his own reckoning, Dread was “everybody’s worst nightmare.”
This is how he introduced himself, recently, to a class of 8th graders at the James W. Johnson Child Parent Center on Chicago’s West Side: “I was that African-American male that was not a role model. I used to stick up, rob, burglarize. I shot at people and got shot at. I got stabbed twice. I shot dope for over 30 years, went to prison five times. I was a violent criminal, the worst type of person.
“I was a vicious animal,” he told the spellbound students. “If I’da seen you in a store with your mother’s money, a $20 bill, I woulda put my arm around your neck and took it. That’s what I did all my life. I took things.”
I came across Dread when I began doing research for a documentary on violence, the subject of this year’s “Chicago Matters,” (7:30 p.m. Wednesday on WTTW-Ch. 11), an effort by the TV station, WBEZ-FM 91.5 and the Chicago Community Trust to explore issues of concern to our community.
I was searching for a way to bring this complex and confusing issue into some sort of human focus when someone suggested that Dread-a man who had spent most of his 45 years taking from the community and was now earnestly trying to give something back-might have some interesting things to say.
I found him working as a counselor for the Gateway Drug Rehabilitation program in the Woman’s Division of the Cook County Jail, the same program that helped him get on the road to recovery. How would he feel about being the subject of a documentary?
“If I didn’t care what people thought of me all those years I was doing bad, why should I worry about them knowing about me now that I’m trying to do good?” he said.
Dread said he was also actively participating in the “We Care” role model program run by the Chicago public schools and the police department.
“I said when I got clean, through the grace of God, `What is it that I could possibly do to try to give something back to the community?’ ” he said. “I’m not rich. So my time and my experience, that is what I bring to the table here. I bring the pain and experience of what I know.”
Dread was born in Gary in the summer of 1948. His mother, 14 years old at the time, had just been taken north from Mississippi, then abandoned by the father Dread never knew.
Big for his age and the eldest of 15 children, Dread had to grow up fast. On a trip to Gary one day to see if we could track down any of his siblings, none of whom he’d seen in more than 10 years, we stopped in front of a lounge once called “The Totem Pole.”
“They’d call me and tell me that my mother had fell out or something on the bar and I would pick her up and I would take her back home,” he said. “I was 8, 9 years old at that time. I most definitely was ashamed of her, you know. She was a drunk and she was a prostitute, and everybody in the city knew it, and I had to live with that every day.
“And that worked on my self-esteem. I said, all right, I’m the son of a whore, so hey, being a criminal, it’s like you’re saying back to society, `What else can you expect me to be?’ “
Dread started to skip school and steal when he was 10, and he was sent off to the Indiana Boys School in Plainfield, where he stayed, off and on, for almost three years. He learned two basic lessons there: from the nuns and priests, how to read and write; from the older boys, how to be a better criminal.
Dread returned to Gary, spent a year and a half in high school, then dropped out and started stealing full time.
“My role models were pimps and hustlers and numbers runners, stickup men,” he said. “They’d put their arm around me and say: `Leon, you’ve got a lot of sense. Do something with that. Go down a different road.’
“But I’m not hearing them, I’m seeing them: the diamond rings, the silk suits, looking like businessmen, you know, brand new cars every year; I mean, they looked like guys that stepped out of a magazine. And I’m coming out the ghetto with one pair of pants that I’m wearing for six months, shoes that I had to put cardboard in, you know. And that’s the reason why we grabbed that that’s in front of us right there at that time.”
`Powerful’ in Vietnam
In 1969, after several arrests for shoplifting, a judge offered Dread a choice: the army or the penitentiary. Dread spent nine months in combat in Vietnam.
“I felt powerful among my platoon because I made sergeant in about four months because everybody was getting killed,” he said. “I was in the 101st Airborne Division. We just, like, getting killed like that. I felt powerful-because I had not got killed, for one thing.
“And then for me to come back and then go to the Unemployment Office and get talked to like I was a slave, you know, telling me, hey, that Bronze Star and all that doesn’t mean anything. I became very, very angry, very angry. And I picked up a pistol.”
Dread spent most of the next 18 years abusing drugs and alcohol, committing crimes, and getting sent to jail and prison. His arrest record is six pages long and Dread said it represents just a fraction of the crimes he committed-the ones for which he got caught.
I asked him which of his crimes involved violence, and Dread recalled that his first felony conviction was in the summer of 1972 for an armed robbery committed with a sawed-off shotgun. He said he’d held up two victims in an alley behind Sandburg Village and had struck one of them in the face with the shotgun and had hurt him pretty badly.
I told Dread that I’d like to try to find those victims and get their thoughts on violence; on how his actions had affected them. I couldn’t produce a documentary on violence based just on how he’d turned his life around. I needed to show the affects of his violence on his victims. I asked Dread how he’d feel about that.
He paused, then said that it scared him a bit. He hadn’t really dealt with all of his feelings about all the people he had hurt.
“But they taught us in treatment, the things that you’re most fearful of are probably the very things you should confront because they have the most healing in them,” he said.
Two trips to the County Clerk’s office turned up the original arrest report of the armed robbery with a brief description of the incident and the names of the victims, of two security guards involved in the chase and the arresting officers, all of whom over the next month I was able to track down and interview.
`Drinkin’ and druggin’ ‘
August 15, 1972, was a hot day, well up in the 90s. Dread, who had been “drinkin’ and druggin’ ” all day in a dingy apartment on the West Side, headed out at dusk with a sawed-off shotgun tucked beneath a heavy overcoat to “find me some money some kind of way.”
Several hours later, he ended up on the North Side in an alley off Schiller Street just east of Clark Street. There, two young businessmen, Gordon and John, were standing at John’s car, a Jaguar XKE, when Dread walked past them.
“It was a warm night and he was wearing a P-coat. I guess we should have known something was up,” Gordon remembered.
Dread suddenly reappeared, shoved the shotgun into Gordon’s back and demanded the pair’s money and the car keys. John resisted and Dread struck him across the face with the shotgun.
Two security guards drove into the alley at that moment. Dread fled up the alley exchanging gunshots with the guards, who were in hot pursuit, and cut east to Dearborn. Twenty minutes later the police and security guards found him hiding with the shotgun in the entrance way to a church.
“The crime that was committed against me was nothing,” Gordon recalls. “There are so many other victims out there that are more seriously injured by crimes. But during the past 21 years, I have changed my life in a lot of regards, the way I look at people with caution.”
John, whose wound had taken more than 100 stitches to close and who left the Chicago area shortly after the incident, admits that the attack caused him both “physical” and “psychological” pain.
Dread committed hundreds of crimes between 1970 and 1988, virtually all of them to get money for drugs. In the summer of 1988 he found himself heading back to prison for the sixth time, for a possible sentence of 30 years. While awaiting trial in the county jail on three counts of burglary, he managed to convince drug counselors in the TASC program, who then convinced Circuit Court Judge Mary Maxwell Thomas, that he wanted to get off drugs and turn his life around.
A judge takes a chance
“I decided to take a chance on Leon,” Judge Thomas recalls. “I looked him right in the eye and said, `Do you understand that I’m putting my neck on the line for you, and do you understand that if you blow this, you know, it’s going to be my neck. And if you come back, know you’ll be dealt with accordingly?’ “
“I had never had an African-American judge decide my fate,” Dread recalled. “Every time I went to the penitentiary it was by a white judge. So that right there did something to me.
“It was a sensible, intelligent move to make because it was either take these 30 years that this lady’s going to give you or go through treatment and be successful at it, so I went to Division 8, to the Drug Unit.”
Dread left the jail drug unit in August 1990 and went to the Gateway drug progam in Lake Villa.
In May 1991, he left the program and started working with the homeless at Haymarket House on Sangamon Street, signed up for school, attended A.A. meetings and struggled with his recovery.
In August that year, while conducting a drug seminar at the Northwest Outreach Youth Center in Austin, he met Griscillia Moore, who was working there as a supervisor. They were married a year later, and he’s now working with women in the Gateway Drug Unit in the county jail, speaking at schools and working on his bachelor’s degree at Harold Washington College.
“I’m skeptical,” said Sgt. William Disselhorst, who arrested Dread in that 1972 robbery. “I’ve looked at his sheet and it hasn’t been any length of time that would give me a degree of assurance that if the opportunity arose and he was in a desperate situation that he might not resort to crime.”
“Who establishes the yardstick on whether or not I’m serious about what I’m doing or not,” Dread responded. “Even after I get 10 years, there are still going to be some people that say, he’s doing something. The people that knew me when I was getting high, they don’t believe. They don’t believe. That’s just human nature.”
When looking at what made Dread change, there appears no one magic button. Just as a combination of risk factors originally set him on a destructive course, it was a combination of events that made him alter it.
At 40, a mix of exhaustion, fear, a long prison term, the expectations of a judge, the discovery of a new family with rules and expectations in the Gateway drug treatment progam, and an acceptance of his own responsibility helped direct him down a new path.
Dread had felt bad about himself all his life, and had dealt with those feelings by turning to violence and drugs.
What Gateway taught him, in essence, was that the feelings of power and self-esteem that came from being able to control others through violence did not compare with the feelings of power and self-esteem that came from being able to control himself.
Men like Dread have a lot to teach us about violence. He knows the subject. He has lived with it for years, as a practitioner and as a victim. And he is struggling daily to overcome it. In himself and in others.
I told Dread that I had showed his “sheet” to a policeman friend of mine who called it “the classic sheet of a bust-out junkie.” Dread did not disagree with that.
The cop said he didn’t doubt that Dread had changed. He said he’s seen it happen to other older players.
“It ain’t that he got religion,” the cop said. “He just got old. And scared. It’s a jungle out there and these young kids today, if they see you slowed down, don’t matter who you were when, they’ll eat you up alive.”
Leon did not disagree with that, either. By the age of 40, as he puts it, “I was sick and tired of being sick and tired.”
