Young Boys Inc and the organizational model of drug rings

[Wombaticus Rex]

Via: http://nplusonemag.com/raise-the-crime-rate

a thirty-five-year period of “tough” crime laws. They began in New York State, with Nelson Rockefeller, the liberalish governor who, having failed three times to secure the Republican presidential nomination, decided he would make drug policy his peace offering to the party’s right wing. Previously an advocate of treatment programs and community supervision, Rockefeller abruptly changed course in 1973, innovating harsh mandatory minimum sentences for both the sale and possession of illegal drugs. In the next thirty years, New York’s prison population sextupled, climbing from 13,400 prisoners in 1973 to 71,500 prisoners in 2000.

The pattern soon repeated itself across the country. As whites abandoned the cities, their governors and legislatures enacted increasingly tough sentencing laws for the minorities left behind. In 1978, in what he would later call the biggest mistake of his life, Michigan’s governor, William Milliken, an embattled moderate Republican from the state’s desolate north, signed the 650-lifer law, a Rockefeller-inspired provision mandating life sentences for anyone caught in possession of 650 or more grams of cocaine or heroin. Only 200 people have served the life term, apparently because most big cases get transferred to federal court. (It’s still terrible, though: 85 percent of those sentenced under the provision had no prior criminal record.)

The new sentencing policies did little to discourage criminals. The same summer that Milliken signed his life-sentence law, an ambitious group of teenagers met on the playground of Birney Elementary, on Detroit’s west side, and founded Young Boys Inc., the first professionalized multicity drug-dealing ring in the United States. Within two years, YBI was pulling in $300,000 a day selling heroin in Detroit and other cities. Many of their clients were Vietnam veterans, tens of thousands of whom had become addicted to opium overseas. YBI’s crucial innovation was to distribute their product through a network of hard-to-prosecute juveniles, “corner boys” as young as 12 years old. They were also among the first to use limitless violence to terrorize and execute rivals. As the auto industry collapsed, the market for heroin grew more and more robust. By the mid-’80s, police activity had loosened the grip of YBI’s founders; by that time, though, the corner-boy and murder-the-competition model had spread to every major city in the United States.

And then came crack...

Via: http://old.post-gazette.com/pg/06064/665355.stm

How Detroit gang got to New Castle
Tactic of using teens as drug couriers invented by Young Boys Incorporated
Sunday, March 05, 2006
By Milan Simonich, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

DETROIT -- The gang called Young Boys Incorporated started here and changed the face of drug dealing.

Adults in their 20s and 30s took children from the streets and hired them to be couriers of crack cocaine. The kids would have most of the confrontations with police. Meantime, those behind the illicit operation would hide themselves and the money their couriers brought in.

If police caught the young drug runners, their juvenile status would protect them from adult punishment. Those who escaped the law would pocket a little money and learn about the business of operating a drug gang.

Every cop working a beat generally knows about the criminal system that Young Boys Incorporated started during the 1980s. But Pennsylvania law officers say they had never seen adults use 14- and 15-year-old drug runners so boldly or so widely until last month, when they caught two Detroit gangs that had shifted their crack-dealing operations to New Castle.

Pennsylvania Attorney General Tom Corbett said the number of couriers sent to New Castle was larger and more efficiently disguised than drug-dealing operations elsewhere in the state.

"These young dealers would stay for several weeks and then return to Detroit, replaced by another group of young dealers," he said.

New Castle Police Chief Thomas Sansone said couriers hired by drug dealers often are locals, but the gangs broke that pattern.

"What was different in this case was that all of the juveniles were from Detroit, and not one of them was reported as missing or a runaway," Chief Sansone said. "They were kids nobody was looking for."

Police say the couriers came from the East and West Sides of Detroit, where the gangs were headquartered. From there, adult bosses drove them 250 miles to New Castle. Once in town, they were to deliver crack cocaine to buyers and keep their mouths shut if police started asking questions.

They did just that.

When found on the streets late at night and questioned by New Castle police, the kids from Detroit lied about who they were. Whether they were staying in crack houses taken over by the gangs or fending for themselves is one of the case's enduring mysteries.

None was found with crack or cocaine, Chief Sansone said. In the end, those who were picked up by police ended up in a juvenile shelter while social workers searched for their parents or guardians.

The gang leaders' tactics threw Chief Sansone's 35-member department off stride for years. Each time his officers thought they had a bead on one group of couriers, a new army of 14-year-old dealers replaced them.

Only after the gangs had been in business for almost three years did their empire started to crumble. Police and prosecutors, using wiretaps and secret informants, obtained arrest warrants for 28 of the gang members. Seventeen of them are Detroit natives.

Even so, all the teenage couriers imported from Detroit slipped away. What became of them is the most haunting part of the case.

"It shows there is a whole underground -- an underworld -- that we don't have a handle on," said Carl S. Taylor, a Detroit native and Michigan State University professor noted for his street research on the gangs.

After World War II, when Detroit was capital of the auto industry, it had a humming economy and a population of almost 2 million. Today, it is down to 900,000 people, and it consistently ranks as one of the most impoverished big cities in America.

Dr. Taylor, 56, said a poor economy, staggering school dropout rate and sense of hopelessness combine to give Detroit gangs a steady supply of foot soldiers.

"Street culture is the one institution that will take you in when no one else will," he said.

Even though these criminal operations have eager teenagers to choose from, they also are facing a bad economy. No longer can the Detroit market feed every drug gang.

"When there's no more meat on the carcass, where do you go?" Dr. Taylor asked. "It's a tough and ugly situation in the city, so I'm not surprised that Detroit gangs find their way to Pennsylvania or Ohio or anywhere else."

In fact, he said, Detroit's drug gangs have branched out to the Midwest and South, all following the business blueprint created by Young Boys Incorporated. This means gangs recruit juveniles to do the dirty work of street sales and delivery while adults collect most of the money.

The leaders tend to be older and willing to use violence to shove out any hometown competition. That was the case in New Castle.

Police say Lamarol "Tone" Abram, 28, and James "O-Z" Brooks, 39, led the Detroit gangs that ran crack-dealing operations. They eventually expanded into Beaver and Mercer counties. Police estimate that, through violence or the threat of it, they eliminated 80 percent of the competition.

Mr. Corbett said the Detroit gangs chose Pennsylvania markets where they would be "the big fish."

But James Tate, second deputy police chief of Detroit, maintains that the gangs looked for a new base because they were being run out of their hometown.

Mr. Tate said Detroit police made drug busts totaling $140 million last year and $85 million in 2004. Because they are under such duress in Detroit, he said, gangs look for cities where they might operate with less pressure from police.

Mr. Corbett, though, said the gangs that took over the crack-dealing trade New Castle and other Western Pennsylvania towns never really left Detroit. They continued to accumulate powder cocaine at their home base in the city, he said. Then they drove the drug supply to Pennsylvania, where it was processed into crack.

In addition, the regular rotation of couriers from Detroit showed that the gangs always maintained their presence there, Chief Sansone said.

With operations in two states, the gangs confounded law enforcement for a time.

"It was frustrating," Chief Sansone said. "A few times we arrested people, adults and juveniles, who had felony drug warrants in Detroit. But then the Detroit police would not extradite them, so we had to let them go. They began to feel more comfortable when they realized we couldn't do anything to them."

Mr. Tate said he knew of no such breakdowns between law officers in Detroit and Pennsylvania. He said Wayne County courts and prosecutors, not his department, typically handle extraditions.

For Dr. Taylor, who wrote about Young Boys Incorporated in his 1990 book "Dangerous Society," gangs are not a police problem.

"They are societal problem, but they have been so glamorized with 'Scarface' and 'The Godfather' that we don't realize it. I'm guilty because I'm looking forward to 'The Sopranos' as much as anybody."

He says the 14-year-old drug couriers who moved from Detroit to New Castle should have been found out immediately, as they were not in school. But nobody in Detroit, not a mom or a dad or a neighbor, seemed to notice when teenager left town for weeks at a time.

"Gangs are evidence of a total breakdown of society," Dr. Taylor said. "It's not 'The Sopranos' at all. It's dog eat dog, life in its lowest form. That's the part of this we should be most worried about."

(I know what you might be thinking about Carl Taylor based on that language, but he's not an academic racist, he's an activist.)

[American Dream]

Thanks for posting this. I would never claim to be an expert on major African American drug dealing organizations, but everything I do know locates them as part of the deep power structure- integrated with the larger underworld though more often the ones doing distribution to the lack community- and protected to a good degree by corrupt police officials and municipal networks.

That said, it clearly doesn't stop there but can extend on up to alphabet soups on a federal level and the history sure seems to include a strong agenda of social control...

[Wombaticus Rex]

VIA: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/artic ... 94,00.html

It was the kind of research project most social scientists avoid. The researcher had to lay out $50,000 of his own money. He spent six years in one + of Detroit's most dangerous neighborhoods in the company of two of the most violent street gangs in America. He routinely asked highly personal questions of edgy young men who earn small fortunes selling drugs and have few qualms about killing people who inquire too closely about their activities.

For obvious reasons, most research on violent urban subcultures is done with computer printouts, not with tape recorders and notebooks on the mean streets. Not so with Carl S. Taylor, adjunct professor of criminal justice at Michigan State University and director of the Criminal Justice Program at Jackson Community College. In 1980 Taylor set out to study Detroit's two biggest and most powerful youth gangs: Young Boys Inc. and the Pony Down. In the process, he encountered four additional groups. The resulting book, Dangerous Society, published in February by Michigan State University Press, provides a harrowing portrait of how the gangs transformed themselves from opportunistic street punks into sophisticated drug-dealing empires that rake in hundreds of millions a year.

Taylor's work is of far more than academic significance. His major discovery is that even as Young Boys Inc. and the Pony Down were unraveling in the mid- 1980s following the jailings of their leaders, they were being quickly and silently replaced by far more sophisticated and highly secretive business operations. Taylor's findings contradict the sanguine attitude of fifth-term Mayor Coleman Young and his political allies, who insist that the Motor City no longer has a serious gang problem. Says inspector Benny Napoleon, who monitors gang activity for the Detroit police: "We have nothing remotely resembling a large, well-organized gang."

Taylor presents convincing evidence to the contrary: the groups have become less obvious to the police simply because they have shifted into more covert and more profitable enterprises. "Detroit kids just laugh when they hear people in L.A. are still wearing colors," says Taylor. "What's sweeping this city are what I call CEOs -- covert entrepreneurial organizations. They do not wear gold chains or beepers or Fila sweatsuits anymore. They're probably wearing ragged clothes and driving ratty cars. They've seceded from the union."

Cocaine sales fueled the evolution of Detroit's gangs. They began as what Taylor calls "scavengers," youths preying on the most vulnerable residents of their neighborhoods. But when the double whammy of crack and job cutbacks in the auto plants smashed into Detroit's poorest areas during the 1980s, the gangs developed "corporate" organizations with a concern for the bottom line and enough discipline to use violence mainly to protect their drug-dealing turfs.

Though smaller and far less visible than the original Young Boys Inc., which pioneered the use of hard-to-prosecute juveniles to sell drugs, the new-style crews have mimicked its security-conscious structure. "In Y.B.I., one of the keys was that the left hand didn't know what the right hand was doing," Taylor says. "That's still true. At the top of each organization you have what amounts to a wholesale operation."

Though most of the membership is drawn from the impoverished underclass, an increasing number of recruits from middle-class families have been lured by the promise of quick financial rewards. Taylor also discovered that female gangs, once considered relatively harmless adjuncts to male crews, have become dangerous, independent groups. In an interview with Taylor's research team, one female gang member bragged of ousting unwanted guests who tried to "bum rush" a party. The guests fled, she said, after "I cut loose on their fake asses with that Uzi."

Taylor believes that gang members share a grossly distorted version of the values mainstream Americans hold dear. The difference is that gang members want money and status faster, and are willing to kill to obtain them. Asked to identify his role models, one 14-year-old cited the cocaine-snorting protagonist of the movie Scarface and Chrysler chairman Lee Iacocca. "Lee Iacocca is smooth and he be dissing ((disrespecting, in street lingo)) everybody," the youth explained. In some cases, parents encourage their children's criminal careers. Said one: "My momma talk about how proud she is of me making doughski. She used to dog me and say I wasn't s---, but now she's proud."

Taylor grew up in the West Side neighborhood from which both Young Boys Inc. and the Pony Down sprang. He escaped with a scholarship to Michigan State. While pursuing a master's degree in criminal justice and a doctorate in education, he started a private security company. He first became aware of Young Boys Inc. when several of its red-sweatsuit-clad members swaggered into a concert at Joe Louis Arena in 1980.

Taylor urges an all-out war on the poverty, poor schooling, broken family structures and dire job prospects that make the urban underclass a seedbed for crime. Unfortunately, such prescriptions are not only familiar but also too expensive and time consuming to attract much political support. Detroit is already a case study of what happens when the conditions that produce gangs are allowed to fester. Warns Taylor: "We need to face up to the fact that there is a major crisis in this city."

Horribly formatted but includes a lot of pdf copies of original YBI stories: http://www.crimeindetroit.com/YoungBoys ... rated.html

Bizarre right wing narrative about how Butch Jones helped Al-Q: http://www.debbieschlussel.com/911/the- ... errorists/ <-- poorly written and full of barely veiled racism but the connections are strange enough for me to keep digging there.

[American Dream]

Tons more info on the black underworld here:

http://panachereport.com/channels/black ... index.html.

[American Dream]

Although this is not the place for any real discussion on Black gangs, they have a place in future politics, too. Because they're all about politics. Not that a criminal gang per se is a fascist organization, although they can resonate along that line. But in the 1990s the u.s. justice department named one particular Black gang as their "number one" target for national investigation & prosecution. This sounded like a strange choice, unless you know the details. The capitalist media talks about gangs as a crime problem, when really it's not about crime (since they're only killing and destroying the lives of New Afrikans, which isn't a crime to America). Although they are public, large and illegal, few if any Black gangs – such as the Vice-Lords which date back to the 1930s or the El-Rukyns which has neighborhood courts where personal disputes are settled and whose leaders were formally invited to President Nixon's inaugural ball – have been ended by the police.Because Black gangs aren't about youth and aren't about crime, although they do crime. They are new violent institutions informally sanctioned by u.s. capitalism, like death squads or drug cartels are, formed as capitalism adapts to this new zone of protracted crisis.

Like many other gangs, this organization controlled a large territory in which its thousands of armed members essentially ruled streets and de facto much of the lives of the population (while it enrolled thousands of youth, much of its structure and leadership were not only adult but middle-aged). Nothing from selling drugs to anti-racist campaigns could take place without their permission. It made and ran on millions of dollars each year in criminal economics. This was tacitly approved of by the police and government, as a "sterilization" to ensure that mass Black revolt did not sweep the inner cities as in the 1960s. Situation normal. It's not quite Betty Crocker, but it really is America as we know it.

However, unlike most gang organizations, it had a leadership with as much practical social-political vision as any George Washington. In the ruthless u.s. counterinsurgency against the 1960s Black liberation movement, their inner city territory had been left a devastated postwar terrain of the type all too familiar to us. A vacuum deliberately maintained by u.s. capitalism. This gang organization decided to fill that vacuum, to become something like an underground dictatorial state. Not only by building illicit ties with policemen and government officials (and sending their own soldiers into the police and correctional guards), not only by starting its own businesses & stores, but by running popular Black anti-racist political campaigns and placing its own electoral candidates in the Democratic Party.

So it wanted to have its own economy and its own share of local State power, as well as violent control of the streets. When it started using indirect federal grants to carry out successful mass voter registration campaigns, with rallies of thousands of people cheering its leading figures, red lights went off. This possibility of a Black quasi-state inside a major u.s. city pushed all the buttons In Washington. This gang organization is not a fascist party, of course. And neither the organization nor the members have fascist ideology – a mafia is a closer example. But there are fascist precursors in the mass gang subculture. A mass armed criminal organization of declassed men that wants not only to have a rough control of the local population but have a linked economic and political program of domination has taken a step towards fascism (many white criminal gangs are already consciously pro-fascist, of course). Such possible future fascist developments might take a nationalist, "anti-racist" or religious outward form.

From:

THE SHOCK OF RECOGNITION:
Looking at Hamerquist's Fascism & Anti-Fascism

by J. Sakai
(an excerpt from Confronting Fascism: Discussion Documents for a Militant Movement)



http://www.kersplebedeb.com/mystuff/boo ... shock.html

[Wombaticus Rex]

Via: http://48201radio.com/2012/02/02/feds-c ... state-rep/

Feds charge alleged leader of Metro Detroit drug ring, former state rep.

Detroit— An accused drug kingpin from Macomb County hobbled into federal court on crutches Wednesday after prosecutors said they hobbled his heroin, cocaine and marijuana ring.

Washington Township resident Carlos Powell was indicted along with 11 others Wednesday following a multi-year investigation — first reported by The Detroit News — of an international drug ring based in Metro Detroit. Among those charged: former state Rep. Ken Daniels, D-Detroit.

During the probe, the feds have seized more than $21 million in cash, 66 pounds of heroin, 26 pounds of cocaine and 1,000 pounds of marijuana. The size, scope and profits of Powell’s alleged drug ring would rank him among the most prolific drug dealers in recent Detroit history.

“This surpasses everybody,” said Carl Taylor, a criminologist at Michigan State University who has studied drug trafficking in Detroit. “That’s very scary. That’s a lot of heroin and a tremendous amount of cash, particularly at this time.”

Powell’s drug ring allegedly laundered profits and purchased $800,000 worth of jewelry, real estate in Michigan and Georgia, luxury vehicles, including two Bentleys, a Ferrari, a Rolls Royce, and boats. Most have been seized.

Powell, 37, stood mute while being arraigned in federal court on charges that could send him to prison for life, and was freed on $50,000 unsecured bond. Powell, the president of an Eastpointe-based company called Grand Towers Inc., must wear a global-positioning device and adhere to a curfew.

Powell declined to comment. His lawyer, N.C. Deday LaRene, declined to comment but said his client’s reliance on crutches was unrelated to his arrest early Wednesday in Eastpointe.

The arrest capped a six-year probe. The probe was revealed in a forfeiture complaint filed by Assistant U.S. Attorney Julie Beck in December 2010 that summarizes the seizures and describes an alleged drug and money-laundering operation.

The drug ring arranged for large amounts of cash from drug sales to be hauled to Phoenix, Ariz.; Mexico; and elsewhere to buy more drugs, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

The drugs were distributed in semi-trucks and vehicles customized with hidden compartments for marijuana, cocaine, heroin and cash, according to prosecutors. Large-scale heroin seizures are rare.

“We are focused on dismantling major drug trafficking organizations that bring illegal drugs into our community,” U.S. Attorney Barbara McQuade said in a statement. “We want young people to see that the lucrative rewards from drug trafficking are short-lived and lead to criminal charges.”

One of the big-ticket items identified in court records allegedly involved Daniels, who represented Detroit in the state House from 1999 to 2004 and served on the Detroit Board of Education. The indictment alleges Daniels purchased two cashier’s checks in September 2010 from area banks, which were used to buy a 2007 Mercedes sport-utility vehicle for Powell.

If convicted of aiding and abetting financial transactions, Daniels faces up to five years in prison.

He was freed on $10,000 unsecured bond. Daniels, 53, shook his head when asked if he had any comment by reporters.

His lawyer, Tom Jakuc, said Daniels was a victim of circumstances.

“The circumstances as set forth in the indictment can be readily explained,” Jakuc said, though he declined to elaborate. “This is truly out of character for a person of his standing and reputation.”

Since March 2010, agents involved in the Powell investigation have executed at least 16 search and seizure warrants across Metro Detroit.

On June 23, 2010, agents seized 13 kilograms of heroin in Ann Arbor. Five days later, they seized $260,000 in Charlotte, southwest of Lansing.

In July 2010, investigators seized $5 million and 10 kilograms of heroin in Chicago.

Michigan State Police troopers found $2.2 million in cash after stopping a Chicago-bound vehicle along Interstate 94 in Calhoun County in September 2010.

A month later, investigators seized $2 million and 12 kilograms of cocaine during a traffic stop along westbound Interstate 94 in Calhoun County.

The feds also have executed raids in Grosse Pointe, West Bloomfield Township, Detroit and northern Macomb County and obtained cell phone wiretaps.

The largest seizures happened Nov. 17, 2010. That’s when agents raided a $458,000 house linked to Powell in the northern Macomb County community of Washington Township.

The 3,244-square-foot home north of 26 Mile was one stop in several coordinated raids executed by drug agents that day that yielded more than $8 million in cash and seven kilograms of heroin. The feds found more than $2.9 million at two homes owned by Powell and $5 million plus another five kilograms of heroin at an alleged “stash house” used by Powell, according to court records.

The heroin seized during the Powell raids sends a clear signal, law enforcement officials said.

“This should serve as clear evidence that the growing opiate/heroin abuse problem in SE Michigan is real, and is being addressed,” DEA Special Agent in Charge Robert Corso said in a statement.

The probe has uncovered evidence of money laundering.

In December 2010, federal prosecutors asked a judge to order Powell’s luxury condominium in a hip area of Atlanta forfeited to the government. The condo was purchased with proceeds from the drug ring, Beck wrote in the forfeiture complaint.

The allegations and big-ticket items draw comparisons to Detroit’s infamous drug dealers, experts said.

[Wombaticus Rex]

Via: http://www.uic.edu/orgs/kbc/ganghistory ... /lance.htm

The Almighty Black P. Stone Nation: Black Power, Politics, and Gangbanging

What I want to talk to us about today is the Almighty Black P Stone Nation. I want to talk about Black Power, politics, and gang banging. In regards to this organization its very important for us to understand some basic things about them. And I'm going to try to give you a overview in the short period of time that we have. I want to cover some points that I think would be very important.



The Black P. Stone Nation: An Overview



First I want to kind of talk about the origin of the Black P Stone Nation, or the Blackstone Rangers. You'll hear me use several different namesto refer to this organization because they have used a variety of names over the years: as they say, they have "elevated" themselves to various names. And so we might talk about the Blackstone Rangers, the BPSN or Black P. Stone Nation, or we may refer to them as the Rangers or the Stones, we may call them El Rukns. These are all different names that refer to this one organization over the last 40 years. I wan tto make clear that I am not sure of the exact origin of the Stones, because there is a lot of controversy about it. I kind of want to talk to you about gangbanging and the Main 21. It’s very important to understand this aspect of the Black Stones and their development. . I want to mention the relationship between the Stones and the Woodlawn community and the Feds. The Federal government funded a job training program which included the Rangers.



Later we want to talk about the connection between the Stones and the Black Panthers. There’s a kind of connection there. We want to talk about their relationship with Louis Farrakhan and his "Angels of Death" which was really what I think had a lot to do with the demise of their organization from a very organized structure. And then we want to talk about their ultimate demise which was their connection with Muammar Khadafy and Libya. And then if we have enough time, then we can talk about the current situation or the current status of Blackstone. Which is something that I, I’m currently dealing with in my work on the street level.



Who I am?



So let me just say , a little bit about me. How I come into this is through my father. My father was growing up, we might call him a gang banger. He was a part of an organization called 14 Street Clovers which is from out West. The Clovers started out as a softball team and grew into a social organization that ultimately became the 14th Street Clovers. As the economy worsened, and not having resources, these guys started to hang out and hustle. So they were hooked, clicked up, \ and so they grew up from a social group to what we may call a street gang . Just based on the conditions that they were living in.



So my father was a part of the original group of people that founded this group called 14 Street Clovers. And as they got older and the economy kind of got bad and they started gang banging, some of them got incarcerated into St. Charles. He was a part of that group and that started to organize themselves based on what they knew and that was you know petty crime. So when they get out of the joint they were still doing these little petty crimes and their organization evolved into what we know today as the Vice Lords.



After these guys got older, those that didn't have extensive criminal records went to the military.. My father wasn’t one of them cause his criminal background was too extensive and so he couldn’t get into the military. Fortunately he got a job working at the post office, got married, and he matured out of gang banging . During this time the Federal governement was funding an organiziation like the YMCA to do work with street gangs. That was because you had this proliferation of street gangs in urban areas and they didn’t know what to do with them. Because these agencies had difficulty communicate with these kids, they went and got some reformed gang bangers and hired them to go back to the street to work with the younger gang banger.. My father was a part of this original group, called "detached workers."



A detached worker is an individual who goes out in the street to do his work, as opposed to doing it in an office. So hanging out with my pops in the summertime I was with him when he was going out and doing his work. And his major areas was Stateway Gardens, and he had a group of guys up there known as the Del Vikings. He worked with the Del Viking and he also worked with the Black Stones. So the kind of information that I’m sharing with you today is based on the kind of stuff that I saw when I was growing up, over a twenty year period.. My pops started with the Del Vikings and the Stones, and then from the Stones he finished up his work with the Vice Lords back out West where he comes from.



So I did that and then as I grew on to school and graduated I ended up and came back to Chicago. I was in Medical school at one time, I flunked out. I had to decide what I would do with the rest of my life. I Decided that I really wanted to you know work with kids. I gravitated into it because that’s what I did with my father . It was easy for me. I started an organization called "Know Thyself" program that was designed to work with school age boys who were having social problems i school, and most of them were gang bangers. Unintentioanlly, as an adult, I ended up back in the element as I grew up as a kid, hanging out with my father. So and i worked with these kids, I was able to draw off of the kind of stuff I stuff I saw as a kid hanging out with my pops. Knowing how to talk to them, understanding them, seemed to work.



So my work as an adult has primarily been with GD’s out of Englewood and right now I put a lot of work in some Eight Tray Stone Terrace from Greshan-Auburn, where there area about four different sets. And then as I progressed in my acedemic development I came back to school. Now I’m teaching Sociology of Violance over at NorthEastern Illinois University, Center for Inner City Studies. Inner city studies and… so that’s really my area. I’m not a gang expert like Doc and them. You know so I want to make that real clear.



The Stones



But we want to talk about the Stones. If you look at the three, what I would call the three key black street organizations in Chicago – the Disciples, the Vice Lords, and the Black Stones. and, I don’t want to just say the Gangster Disciples, but let’s just say the Disciple affiliates because you’ve got the GD’s and you got the BD’s that are both what you would consider major street organizations but they all come out of one organization which are considered Folks, meaning those riding up under the 6. Sowe’ll talk about the BD’s and the GD’s together. So we talk about three groups. We talk about the Lords, the Stones and the D’s.



The Stones are different than all of these organizations, or other street gangers, or street organizations, who were all politicized at some particular point in time. When I say politicized I mean that they at some time in their history, Vice Lords and the Disciples decided to get involved in the political movement in Chicago. But the Black Stones were the only organization that had a main pillar of politics of the Black Power movement from their inception. .



The only other street organization in Chicago that could fir into that category, would be the Latin Kings. The Kings also had a political agenda from the start. So you look at the Kings and you look at the Black Stones you see they have a lot in commen. But because we’re talking about black organization I’m not going really be talking about the Kings today.



So the Stones came into existence on the heels of the Black Power movement and that was one of their major pillars. Despite their political and their religious affiliations over the years, they have always were gang banging. Cause some people say well how you gonna talk about the Stones having a political agenda, meaning that they were for community development and empowering those people in their communities but at the same time gang banging. When I say gang banging I’m talking about doing all those things that are wrong: drug selling you know, intimidation, buyers and all of that kind of stuff. So yeah they did all of that but they also were political and they also had a Black Power agenda.



So let’s deal with the origin of the Blackstone Rangers. Jeff Fort and all those guys come out of Woodlawn. Woodlawn was a changing community in the 1950s. It was one that a lot of black people weren’t living in at the time,but they were moving into the community. The organization started around 63r adn Blackstone and hung out between 63rd and 67th and BlackStone. Black Stone is a street about two to three blocks west of Stoney Island. And so that’s where they originated as a small little clique around ’59, ’60. We don’t really know the exact date. People will tell you they know but it’s, they really don’t know.



The Blackstone Rangers started off with about 10 guys. The founding members of the Black Stones were two individuals – Jeff Fort, Chief Malik, aka Angel and another guy, a lot of people don’t know about, his name is, we used to call him Chief Bull, Eugene Hariston. Chief Bull and Jeff were the ones that brought this whole thing into existence. The Rangers talk about the period ’59 through ’65as being their period of "creation." From then on, they definitely have a strong identity and they begin to grow.



The Main 21



It is important to understand the Main 21's role in the development of the Black Stone Nation. Without getting into the the details of their symbolism, I would like to briefly talk about the symbol of the pyramid and what it means to the Black Stones in relationship to the Main 21. When you see the pyramid written on a wall, it is composed of 21 stones. Each stone represents one of the Main 21. Now a lot of people don’t understand that the Main 21 used to be separate gangs or separate street organizations. It was the effort of Chief Bull and Chief Malik to pull these street organizations together in one solid organization. That is how the Black Stone
Rangers came into becoming the Black P Stone Nation. These 21 street gangs were pulled together to form one organization called the Black P Stone Nation.



When I was a shorty we used to go up to the beach around Jackson Park every Sunday. Back in the 60’s and 70s That was when African American’s used to wear the big fros and all the different loud colors, the greens and purples and all of that’s along coming into the 70’s with the stacks. The Main 21 used to have processions in the park and they walked through the park like a big parade and all the kids and other people from the community would walk behind them. The Main 21would give us money and candy and all this stuff every Sunday . So we didn’t always see them as something bad until we learned a little more about some of the other things that they were doing. So this was the Main 21 as part of the origins of the Black Stones.



I’m not a historian, but I remember my father telling me about when Jeff and the Stones were teenagers, 13, 14 years old. So they were little boys basically, putting this thing together. The guys that were head of these different 21 organizations were grown men 30, 40 years old. So how does some 13, 14 year old kids pull together 21 street organizations of grown men and make them a part of one organization? It’s really deep how it happened. But time doesn’t permit me to go into it in details. But originally what happened was in the late 60’s, I mean maybe about ’67, ’68, Bull got locked up. Now see Bull was the muscle in the operation, he was the dude that would do most of the fighting. He was a big kid and he wsa the leader. Jeff was the brains but people were more afraid of Bull. Chief Malik, you know he was a big guy. You don’t do this kind of stuff without being a punk, but he was also very intelligent. But when it came down to throwing down, it was Bull that the person that people didn’t want to have to deal with. Okay so Bull was the muscle man, Chief was the brains. Bull got locked up,for about three or four years. Chief is running the thing by himself.



When Bull gets out of jail, the Chief calls this big nation meeting,. I was there I remember the meeting was out on the Rocks, between 31st and 39th street. hit would be packed with Stones and people, it was like a big picnic. Andthey had a big meeting. And the Chief made this announcement that from this point on that he would be taking on the sole leadership of the Black Stones, but they call themselves pretty much the Black Stone Rangers at that time. And he told the members pick a side. You know, "those of you want to go with Bull, go with Bul. ,Those who want to be with me come with me." And it shocked everybody. But the younger guys and the new members who really didn’t know Bull well because he was locked up when they came into the organization all went with Chief. The only guys who knew what the organization was about stayed with Bull.



Because the younger guys, who were the most ruthless gang bangers, wanted to stay with Chief Malik, it gave him the advantage over Bull and his followers. These younger guys didn't mind shooting and killing in the name of the Almighty P Stone Nation. Bull was very bitter and he vowed to kill Jeff. But because Jeff' security was so tight, there was no way to get to him. . I don’t know if you can imagine Lakeshore Drive around McCormick Place, they used to have rocks aroudn 31st street on the lake front. You would go to a meeting Jeff is standing alone out on the rocks, and everybody else would be around in the grass areas. Their security was so tight that they had people in boats behind him and you could never get to him, you couldn’t get access to him. And the ;reason they used to call the Chief "Angel" was because he used to do mysterious kinds of things like disappearing acts and other things . He was like that. . You know he was very elusive and that’s how come the Feds couldn’t catch him cause he played games with who was who and where he was and you would think he was in one place and he wouldn’t actually be there.



Anyway after the split up, Bull was messing around with Smack, Heroin. He got addicted and he would try to send people to kill Chief but tghey couldn't touch him. The Chief told all of his men that for no reason should any harm be brought to Bull, "don’t touch him. Anybody has aproblem with him, let me know." My father talks about it all the time and he was always kind of partial towards Bull because of his situation. So Bull was my man pretty much too I liked him because my father liked him. Bull kept with the drugs and then ultimately he got killed in Ida B Wells Projects, on some drug deal that went bad.





At one time as they became a little bit more political they hooked up with the Panthers . Well the Panthers came over said well look y’all got this large group of young people you doing things with politics and you know we could kind of come together. And as the Federal government, the FBI through the COINTELPRO program, saw this happening they did not want the Black Panthers who were a youth political organization, to hook up with a street organization. Because you talking about maybe up to 50 60 thousand members in Blackstone. Today, you got about 12000 police. So the Black Panthers who believed in armed defense against police brutality, if they hooked up with the Black Stone Rangers, 50000 deep and were strongly influenced by the Black Panthers. They decided we taking this place over… nothing the police could do about it. With 12000 against 50000 they would have to call in the National Guard and the military and everybody else. And if that influenced what was going in inner cities throughout the United States of America, America would have had a big problem.



Another person that you need to know in this history is this guy named Mickey Cogwell. Mickey Cogwell was an original Main 21. Jeff loved Mickey. He was his favorite person,he always talked about Mickey. And Mickey was the kind of person that made everybody smile, people just loved being around him. Well this guy Mickey Cogwell, very smart, very well educated. But the gang bangers always liked those kind of guys like Mickey who could go to a meeting with people from the establishment and represent the organization very well. He made the members proud to be Blackstones. And ultimately what happened was Mickey tried to take the Black Stones to a higher level, as an organization, get them involved in politics. But Chief Malik wasn't ready for the organization to become involved with poltics because they were still involved in doing illegal things.



So what happened was Jeff allowed Mickey Cogwell to do his own thing which was forbidden among the other Main 21. And so Mickey went and dazzled the people close to him, work for him, ultimately derive the two group called the MC’s, Mickey Cobrastones that's still in existence today. Mickey had a brother named Pony Soldier that was very wild , aggressive. Pony Soldier was very tight with Larry Hoover, who is now the chairman of the Gangster Disciples. Pony Soldier and Larry were real tight and at one time they were trying to get Larry to be part of the Stones but he already with the Gangsters. The Gangster Disciple part didn’t come until later.



Hoover pulled the Disciples together and made them become the GD’s right. Hoover was going to be part of the Stones but they wouldn give him high enough rank because all of the top positions were taken. Its hard to take one of those top lead positions and give em to somebody else because they had a network of people around. So they couldn’t give him a top position andhe decided not to be a part. But Pony Soldier and Larry remained real good friends. Ultimately Mickey Cogwell becomes a union organizer, organizing people that work in fast food resturants to be part of unions so they could be treated fair. And I think that that’s what got him killed because in 1977. . And he was muscling in on organized crime' territor. He was organizing McDonald’s workers and other fast food restaurants, and that’s a powerful thing to have a union of poor people that work in these fast food restaurants. So he got killed in 1977.



Now around ’73, ’74, Chief ended up getting his money from the Federal government, through the Woodlawn organization to do some job training. I think was a set up, because street organizations have always been a threat to the political structure of the United States of America. They could pull people out. The feds gave them all of this money right. And you give these gang bangers a bunch of money what you think they gonna do with it? Spend all of it. Yeah= they didn’t have any sophistication or money management skills, so they blew the money. And they came down on them for blowing this Federal money saying they were using the money to buy drugs and they may mismanaged it . Just that they didn’t have any fiscal skills, so when they got some money it was just comingled, you'd call it. It wasn’t something I think that was really intentional. Because of this, Jeff goes to Federal Prison, Leavensworth, he was locked up for four years. he got out in ’76, he kind of wanted to get away from Chicago, he went with Doc and them in Milwakee and set up shop and was being taught about higher level thinking about religion and what not. And when he gets out he starts this group called the Martin Luther King Movement to fight against these neo-nazis in the Marquette Park area.



And then when Jeff gets out of Federal Pennitentiary that first time, the ’76, is up in Milwakee he’s influenced by Islam and they become the Moorish Temple of America. So they were a street gang influenced by Islam That’s how come today when you get a Black Stone’s talk to each other they say" what up Mo". You ever hear that? You know even when I talk to the young guys I say well what does this Mo mean? Most of them, you know those guys on the street, they don’t know. But Mo comes from the term Moorish, which refers to Moors, who were Muslims who had conquered Spain at one time. So they called themselves Moors because they saw the Moors as African people. And so they got Islamic influences but still with street gang influences. And then they evolved from the Moors or the Mos to the El Rukns and they do that from about ’75 to ’88. And again they have Islam influences, but now they have now Islamic influence with organized crime influences.



Louis Farrakhan was the person that introduced Jeff Fort to the people in Libya. They were thinking they were going to do some terrorist activity... And because they were not sophisticated enough and let, I mean it was really scandelous how the thing happened, I happened to be at that Saviour’s day when Farrakhan had Khadafy speak via satellite and brought some of the El Rukns up on the stage and said these are my " angels of death." Farrakhan was afraid that the government was about to get him like they got Malcolm and so he used the BlackStone Rangers as a shield. But they didn’t know what they were getting into.



Farrakhan introduced Jeff Fort and members of the Black Stones to members of the international commuity who were involved with Black nationalism and some were into terrorist activity. One of the connections was made between Farrakhan, Libya's Khadafy, and Jeff Fort. On one visit to Libya, Black stone Rangers were given a ground to air rocket launcher and brought it back to the United States. The CIA intercepted in and took the trigger device out of the rocket launcher and placed a tracking device in it. The Stones brought it back to the Headquarters and the Feds tracked it andbusted the Fort, which was their headquarters on College Grove on 39th, right off of Oakwood and Drexl . They tore the building down.



In 1988 and 89 he’s convicted of plotting against the United States government for some terrorist action that they had been involved with in Lybia. He's sentenced to 80 years in Federal Penitentiary, then another 75 years they gave him so if he ever gets out of Federal Penitentiary, and he finises his 80 years, when he gets out he’s got to come back to Illinois and do another 75 years for a some kind of murder. they put on him in ’88 right. And this whole proces,s the Federal US Attorney Hogan who was prosecuting the Black Stone Rangers, they tookmany the Main 21 and gave them special privilidges to turn states evidence. The let their girlfriends come in, brought drugs and contraband into the Federal Jail, the one right downtown.



They were informants for the Federal Government and they were getting privlidges for it. Hogan lost his joband because of giving special prvilidges, but they never did go back and retry those guys that were convicted with this tainted evidence., like Jeff. Some of the other ones got new trials or something but they still ended up getting a lot of time. And then I think that Hogan got his position back. I did want to say, oh, this is what I want to get to.



And ultimately from ’88 until now they refer to themselves as Black Stones. So after the Feds came down and bustedth em all up they fragmented sets with a lot of drug influences. So right now the set I’m working on it’s got 3 G’s. Those main 21, when Jeff got out of the lock up and they became El Rukns they went from the Main 21 to the generals, 21 Generals. And then when he got, when they all got the Federal time that whole thing busted up. So now you got all these different sets around Chicago, no real organization and it’s like one of the sets that I work on in the trade you got three G’s in one set. So what kind of problems does that cause there is no chain of command. Right. It’s nobody really to answer to and so you know they do their own thing pretty much.

[Wombaticus Rex]

"for some terrorist action" in more detail: http://www.nytimes.com/1987/12/31/us/fi ... cheme.html

Five Draw Long Sentences for Terrorism Scheme
AP
Published: December 31, 1987

Five members of one of the nation's deadliest street gangs have been sentenced to long prison terms for conspiring to acquire $2.5 million from Libya in exchange for their offer to commit terrorist acts in the United States.

Jeff Fort, the 40-year-old El Rukn gang chief, sat impassively in his blue prison coveralls Tuesday as Federal District Judge Charles Norgle sentenced him to 80 years and fined him $255,000.

''The purpose of this sentence is not to put you in prison for the rest of your life,'' Judge Norgle said. ''This sentence must serve to deter others.'' Mr. Fort and the four others were convicted of conspiracy and weapons charges Nov. 24 after a five-week trial. The Government said they had offered to blow up planes and buildings for Libya, although they had not actually done so. Other Sentences

Of Mr. Fort's co-defendants, Reico Cranshaw, 56, received the stiffest sentence: 63 years in prison and a $241,000 fine. Alan Knox, 35, was sentenced to 54 years and a $229,000 fine; Leon McAnderson, 37, to 51 years and a $241,000 fine, and Roosevelt Hawkins, 24, to nine years plus five years' probation. Prosecutors had sought the maximum 260-year sentence for Mr. Fort, who will now be eligible for parole in 25 years. Judge Norgle said the evidence did not support a maximum sentence, although he noted that ''Mr. Fort, at the age of 40, has had 34 arrests and 12 convictions.''

Mr. Fort was found guilty of 49 counts in a 50-count indictment that alleged conspiracy, weapons violations and interstate or foreign travel or use of the telephone to further the conspiracy. One count was dismissed during the trial.

The El Rukns had contended that their organization was a religious one that planned no violence and had met with Libyans only to raise money for a mosque.

Prosecutors argued otherwise. ''These defendants, under the direction of Jeff Fort, were prepared to benefit at the expense of innocent individuals and institutions in this country,'' an assistant United States attorney, Susan Bogart. said at the sentencing hearing. Prosecutor Sees Deterrent

After the hearing, Ms. Bogart said the penalties were severe and dealt ''a substantial blow to the El Rukn organization.''

''This should act as a deterrent to the remaining El Rukn generals and members,'' she said.

[Wombaticus Rex]

Via: http://www.thenation.com/article/168965 ... e-torture#

Chicago's Dark Legacy of Police Torture

Liliana Segura
July 19, 2012

On January 25, 1990, the Chicago Reader, the free alternative weekly, published a cover story, nearly 20,000 words long, titled “House of Screams.” Written and reported over the course of a year by journalist John Conroy, the investigation exposed, in meticulous detail, a long and chilling history of abuse by police against suspects on the South Side of Chicago. At the Area 2 Violent Crimes Unit, Police Commander Jon Burge had overseen and participated in the systemic torture of an untold number of African-American men, dating back to the early 1970s. They had been beaten, burned against radiators, suffocated with plastic bags and, most disturbingly, had their genitals subjected to electric shocks. “Fun time” was how Burge referred to the electrocution sessions, which, Conroy would later reveal, drew on his experience as a military police officer in Vietnam.

Despite its bombshell revelations, the story did not spark immediate or widespread outrage. Even the local dailies failed to run with it. So over the next seventeen years, Conroy would write twenty-two more articles about Chicago’s police torture regime—stories that laid bare the extent of the abuse and decried the total impunity enjoyed by the perpetrators. Among those who knew about the torture was former Cook County State’s Attorney Richard Daley, sworn in as mayor months before “House of Screams” was published. (Some fifty men claim to have been brutalized in the eight years he served as state’s attorney.) In 2003, out of concern that innocent men had been convicted and sentenced to die based on confessions that had been tortured out of them, Governor George Ryan famously emptied Illinois’s death row, commuting 167 sentences and pardoning four men.

Burge was fired in 1993 and moved to Tampa, Florida, where he spent leisure time on his boat, The Vigilante, and continued to collect his taxpayer-provided pension. It was not until 2008 that he was finally arrested—not for the torture itself but for his role in trying to cover it up in the case of one of the pardoned men, Madison Hobley. Burge was sentenced to four and a half years in a minimum-security federal prison. He is scheduled for release in 2015.

Conroy, meanwhile, was laid off by the Reader in 2007. By then, he had started writing a play about the torture scandal. Darkly titled “My Kind of Town,” and now in its final weeks at the TimeLine Theatre on Chicago’s North Side, it is a complex and powerful indictment of the city’s collective unwillingness to confront its legacy of torture. In two acts, the play draws from numerous cases—and actual testimony describing the abuse—to bring to life the character of Otha Jeffries, a death row prisoner in a state of total mental breakdown, who swears that his confession was brutally extracted from him. (In real life, twelve tortured men were sentenced to die and five were exonerated.) Jeffries’s treatment at the hands of Detective Dan Breen and his boss, Jack Gunther (the Burge character who exists only offstage), includes being handcuffed to a pipe and having his pants pulled down, being shocked on his genitals and his rectum and suffocated with a plastic bag. As Jeffries’s estranged parents try to piece together what happened to their son, his mother, Rita, visits District Attorney Maureen Buckley, who as an assistant state’s attorney years earlier was in the police station during her son’s interrogation and heard him scream. “Please don’t tell me you’re here because you think your son is innocent,” Buckley says wearily, having deeply buried her recollections of that scream. She then advises Rita, “There’s nothing you can do about it except pray for him.”

I saw “My Kind of Town” on June 30. It was auspicious timing; that same day, the Illinois Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission—created in 2009 to investigate several dozen claims of police abuse—had officially gone out of business after state lawmakers announced it was being defunded. The stunning move, over a relatively paltry budget request of $235,000, came just as the commission had finally recommended its first set of cases for judicial review. “It’s chump change,” the commission’s executive director, David Thomas, told the Chicago Tribune about the money saved by the state. “But we don’t have a real political constituency. Our people are all in prison.”

One of these people is Gerald Reed, convicted in 1993 on felony murder charges in a double homicide and sentenced to life without parole. Reed, who maintains he’s innocent, is one of the lucky ones. He is one of five prisoners whose claims of abuse were found “credible” by the commission and should now reach a courtroom, potentially reopening his case.

Reed was brought in for questioning at Area 3 headquarters in October 1990, ten months after “House of Screams” was published. By then, Jon Burge had been transferred there from Area 2 and supervised Detectives Victor Breska and Michael Kill.

Although Breska has gone unnamed throughout the torture scandal except in one other case, Kill has come up in more than twenty cases dating back to 1986. They include Marcus Wiggins, who was only 13 when he was arrested and who described being shocked and beaten. (The city paid him a settlement of $95,000 in 1996.) They also include Ronald Kitchen, who gave a false confession in 1988 after thirty-nine hours in police custody, during which he was beaten with a phone book and a phone receiver, and hit in his genitals with a nightstick. He was sentenced to death and was eventually exonerated, in 2009. Another man, Peter Williams, was beaten and had a pistol stuck in his mouth. As a result he gave a false confession to a crime he could not have possibly committed, since he was in jail at the time. His case was tossed, but his two codefendants—16-year-old Harold Hill and Dan Young, a man with an IQ of 56—were also brutalized and confessed. Both were exonerated in 2005.

Reed claims that upon arriving at the Area 3 station, Victor Breska kicked his chair out from under him and kicked him repeatedly in his legs and lower back. Reed had a metal rod in one leg from an gunshot wound he had sustained in 1985; at a pre-trial hearing in 1992, he testified, “I got pins in my right knee, lower part of my knee, and a rod going from my knee to my hip and he kept kicking me in the center of my thigh and I kept telling him that, you know, I’m hurt, I’m hurt.” X-rays would show that the rod was broken and that the orthopedic pins that kept it in place had loosened. But attempts to introduce this evidence—or any evidence of coercion—at trial would fail. Based almost entirely on a five-page statement that Reed signed after being held in custody for several hours, he was convicted and sentenced to life without parole.

“The only plausible explanation for the broken rod and the loose screws is the beating at Area 3 described by [Reed],” the commission concluded in its June 18 filing on his case. Given that his conviction hinged on his signed statement, this conclusion has important implications.

Reed has been at Stateville Correctional Center since 1994. Over the past decade, the metal rod has continued to deteriorate. He was walking on two crutches until last summer, according to his mother, Armanda Shackelford, when his cellmate beat him with one of his crutches, which was left in pieces on the floor. “Now they are refusing to do surgery because it costs too much money,” she says through angry tears. “I could see them saying that if he did this to himself. This was done to him. So you’re torturing him all over again.” The only treatment he is receiving, she says, is in the form of Ibuprofen.

I met Armanda at her home on the South Side of Chicago following Conroy’s play. We talked in her living room, where her granddaughter was watching Law & Order. Armanda had seen “My Kind of Town” recently, along with Bertha Escamilla, an activist whose son, Nicholas, also alleged he was tortured (he was eventually released). Armanda identified with the character of Rita Jeffries, who was so determined to help her son. “Fathers—they’re caring,” she said. “But they get tired quicker than the mothers so. The mother will just keep on going.” Today she attends political meetings and rallies with other mothers of prisoners who were abused. When I ask to see a photo of Gerald, she brings out a large poster featuring his name and mugshot. It reads: “Still being tortured.”

Armanda is grateful that the commission had a chance to make its recommendation in her son’s case before it was shuttered. “When I found out, it was just like a light came on,” she says, smiling. “I had been in darkness all this time. And all of a sudden…I could see.” But she aches for the men behind bars who now have little recourse. “That hurt. Because this was their only way out.”

One of the cases that will no longer be reviewed by the commission is that of Johnny Plummer, who was just 15 when he was brought to Area 3 in 1991 to be questioned about a murder case he swears he had nothing to do with. He alleges that Michael Kill hit him in the face, stomach and side, at times with a flashlight, before he gave a statement incriminating himself. (Also involved in his case is Detective Kenneth Boudreau, who has been named in thirty-seven other cases—including those of the aforementioned codefendants Williams, Hill and Young—some as recent as 2004.)

Johnny was convicted of first-degree murder and given life without parole. Now 36 years old, he is at Menard Correctional Center, more than 300 miles away from the South Side neighborhood where he grew up. When I speak to his mother, Jeanette Plummer, on the phone, her outrage over the defunding of the commission is raw. “Why would [lawmakers] take that money back after they set up this board?” she asks. “I’m very disturbed about that. I’m very hurt. That is wrong. They can’t treat people like that.” For her, it adds insult to the injury she felt at the short sentence for Burge, which she called a “black eye” on the black community.

Now, Jeanette hopes that the recent Supreme Court ruling in Miller v. Alabama, which outlawed mandatory life-without-parole sentences for juveniles, might now pave her son’s way home. But without a lawyer, he faces an uphill battle.

“They did a good job on that play,” Jeanette says about “My Kind of Town.” “They knew what was going on,” she says of the players, real and fictitious. “They just didn’t care.”

I met John Conroy on the North Side of Chicago on the day after the play. “There are so many cases, they start to run together,” he says, as we discuss the people who inspired his characters and where they are now. He tells me that Dick Devine, who succeeded Daley as Cook County State’s Attorney and whose denial of the police torture was so staunch he called the four men pardoned by Governor Ryan “evil,” was recently honored by the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin, named one of “Ten attorneys who raised the Bar in the last decade.” A press release describes Devine as “first and foremost an attorney dedicated to the pursuit of justice.”

When I ask Conroy why he thinks there was not more accountability—or even outrage—over the years of brutality meted out against so many men, he echoes a line from his play, delivered by the lawyer for Otha Jeffries. “I think it’s that there’s a torturable class in this country,” he says. So revelation after revelation, “people just didn’t care.”

That goes for the media outside Chicago, too, which mostly ignored the story for years. “This is the biggest national police scandal of the past fifty years,” Conroy says, reminding me of the innocent men who landed on death row. “Corruption is one thing. This was attempted murder.”

[jcivil]

Opium wars. 1839 State Drug Dealing

French Connection

(Alcohol Prohibition created powerful gov/mob connections, kept and grown with legal alcohol [the dangerous drug] and now illegal naturally occurring drugs [weed, opium, coca]

Lansky/Gov invasion of S.Italy/Sicily
Alvin Malik gov drug murder mob

Vietnam War (Laos Cambodia) (Mass murder plus mad heron, lung replacement et al)
Watch the classic Super Fly (all drugs dealt through the man)

Bush"Poppy" Mob
Dark Alliance (Gary Webb, Freeway, Suicide by two shots to the head, RIP)

Cassolaro, Mena, Contras, [Read Compromised, Secret Life of Bill Hillary, et al] etc...
Kerry Cover Up (Kerry Committee cover up of U.S. drugs dealing) [Kerry SB 1966]

The U.S. runs the ISI and the JKLF with ten trained paid operatives at the top, same with gangs and mobs U.S. and worldwide. Brits created the Muslim Brotherhood et al...

Se sel solucion revolucion

to quote C.O. from the dubious Trance Formation of America, "The only war on drugs I ever saw was the war on the competition."

As a privileged hottie I sit on beach chairs in the Keys through the cold months, the unmarked single engine planes go overhead night and day without a hitch. Could be al quaida (if they existed) or a bio war attack. Funny enough, never a problem, never.

Don't believe the hype its a sequel.

[Wombaticus Rex]

^^Amen. It's the interface that fascinates me, though -- where agent meets asset, as it were, how distribution gets unpacked and how the compartmentalization works.

Especially in terms of the actual street level, a case study in how you can have a whole organization full of people who have utterly no idea what they're really doing.

[jcivil]

The interface is the same from CIA/State to Mobs as from CEO to the machete thugs.

Just more Order and SB and nutters.

[dbcooper41]

i'm kinda surprised the article on the blackstone rangers/el rukns didn't mention jessie jackson.
i seem to recall that at one time he had a fairly cozy relationship with them