Bobby” Gore, retired Vice Lord, examines the tattered black and white photo showing the leaders of the gang-himself, Pee Wee, Cupid, Alfonso and Leonard. They are standing on a sidewalk with their canine mascot, “Tiger.”
“He’s dead, he’s dead, he’s dead, he’s dead,” Gore says, pausing. “The dog’s dead. I’m the only one left from the group.”
At 59, Gore is a survivor, a guy who relinquished his gang leadership and moved on. A reminder that leaving the gang is rarely easy but not impossible. Gore doesn’t have any photos of them, but he mentions a couple of police officers who are former Vice Lords. He adds, “They wouldn’t want anyone to know.”
Yes, ex-gangbangers are cops. They also are preachers, lawyers, mechanics, meter readers, city employees, even students. One example: “Will Kill,” a former gang bodyguard, is studying for his master’s degree in social work.
After leaving, ex-gang members-like ex-drug addicts-often want to lend a helping hand to those who are like their former, more dangerous selves. Gore, for instance, works for an agency that assists released convicts. A founding member of one Latino gang takes an interest in the neighborhood children who hang out at his hot dog stand, counseling them to stay in school. He also assists a pastor who is trying to reach gang members.
Politics is another refuge. Ald. Ricardo Muoz (22nd), who hung out with the Latin Kings in Little Village as a youth, says he never officially joined the gang but agrees it’s fair to describe him as a fringe member. There are other officeholders and would-be officeholders who have similar backgrounds, though most try to keep it quiet. The city’s most famous ex-gang member is also its most famous mayor: the late Mayor Richard J. Daley, a leader of the Hamburg Social Club, an Irish clan of softball players and street brawlers.
Daley, like Muoz, didn’t exactly seek out the label of ex-gang member either. Most former gang members, even those not in the limelight, would prefer not to talk about it; if they do, they’d like to make sure their names won’t be published, or they try to gloss over the mayhem they created. So, their stories often go untold or incompletely sketched.
Academics, meanwhile, have only a limited understanding of what motivates a gang member to quit. Researchers tend to be more interested in why kids join gangs than in how they leave them.
Firm numbers in gang research, in general, are hard to come by. For instance, the total number of gang members, male and female, in Chicago can only be estimated, though that may be too generous a word for what is clearly guesswork.
“There’s no membership list,” cautions Donald Hilbring, commander of gang investigations for the Chicago Police Department. He says there are “approximately” 50,000 to 70,000 gang members in Chicago, fewer than five percent of them female.
Hilbring doesn’t see girl gangbangers as a growing sector. Wilfredo Gonzalez, a gang intervention worker for the Chicago Commons agency (and a former gang member), tells a different story; 30 to 40 percent of Near Northwest Side gang members are girls, he says, far more than a decade ago.
Guessing how many or what percentage of males and females leave the gang would be sheer folly. Here’s a ballpark estimate: somewhere between “not enough to mention” and “more than you would think.”
Says Gonzalez: “The numbers, as far as success stories, are not very high.”
But numbers, even if tallied by the U.S. Census Bureau and interpreted by a team of social scientists, never could completely explain this phenomenon. Perhaps only people like Bobby Gore or the others profiled on these pages really understand.
Why do they quit? Juan Ramirez has a simple explanation. “Once you have something to lose, you become ineffective as a gangbanger,” he says. For Ramirez, it was a wife and a child and a budding career as an actor that saved him-people and aspirations that he no longer could put in jeopardy.
In the examples here, the individuals found something to replace the camaraderie and structure of the gang. For Connie Morris, it was religion. For Hector Escalera, it was a loving home. For Gore, it was education and his social work. It does not always happen this way, but all of these former gang members have left their old neighborhoods.
Their stories are more than personal histories. Told together, they become a compelling history of gangs in Chicago and how they have evolved-from the days when they resembled rough-and-tumble boys clubs, to an era when they were awarded federal grant money for community-minded projects, to modern times, when drug money and the availability of deadly weapons prompted the Chicago Crime Commission to label street gangs “Public Enemy No. 1” earlier this year.
But for all the tough-talking denunciations of gangs by the crime commission and the cops, former gang members often are the most stinging critics of gangbanging. That’s probably because they feel more empathy for the young lives being wasted, and they understand that, with a few breaks, those lives can be redeemed-that it’s not too long a journey from the street corner to a college classroom.
Even T.J., featured here because he’s still in the gang but wants to get out, considers gangbanging a foolish pursuit. “It screwed up my life,” he says.
They all know what’s at stake, which is why they agreed to talk so openly of their pasts. Says Gore: “I would hope the story would turn out where somebody would learn some sense from it.”
Juan Ramirez joined a gang in 6th or 7th grade. The way he saw it, he had no choice.
“You had to get from point A to point B, and the majority of the people between point A and point B were white,” Ramirez says. “The only thing you had was strength in numbers.”
It was a classic example of a group of neighborhood kids banding together to play ball, hang out and defend themselves. The time was the mid-’60s, but it could’ve been the turn of the century, so familiar is the pattern. The corner was Beach and Spaulding Avenues in West Humboldt Park, but it could’ve been somewhere in the Austin neighborhood on the West Side or Englewood, down south. New York, Philly or L.A.
In Humboldt Park, the whites already had their gangs-the Bel Aires, the Jousters, the Polish Mafia, the Simon City Royals, the Drakers. Before the Latinos moved in, the whites fought each other, their conflicts often based on ethnic rivalries. The Latinos formed their own gangs; battle lines and racial lines were the same.
The gang meant protection. Protection from getting your butt whipped or your pride wounded. Protection, too, from the erosion of identity that accompanies immigrant assimilation.
“We needed the gang to continue being Latino,” recalls Ramirez, a first generation Mexican-American. He and his buddies (mainly of Puerto Rican descent) aspired to some sort of street version of Latin royalty, as suggested by their moniker: the Imperial Gangsters. Later, it was the Latin Kings, which absorbed Ramirez’s smaller group.
Ramirez grew up exposed to both radical politics and neighborhood combat. It was with some pride that he watched the whites flee Humboldt Park, thinking it a glorious racial victory rather than a prelude to even more bloodshed.
“So we were left there-all these warriors, with only each other to face.”
Ramirez, 37, is sitting in partial darkness on the stage at the Latino Chicago Theatre Co. in Wicker Park, where he works as artistic director. It’s a quiet place to talk and, perhaps, the best locale for Ramirez to relive a saga filled with such emotion, color and tragedy.
“The community people tried to convince us, ‘Look, man, you’re killing your own kind.’ It was too late. We were just going to kill each other. Someone had killed so-and-so and we knew it and we knew they were laughing about it. We just knew it, and so when we did shit we would laugh about it.”
Gang hits were executed from the front seats of cars, and later from the back seats, so that a gunman could hide in the rear and a driver could cruise along, seemingly alone and less likely to draw attention. But a bicycle also had its advantages for an attack. Bikes don’t have license plates.
Elaborate strategy sessions often preceded the deed: “We’ll disguise ourselves as old men and get real close.” Or: “Let’s sneak up on those guys under the viaduct. We can walk along the tracks and aim our shotguns from above, under the viaduct. They’ll be sitting ducks. They’re so stupid.”
Ramirez survived a drive-by shooting, wounded in his buttocks and legs. He remembers the buckshot from that shotgun blast whizzing through his hair. Not long after, he retaliated against his attacker in another drive-by, shooting him in the side of the face. Ramirez later saw the rival with a patch over his eye and figured he probably blinded him. Had the gangs back then been using the high-powered weapons and deadly ammunition common today there would have been more killings, he believes.
“We did it all, and it was nothing to be proud of,” Ramirez says. When there weren’t scores being settled, there were drugs to be sold-pot, acid, cocaine. Ramirez’s section of the gang drew the line at heroin, selling only what they liked to consume. The gang’s routine included cheap wine and potent malt liquor, all-night parties and girls swooning over the tough guys who swaggered in Stacy Adams wingtips, crisply pressed khakis and leather jackets.
But by 1977 Ramirez, the true believer, was wracked by doubt and the adrenaline was stanched by sorrow.
“Friends of mine were just dropping-by drugs, by murder, by suicide,” Ramirez says. “People were dying, and these people had wives already or kids, and there were 15-year-old widows, and you went to all the funerals and the parents were-they were just so drained. These martyred women-the lament. And the fathers, powerless and just, like, dried up.”
Ramirez left town-“high on angel dust, with two women and a ’66 Rambler and a friend”-and ended up in Los Angeles.
Were this tale being recast by a playwright or screenwriter, the story might end here, the angel dust edited out and the protagonist on his way to better things.
In reality, though, Ramirez’s escape from Humboldt Park was only the beginning of a long process. Gang members leave in all sorts of ways; Ramirez just started fading away. “It was a kind of a gradual nudging out of it,” he says.
When he returned to Humboldt Park after six months in California, he began attending acting workshops and trying to reform his violent ways. It wasn’t easy. Most of his friends still were Kings. He hid guns for them, provided alibis, sometimes rode with them on drive-bys.
He was in his early 20s, had a wife (his second), a little boy (his first, after a daughter from his previous marriage) and a reason to want to stay alive, or at least keep his family out of harm’s way. He began to think he could use the gang to help the community and started tutoring children, coaching basketball and teaching theater in the neighborhood.
One night, out with the guys, a confrontation escalated and his friends piled out of their car for a fight. Ramirez froze. He couldn’t get out. He was in a play at the Victory Gardens Theatre and didn’t want to show up for the next night’s performance with a black eye or a broken nose.
It was almost time to move on.
When his young son was cast in a McDonald’s commercial in 1983, the Ramirez family realized a windfall and moved to a quiet North Side neighborhood.
Juan Ramirez retired from the gang life. He really had no choice. He had changed, and he realized that he could not change the gang. The drug trade was too lucrative. The younger members were too wild. The illusion had been stripped away.
Ramirez never made a triumphant return to Humboldt Park-though he owns a coachhouse there that serves as a writing retreat. In recent years his movie credits have included small roles in “The Fugitive,” “Backdraft” and “The Package”; he was a regular in the television series “Missing Persons.” But his passion for the last nine years has been the Latino Chicago Theater Co.
For some acting roles, Ramirez uses heavy makeup to mask an old gang tattoo, which covers nearly the entire back of his left hand. That tattoo, self-designed and self-executed with a needle and India ink, depicts a book. Its covers are decorated with branches and the initials B and S, for Beach and Spaulding.
Surgeons using lasers now routinely remove such tattoos, but Ramirez shuns the idea. That would be like forsaking all the guys from Beach and Spaulding.
So the tattoo remains, and the stain only seems to get darker as the years pass. He expects to keep it always.
Ding her time at Cabrini-Green, Connie Morris was a very valuable gang member.
She wasn’t a shooter. But as a Vice Lady-Vicelet, for short-she held the guns for the male gang members, hiding them in her pants or down her shirt. She wasn’t an assassin, but she was an effective spy, slipping into enemy territory for the Lords.
“A woman’s got an influence on a man,” says Morris, now 25. “You’d put some shorts on, something slinky, and they thinkin’ about that. They tryin’ to flirt and you flirtin’, and all the time you’re lookin’ at them, seein’ what they’re doin’, and how they’re doin’ it. You on a mission.”
The mission might be to determine where rivals are standing and how many have guns. “And then I’d leave and they’d go in shootin’,” she says.
The female gang member contributes to a gang in different ways than a young man might, but her reasons for getting involved are similar. She wants to belong. She wants status. She thinks she’ll make money, and she’s not the kind who backs down from a fight.
In Morris’ case, two older brothers were in the gang and the neighborhood boys she wanted to date were gang members too. She joined the Vice Lords at age 14. “That was, like, the crowd, the biggest, baddest ones,” she says.
Her self-portrait is something of an understatement: “Girlfriend wasn’t nothin’ nice.”
By 16, she was dealing cocaine and heroin, sometimes from her family’s public housing apartment. Her mother, a heroin abuser, didn’t mind, Morris says. At 18, an unwed mother with two children, Morris experimented with heroin and soon was addicted. She dropped out of high school. Her drug profits, which could reach $500 on a day when public aid checks were cashed, dropped as she inhaled and smoked the profits.
“My kids would say, `Momma I’m hungry,’ and I’d say, ‘I’ll be right back,’ and I’d go get a blow and then beg for a quarter to get them something to eat,” she says.
There is a trace of shame in her voice as she describes this portion of her life. But it is no more than a trace. There is also a certain detachment, as if she is talking about another person. Morris is a born-again Christian. That other person-the not-so-nice gangbanger-doesn’t exist anymore.
She found Jesus Christ on July 20, 1994. He did not stop her from spending her public aid check, money meant to feed and clothe her three children, on drugs and booze that afternoon. But that day she did take home a flyer with a phone number that changed her life, courtesy of Victory Outreach.
Victory Outreach, a nondenominational, evangelical street ministry, had staged a rally at Cabrini-Green, complete with Christian rappers and testimonies from former gang members and drug addicts telling how their lives had been saved. Morris listened. She sensed they knew what she was going through.
Her life was a mess. She feared losing her children to the state, and she felt the grip of her addiction slowly tightening. She also was afraid of what the gang would do to her if she ever got up the nerve to leave. She had seen others beaten badly, even shot in the leg, for “violations” of gang law, and she knew leaving could have similar repercussions.
In the early morning hours of July 21, after binging on crack and heroin, she wasn’t high-just alone and distraught. She called the number on the flyer. The door is open, she was told. After two bus rides, she arrived on the doorstep of a group home run by Victory Outreach in a quiet West Side neighborhood, bordering a suburb. In a plastic shopping bag, she carried a flimsy dress, a toothbrush, toothpaste and toilet paper.
The church became her new family, religion her new strength. Her little girl, 6, and youngest son, 2, now live with her there, and they share space with two other women in the basement. Her eldest son, 8, lives with her boyfriend in a home for men run by Victory Outreach. The church people never let her wear the dress she brought-too revealing. She has given up drugs, alcohol, even cigarettes. She studies the Bible, watches after her children and evangelizes at Victory Outreach’s street rallies.
A social worker who knows Morris says, “It changed her life completely around.” Morris believes what has happened to her is miraculous, and those who know her would not argue with that. But it is not unusual.
Religion, particularly when preached through nontraditional churches, can be a way out for gang members who are desperate for change. In many respects, it is a logical transition. One devotion traded for another, one set of rules replaced by a new code of values.
“I think a lot of people end up in a gang or on drugs because they’re looking for something,” says Victory Outreach Pastor Nick Walker, himself a former gang member and drug addict from Los Angeles. “There’s a void in their lives.”
There’s also this reality for those who have hit bottom: Only a street church is likely to open its arms to someone on the margins of society with no education, no job skills and a police record. Second chances are not a common commodity in Cabrini-Green, as they are in wealthier communities.
Researchers note that female gang members often leave the gang earlier than males, with pregnancy and the responsibilities of motherhood usually the catalysts for change. Another factor is that women, because they rarely are as deeply involved as the men, find it easier to fade away. The gang had not become a way of life for them.
Morris is still living in the group home. It is a modest place with lace curtains hanging over the windows and framed religious posters on the walls. A boom box plays gospel music. Someday, Morris would love to run a home like this, help people who come from the same troubled circumstances as she did.
Occasionally, she will return to visit Cabrini-Green. Some people don’t recognize her. Her clothes are clean, the curse words have been cleansed from her vocabulary. The vacant eyes that stare from her public housing I.D. photo are alive again; they sparkle when she plays with her children.
Though she knows she made more than a few enemies at Cabrini-Green, no one hassles her there.
“They see the difference,” Morris says. “They know I’m not the same. It’s like God: He made the crooked path straight.”
It didn’t take long for Hector Escalera to get out of the gang. Four minutes. One of his fellow gangbangers timed it with his watch. Three others surrounded Escalera and beat him until he was numb.
This was his way out-his “violation,” the brutal ritual that would cancel his membership. He met the guys behind the Hans Christian Andersen grammar school, out of view of the street. They hugged him, then they started hitting him. Escalera, who was 15 at the time, was not allowed to strike back.
“Cover your face,” Escalera reminded himself.
He had been violated into the gang six years before, becoming a “peewee” member. Two other peewees beat on him for about two minutes. When they violate you in they can’t hit you in your head. But when they violate you out, anything goes.
“Don’t fall down,” Escalera reminded himself. “If you fall down, they might kick you.”
He felt his nose start to bleed. Blood in his mouth. Pain in his back, legs and arms. A flurry of blows to the stomach, and he lost his breath. Three minutes gone, and he didn’t feel anything.
Escalera told himself, “This is worth it. This is the last time I’m going to get beat up.”
“Time!” Four minutes were up. Escalera fell to the ground and stayed there for 20 more. When he got up, they hugged him again. And then he walked away, a former gangbanger.
Escalera, now 21, is a student at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he is studying history and criminal justice. He’d like to become a lawyer, but whatever he does with his career he hopes to give something back to his old neighborhood. He already is doing what he can, talking to gang leaders to permit several members to quit without enduring a violation. (He prefers not to have his old gang identified in this story because he doesn’t want gang members in his new neighborhood to target him.)
Whatever pain he experienced during the violation was worth it, he says. “The violation felt good. I mean, it felt bad. But after a couple weeks coming around the neighborhood, a lot of people said, `Hey, we heard you’re going to be doing good. We heard you got out.’ And that sort of sparked a feeling that, Hey, I’m beginning to feel good about myself.”
Sitting on a crumbling stoop at Thomas Street and Wolcott Avenue, his former hangout, Escalera can see the Andersen schoolyard and the other places where most of his gang life played out. Across the way, when he was no more than 7, older gang members stuffed his pockets with packets of cocaine or marijuana. Escalera didn’t know what he was holding, didn’t understand that the gangbangers were using him because they figured the cops would never search a little boy.
“Good kid,” the older guys told him.
That felt nice, real nice. Better than the feedback from his mother, a drug abuser who had little time for her son. “You’re stupid,” she would tell him.” Or, “You will never become anything.” His father was long gone.
Escalera recalls watching “The Cosby Show” and “Family Ties” on TV and fantasizing about a life that was wholly alien and completely transfixing. The next best thing was on Thomas and Wolcott.
He graduated into small-time drug dealing, but it was as a street warrior that he made his rep. He was called “Bricker,” a brick being his favorite weapon to use on car windows-or on rivals’ skulls. He was just as malicious with his fists, a broken bottle, or a gun. (“Shoot at the bad guys,” he had been instructed before his first gang gunfight.)
His real weapon, though, was his anger. “I didn’t feel no pain because I used to be so angry,” he says. “I had nothing to lose and nothing to fear.”
By 14 he had a small-time rap sheet and had been kicked out of Amundsen High School. He fended for himself, rarely coming home, dining on doughnuts he scavenged from garbage cans in his Ukrainian Village neighborhood.
He drifted. First, with his mother to Puerto Rico. Then, on his own, to New York. And, finally, back to Chicago, where he was wanted by police for violating a judicial order to stay in Puerto Rico with his family.
It looked as though he would be returning to the same corner in a dead-end life. He didn’t realize it, but he was coming home to a new family.
Carmen Colon, a diminutive and kind cafeteria worker, had taken a liking to Escalera at Amundsen. She saw beyond his bravado. She and her husband, Cristobal Colon, had previously asked Escalera if he wanted to live with them and their three daughters. He liked the Colons, but he had always declined.
This time, they made their request in juvenile court when Escalera’s case came up again. He agreed, and the judge granted temporary custody.
They weren’t the Huxtables from “Cosby,” but they were the perfect family for Escalera. Cristobal was an ex-con, a former high-ranking gangbanger who straightened out his life at age 34. His transformation is best symbolized now by his fingers. Once they bore gaudy rings; now they are callused, and his nails are dirty from his work as a mechanic. Carmen had been dragged reluctantly into the gang life by her love for Cristobal. They left the gang together, becoming Christians and forming a Pentecostal youth ministry, God’s Army. She is now 48 years old and he is 43.
They understood what Escalera was going through. Their religious belief allowed for miracles; their experience told them this one wouldn’t happen overnight.
Cristobal Colon told Escalera: “We’re going to pull you in toward us little by little. We’re not going to yank you to us.”
The Amundsen principal allowed him back and Escalera began attending church. Still, most afternoons he made his way from his new home in Logan Square back to Thomas and Wolcott.
By 10 p.m., the Colons were coming to get him. They told him it was dangerous to be out too late. Pretty soon they were cutting back his hours to 6 or 7 p.m. Then they told him he could only hang out every other day. Then, just weekends.
Instead of resenting it, Escalera looked forward to the moment his new parents would arrive to take him home.
“I never felt that kind of love before,” he says.
Custody isn’t permanent in a legal sense, but in every other way the Colons have become Escalera’s family.
It was on a summer day that Escalera told his gang’s leaders that he wanted to be “violated out.”
It’s possible to just walk away from the gang. Go on vacation, retire, fade away. But that leaves a door open. “Two or three weeks later, they’re back because they never got violated out,” Escalera says.
The gang leaders told Escalera to think it over. He said he was sure. He wanted that door triple-bolted.
“I wanted to make sure I would never come back.”
Bobby Gore still goes back. Two or three times a week, before he heads home to the south suburbs, he takes a detour to the Lawndale neighborhood on the West Side. Sometimes he carries job applications with him. Or condoms to distribute to teenagers and adults. He usually leaves Lawndale with his wallet a little lighter, after underwriting a woman who needs a loaf of bread or buying candy for some children. The young ones call him “Uncle Bobby.”
Gore’s reaction to the spectacle of neighborhood kids playing in the Douglas Parkway-tumbling, turning and soaring in an unscheduled show of acrobatic prowess-is typical.
“All they need is a chance,” he says.
He tells the children that they’re good enough to be part of the famous Jesse White Tumblers. He promises to contact the politician about them, then warns them to watch out for glass shards in the grass.
Curious as it may sound, Fred “Bobby” Gore once thought that he could provide those opportunities, enriching young lives and the neighborhood, through the Vice Lords. That was almost 30 years ago, when he was at the forefront of a movement to transform the gang into a legitimate neighborhood group, make the “Vice” in its name obsolete.
By the mid-1960s many Vice Lord leaders were no longer teens and had begun to see gang violence as a dead end. Gore, who had turned 30 and was a vice president in the gang, already had acquired his limp, a souvenir from a shotgun ambush as he relaxed on a front porch one night.
But another change, just as a dramatic, slowly was taking hold of him; he had begun to see that the Vice Lord leaders needed to forget their grudges with rivals and focus on Lawndale’s youths, make sure they stayed in school, stayed away from guns and drugs and grew up to be responsible men. Otherwise, the neighborhood would continue its plunge into despair.
This was a time when gangs still were seen as groups of troubled boys, rather than criminal organizations or emerging mobs, and drug distribution was not a major source of income for the gang. It also was a time of social upheaval, civil rights marches and black political awakening. There were plenty of liberal activists, politicians and corporations, even a West Side police commander, who believed gangs could be cultivated for the community good.
The Vice Lords, which had been formed in the St. Charles juvenile detention center, became the Conservative Vice Lords-a reflection, it was said, of new goals and values. Grant money poured in from government and private sources, and the CVLs became an incorporated entity, opening an ice cream parlor, an arts and crafts boutique and a business office on 16th Street.
And then, just as quickly as it started, this brief moment of promise was over. The political climate changed by 1969, and the money dried up. The Vice Lords couldn’t sustain the businesses or contain their violent members.
Unless you count Gore, barely a trace of that effort remains in Lawndale.
“Sometimes, it makes you want to cry,” Gore says during a tour of the neighborhood, with its empty lots, outdoor drug markets, shuttered businesses and pervasive air of desperation.
The Vice Lords, of course, remain. But Gore feels little empathy toward the gang and what it now stands for-drug money and drug turf.
“I’ve always been against them,” he says of drugs. “I knew it would bring killing. I knew it would bring a lot of disharmony.
“Everyone’s in it for the dollar from what I see; from what I’ve seen, nobody has time for the kids anymore. I don’t condone it. As a matter of fact, a lot of those guys, I’ve come face to face with ’em and I tell ’em, ‘I’m ashamed of what you’re doing.’ “
He relinquished his leadership position while in Stateville Correctional Center in the early 1970s and became an inactive gang member; he felt out of touch with the younger members and angry about the gang’s growing interest in the drug trade.
By then, he was hitting the books, first to earn his high school equivalency certificate and then two undergraduate degrees. He lent his leadership abilities to a prison chapter of the Illinois Jaycees.
In a 1973 book about the Vice Lords, author and Vice Lord associate David Dawley wrote, “Bobby demonstrated an unrelenting gut determination to survive, to grow-an inspiration to the many young people he urged to give up territorial jealousies, to stop violence, to find a better way.”
Gore served 11 years in prison for a murder committed outside a tavern. It’s a crime he has steadfastly maintained he didn’t commit. That’s not something he’s ever likely to prove conclusively. But what he has demonstrated for the last two decades-inside prison and out-is his desire to help people and to work constructively within the system.
He’s now a counselor in the Cabrini-Green office of the Safer Foundation, a nonprofit group that helps convicts adjust to life outside prison and find jobs. Before that, immediately after his release, Gore worked for the Cook County public guardian, Patrick Murphy. Murphy had defended him in his murder trial. He represented a lot of Vice Lords while in private practice; most of them were probably guilty, Murphy now says. But not, in his view, Gore.
“I just think he’s a phenomenal guy,” Murphy says. “He was just a guy who took to the gangs as a way to help other people. The gangs today are entirely different.”
Even after prison, Gore had the opportunity to cash in on the new drug economy and the respect his name still garnered in the gang world. “You could be filthy rich,” gang leaders told him. Gore declined.
Instead, he married again (prison ruined his first marriage) and moved out of Lawndale, helping to raise four step-children and eventually settling in south suburban Lynwood. All his stepchildren attended college, he proudly notes, and two graduated.
It’s with regret that he talks about his son from his first marriage and that child’s struggle with drug addiction, his difficulty holding onto a job. Gore wasn’t around to raise him, and he blames himself. Sometimes it is not the prisoner but his family that prison destroys.
Though he left the gang behind, Gore still clings to some of the same beliefs he held in the 1960s: that most gang members are redeemable, that black neighborhoods and black children are purposely ignored by the white power structure, that CVL leaders never got enough credit for what they were trying to accomplish.
Along 16th Street, there’s a new sign above an old motorcycle club announcing the latest tenant, the B C & B Not for Profit Private Social Club. Gore and two friends (one’s an inactive Vice Lord who now installs floors) have leased the space.
Once they get running water and other essentials, they want to open it up to children during the day and adults at night.
The money they make from club membership fees would go toward starting a social service center next door, giving Gore a Lawndale office again.
In the late ’60s, Gore offered Dawley this hard-nosed assessment of his life: “Rather than get pats on the back for what we’re doing now, we need to be kicked in the ass ’cause we should have been doing this 10 years ago. . . .You gotta see that your kids have a better chance. To hell with us. Our lives are wasted.”
Since then Gore has proved he wasn’t just talking a good game. He also proved himself wrong: His is not a life wasted.
T.J.’S DILEMMA: CLEAN LIFE OR DIRTY MONEY?
On his hip, T.J. wears a pager to keep in touch with his gang associates. Under his arm, he carries a worn textbook to keep up on his studies at trade school. The muscular, affable Spanish Cobra is caught between two worlds.
He’d like to leave the gang-and he says that he already has given up the gang violence-but he is still on the corner because that is where he sells his drugs.
He deals rock cocaine to finance his education and buy things for his 3-year-old daughter, who lives with her maternal grandparents.
“Life,” he says, “begins in April.” That’s when his studies should be complete and he hopes to begin making a decent income as an electrician.
“This isn’t a life,” he adds.
It may not be. But T.J.’s dual existence as gang member and student is part of the reality of modern street gangs. Talking to T.J., it becomes clear how emphatically drugs have altered the relationship between gangs and youths.
In another era, before street gangs entered the drug business, a young man like T.J. had little reason to remain a gang member. He would begin to tire of the fighting and the danger; he’d look to settle down, maybe find a factory job, slowly stop hanging out.
At 21, T.J. has been involved in enough trouble to last a lifetime-or earn a life sentence.
“I’ve done my drive-by shootings, burned people’s houses, burned their cars,” he says. “The newer guys come into the gang, they want to get their name. They want to have their respect too. You get drunk and go shoot at people. But I snapped out of it.”
One thing keeps him in the gang life-“easy money,” $500 dollars for a few hours’ work on a busy night. An electrician’s pay probably won’t match that. But T.J. says he’s willing to take a cut in salary in return for something better.
“It’s a better life,” he says. “It’s clean.”
