An experienced gang crimes police officer was speculating Friday about which gang may profit most from the difficulties facing the Gangster Disciples in the wake of major federal indictments aimed at its leadership.
The first organization that popped into his mind: the Black P Stones.
You probably remember them. The Black P Stones are a remnant of Jeff Fort’s Rukns, a powerful crew targeted by federal agents in the mid-1980s and supposedly destroyed through a series of indictments and convictions.
What happened next may be instructive: The Rukns’ setback created an opening for the Gangster Disciples, or GDs, to become the South Side’s dominant gang and the biggest gang in the Midwest.
When Rukn loyalists and leaders resurfaced in 1991, they used the gang’s old name from the 1970s, and the Black P Stones have “increased over the past few years because they are aggressively challenging the Gangster Disciples,” according to a Chicago Crime Commission report on gangs issued earlier this year.
An examination of Chicago police statistics shows no homicides related to the Black P Stones from 1987 through 1990. From 1991 to 1994, 61 members of the gang were arrested on homicide charges, records show.
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“All of a sudden, they’re back,” said the veteran gangs investigator.
He calls law enforcement’s role in the gang problem “a paradox.” If police do not do anything about the gangs, they become stronger and tighten their grip on a neighborhood. If they break up the gang, new violence may result from the scramble for territory.
A review of investigations that tried to dismantle gangs suggests that massive gang busts do not tend to solve problems as much as they create voids, and those voids are filled by new leaders or rival gangs. The problem remains the same; the enemy just has a new name.
That is probably why professor Irving Spergel, a respected gang researcher at the University of Chicago, doubts the streets will be any safer with the arrests of GD leader Larry Hoover and his top lieutenants.
“What the cops did is not bad, but its consequence may not be all that great and may not affect the gang violence significantly,” Spergel said.
Spergel made a distinction between the business side of a gang, as epitomized by the middle-aged “Chairman” Hoover and his board of directors, and younger members of the gang, who are more easily provoked to violence.
Referring to the GD indictments, Spergel said, “You’re probably making a crimp in that gang’s drug and criminal operations, but you’re doing very little to affect this quasi-random violence on the streets.”
Of course, nabbing people suspected drug dealing is exactly what federal agents and local police officers are paid to do. When Willie Lloyd and other leaders of the Unknown Vice Lords were arrested and taken off the streets in 1994, many residents were thrilled to think that the bad guys finally were getting what they deserved.
Leola Spann, president of the Northwest Austin Council, said the Vice Lord sweeps were “a ray of hope.”
The streets of Northwest Austin seem a little safer now, she said, though Spann attributed that to community policing and other facts, as well as to the gang sweeps.
The big-picture answer, according to Spann and Spergel, requires a combination of good police work and smart social programs that aid families, target at-risk youths and deal with drug addiction.
“They always put prevention on the back burner,” Spann said. “We’ve been fighting this war on drugs and we haven’t been that successful, so we have to think of other ways to do it.”
Some police officers are hoping that even if the GDs are not destroyed, the gang’s mystique and Hoover’s power will be diminished.
Should Hoover, who allegedly ran the gang from the Dixon Correctional Center, wind up in a federal facility with limited access to the phone and visitors, he likely would lose his ability to tightly control the GDs. And the GDs could end up a fractionalized entity, with a loose network of neighborhood crews.
That scenario, police said, would make their work easier because informants would be more likely to step forward with information on the weakened gang, less likely to feel intimidated by what had seemed to be an impenetrable organization.
A reduction in GD strength also could make it easier for neighborhood groups to reclaim areas dominated by the gang.
“The tenants are tired of not being able to raise their children safely,” said Chicago Police Lt. Ricky Edwards, of the public housing south district, where GDs control many high-rise buildings. “They’re tired of living in a war zone. I don’t think they’ll allow anyone to have a stranglehold on them like that again.”
While the Rukn prosecution and the GD indictments have similarities, another way to preview what is to come on Chicago streets is to examine a major crackdown on the Rockford branch of the Gangster Disciples two summers ago.
Thursday’s arrests in Chicago resembled the Rockford sweeps in many respects, down to the dramatic rhetoric of law enforcement officials declaring victory over the gang.
“We’re going to win the war,” said Rockford Police Chief William Fitzpatrick after the July 1993 indictments of 31 Gangster Disciples in an investigation coordinated by the Drug Enforcement Administration, the FBI and local police. “They thought these were superheroes, that nobody could touch them.”
Rockford residents-alarmed by the big-city violence that threatened their once-tranquil neighborhoods and schools-cheered the sweep. They were happy police finally were doing something about the gang, and they wanted to believe the arrests would make a big dent in the drug trade.
It took only a few weeks before other gangs, independent dealers and the remaining Disciples started fighting to fill the vacuum left by the indictments. A new gang came to town, the Satan Disciples. Drug dealers from Chicago and Detroit arrived to meet the demand for cocaine.
Despite the gang arrests that year, 1993 saw a record 300 shootings in Rockford, most of them drug- and gang-related. And homicides hit a high of 23. It only got worse in 1994, with a record 30 homicides, about double the usual pace for Rockford.
“I don’t think they crippled anything,” said Mary Allen, a 15-year veteran of the gang wars who has developed prevention programs for the Rockford schools and housing authority.
“They took these guys out of circulation, but look at the numbers they left behind,” Allen said. “They took the top off and opened up the market to the other guys. We’d seen more murders and shootings than ever because there was a great competition for the drug trade.”
Deputy Police Chief Dominic Iasparro acknowledged that the aftermath of the crackdown carried mixed results. But Iasparro maintained, as he did back in July 1993, that the arrests were “a tremendous blow” against the Disciples.
Of the 31 indicted, 29 pleaded guilty or were convicted by federal juries. Seven, including Rockford Disciple leader Karl Fort, were sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
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“I hate to think what this city would be like if those people had not gone to prison,” Iasparro said.
Thursday’s sweeps also take dangerous and devious criminals off the streets, according to investigators.
Lower-ranking GDs who heard about the indictments were stunned by the arrests, but one 25-year-old member of the gang interviewed for this article said the feeling was only temporary. He spoke on the condition that his name not be revealed.
“I was kind of shocked,” the GD said, “but then I kind of blew it off. This is not going to stop us. The little guys that are soldiers, they’re going to take those positions as leaders.
“They always train somebody to take over a position. If a governor (for the gang) gets shot on the West Side, there’s always the assistant governor to take his place. The chain of command is always going. It’s like a cycle.”
One public housing police officer familiar with the GDs had a similar analysis.
“It’s the enforcers who kept everything in line,” he said. “And those guys are still out there. These are the guys who go out there and peel heads. These are the thumpers. These are the ones who bust you up. As long as you got those enforcers out there, there’s going to be very little or slow change.”
Another factor to consider, he said, are rival gangs that may try to exploit the situation.
The GDs long ago adopted a corporate structure, and this public housing officer used a corporate analogy to explain the gang dynamics.
“Just like if IBM closes down,” he said, “some other company is going to move right in.”