As murder after murder reveals a bloody struggle for control within Chicago’s largest street gang, President Clinton on Wednesday will call for a nationwide crackdown on street gangs.
In a speech to the Justice Department, Clinton will describe the scope of the nation’s gang problem, naming Chicago’s Gangster Disciples as among the nation’s most notorious. One official said the president will equate the gang problem with the mob crisis that Robert Kennedy, as U.S. attorney general, identified in the 1960s.
In an election-year speech intended to bolster his anti-crime credentials, the president also will announce that Chicago will be one of the cities to receive federal funds for “gang suppression.”
But though the president will call for the full force of law enforcement to be employed against gangs, he is only distributing $11 million in grants, a minuscule amount of money in the nation’s overall crime-fighting budget.
Clinton is also expected to call for stiffer penalties for drug dealers with guns.
Although Chicago’s $1 million grant is hardly enough to curb the city’s gang woes, it comes amid a backdrop of proliferating gang violence.
The fallout of a massive federal assault on the Gangster Disciples has left the outlaw organization in disarray. In the wake of the power vacuum, at least six Gangster Disciples have been killed in recent weeks. Authorities suspect that the organizational instability may have also played a role in the killings of three Disciples who were shot to death on a Will County road early Monday.
The seemingly endless war between law enforcement and street gangs, meanwhile, has prompted investigators to rethink the ways they attack organizations like the Gangster Disciples.
They plan to use federal strategies for organized crime–such as computer tracking–and are already using military tactics, from night-vision equipment to aerial surveillance.
“If this is really a war . . . let’s equip ourselves for the battle. If it’s good enough for the Army, why not us too?” said one veteran observer of law enforcement in Chicago.
At Wednesday’s news conference, Chicago will be named as one of 15 cities to receive federal funds to combat gangs, a tiny though not unwelcome donation to the war on street gangs. The total of $11 million in federal funds that will be available equals slightly more than 1 percent of the Chicago Police Department’s yearly budget of about $880 million.
Chicago Police Supt. Matt Rodriguez and U.S. Atty. Jim Burns are planning to attend the news conference.
Cities will have wide latitude to use the money for community-policing programs, from creating programs to keep children in schools to beefing up patrols in trouble areas.
Police officials said there is no shortage of ideas for ways to spend the money, though no official decision has been made.
“Isn’t that wonderful?” said Donald Hilbring, commander of the Gang Investigation unit.
Though he didn’t know how much money his unit would receive, Hilbring said a top priority will be to track gang members as they move through the ranks, much the way the federal government tracks members of organized crime families.
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Warren Friedman, executive director of the Chicago Alliance for Neighborhood Safety, which helps train residents to work with police as part of the city’s community policing program, applauded word of the federal funding. But he said he hopes the city invests the money directly into the community rather than the police department.
Specifically, Friedman said the money should go to help pay the salaries of community-based organizers, people in the neighborhoods who help bring residents and police together to combat crime. The annual salary for a community-based organizer, he said, runs between $20,000 and $26,000. Several community-based organizations raise their own money to pay staff salaries.
“This is really critical work if you have a shot . . . at being able to stand up to the gangs,” Friedman said. “These are neighborhoods where everybody fears intimidation. Safety in numbers is critical. The police cannot do it by themselves.”
Prior to Clinton’s speech, Burns will join Atty. Gen. Janet Reno, U.S. Atty. Christopher Darney of Hartford, Conn., and U.S. Atty. Edmund Sargus of Columbus, Ohio, in briefing Clinton on recent efforts to suppress gangs.
Burns is expected to give a 10-minute presentation to Clinton that will focus on the ongoing trials of Gangster Disciples leaders, including imprisoned chairman Larry Hoover, and include snippets of secretly recorded conversations between Hoover and his associates.
The first Gangster Disciples trial resulted in the convictions last month of seven gang leaders and a former Chicago police gang crimes officer whose boyfriend was a top gang leader.
Since then, two Gangster Disciples leaders have been killed in what investigators describe as a struggle for power, and at least four other members have been killed by rival gangs angling to take over Gangster Disciples territory.
Police said Tuesday that they are still trying to determine why three Chicago men, all members of the Gangster Disciples, were slain on a country road in Lockport Township.
The bodies of Derrick Anderson, 25, Henry Braggs, 31, and Joe Nathan Newman were found on Oak Avenue by a passerby early Monday. All had been shot in the head and elsewhere on their bodies. Police believe they drove to the Oak Avenue location for a meeting about 1 a.m. Monday, had some coffee and marijuana and were then ambushed.
“By the evidence found around the crime scene, they were at ease,” Hilbring said.
Braggs was considered an “overseer” who monitored the Joliet faction of the Gangster Disciples for the larger Chicago organization, Hilbring said. He also collected a share of the Joliet group’s drug profits for the Chicago gang.
Hilbring theorized that the slayings may have represented a bid for independence by the Joliet faction, who may be angling to withhold payments of street taxes to their Chicago colleagues now that the gang’s leaders are in jail.
“We’re looking at everything,” said Will County Deputy Sheriff John Moss. “And that includes gang warfare, a bad drug deal. . . . We know who (died) and we know how (they died), but that’s all we have right now.”
Police also are investigating reports that the three Chicago men went to Joliet to visit an imprisoned gang colleague at Stateville Correctional Center in the hours before their death.
Stateville’s visitation records were not available Tuesday.