On a Sunday afternoon in 2000, it was a typical Mississippi Delta social event, a gathering over smoking grills and sweet tea in a cousin’s back yard. But the chance meeting would spell trouble for both men.
Jude was 28 and digging deeper into a life of crime that already included dealing marijuana on the South Side.
For Westbrooks, a 26-year-old underemployed father in need of money, it was a turning point. Born and raised in an isolated Delta hamlet known only by the country road it sat on–Starkey–Westbrooks came from a family of schoolteachers, his grandmother said. His principal from West Tallahatchie High School remembered him as a good kid who played football and signed up at the National Guard post after his graduation in 1993.
But seven years later, a gangbanger from Chicago had his ear. Jude would bring down money that belonged to the Mickey Cobras street gang. All Westbrooks had to do was drive around with him, visit a few pawnshops and buy some guns.
Westbrooks said he was interested.
Jude next saw his Mississippi acquaintance several months later in Chicago, when Jude dropped by his gang boss’ house in the 4400 block of South Shields Avenue. Westbrooks sat on the sofa, Jude later told federal agents, as the Mickey Cobras leader laid out the terms of a new business plan: Guns would come up to Chicago; marijuana would go back to the Delta for Westbrooks to peddle.
Westbrooks was joining a pipeline of crime between the Delta and Chicago that has been laid over generations.
Each time Police Supt. Philip J. Cline is asked why Chicago has so many murders every year–a nation-leading 598 in 2003–he gives the same answer.
“It’s simple: gangs, guns and drugs.”
Gang experts say street gangs are more deeply ingrained in neighborhood culture in Chicago than elsewhere in urban America. Always a major center of drug trafficking, Chicago has supplanted Los Angeles as the primary distribution center of narcotics for the middle of the country, federal officials say.
And there are indications that more illegal guns are here than in any other city. In 2003, Chicago police seized 10,033 guns, while Los Angeles police recovered 6,985 guns and New York police recovered just 3,981 guns. Of the 598 murders in 2003, 80 percent were shootings.
The story of Chicago drug dealers, Delta poverty and the guns that link them is a significant piece of the puzzle in this city’s problem with violence.
In the first part of the 20th Century, 5 million African-Americans left the sharecropping cotton economy of the Delta in search of a better life in the North. But the story of the Great Migration has a tragic side as well.
As neighborhood segregation created ghettos in Chicago, and the industrial jobs that lured people north disintegrated in the 1960s and 1970s, Chicago gangs turned drug peddling into a big, violent business on the South and West Sides. For decades, Chicago’s problems have been trickling back to the Delta, making matters worse in a rural region already ravaged by poverty and inequity.
As Chicago toughened local restrictions on owning and selling firearms, gangs began turning to the homeland of their grandparents for firepower. Across the South, gun laws are much more lenient than in the North. Anyone with a Mississippi state ID can walk into a dealer’s shop and get as many guns as desired, without a waiting period. In Illinois, buyers need a firearm owner’s identification card and must wait 72 hours to obtain the gun.
The result has been a pipeline of Chicagoans going south, recruiting family members or acquaintances to buy guns for them, then running them back to Chicago to fuel the violence on the streets.
Police say thousands of guns a year are trafficked from Mississippi to Chicago. They seize a tiny fraction of them, said Sgt. Ken Barnas, who runs the Police Department unit that traces guns used in crimes.
In 2002, Chicago police seized 493 guns that were traced to Mississippi, second only to Indiana among out-of-state sources of illegal guns, according to the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
Nearly all of the guns end up in the hands of gang members engaged in drug dealing.
End of the road
One chilly afternoon in November 2001, a year and a half after they met, Jude drove Westbrooks across the Delta on one of their regular business trips. It would be their last.
ATF agents had been tailing them since Cleveland, Miss., where the owner of a pawnshop on Cotton Row, the town’s main street, called in a tip when Westbrooks used his Mississippi state ID to buy 26 semiautomatic handguns.
Afterward, Westbrooks, Jude and a Chicago teenager who had come along for the ride headed north on U.S. Highway 61, through the flat expanses of dormant cotton and rice plantations. They stopped in Clarksdale at U.S. 49–the famous “crossroads” of the Delta, where legend holds that Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil in exchange for the power to play the blues. At the crossroads, Westbrooks bought a gun at Krosstown Trade & Pawn, then they continued north.
After buying one more gun at 61 Pawn and Trade in Tunica, they doubled back and turned off the highway, heading into the sticks, across more cotton fields and bayous to Jonestown, where Westbrooks lived with his girlfriend and children.
It was getting dark. The ATF agents had been tailing the gray Ford Taurus with Illinois plates for a few hours, and Jonestown, population 1,400, is a foreboding place, isolated and poor. The agents feared that trying an arrest after dark would invite the neighbors to start shooting.
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“There are some places around the Delta where the police are not welcome. Jonestown’s like that,” said Gary Ingle, resident agent in charge of the ATF office in Oxford, Miss.
When the Taurus pulled onto Jones Avenue, a narrow lane of ramshackle mobile homes and cottages, the agents flipped on their lights, drew their guns and moved in.
Westbrooks and Jude both pleaded guilty to gun trafficking charges. Westbrooks is in federal prison, serving a sentence of 33 months; Jude got 60 months.
In 2001 alone, Westbrooks bought at least 95 guns that were destined for the hands of Mickey Cobras in Chicago. These are only the guns agents know of based on an audit of a few stores.
Several gunrunners have been prosecuted since 2000 under the Justice Department’s Project Safe Neighborhoods, an anti-gun program that includes stiffer prison terms.
Still, the guns come pouring in.
`I’m at war with them’
Two weeks after Westbrooks and Jude were arrested in Mississippi, a similar scheme was playing out 70 miles north in Memphis. Lamonda King, a Gangster Disciple, drove Tamiko Holloman, a 21-year-old Memphis resident, to a pawnshop on Poplar Avenue, where she bought six guns for $960, prosecutors said. Five days later, officials said, she bought five more guns for King at the same shop.
Half a year later, Holloman left another pawnshop on Summer Avenue, a long, cluttered street of barbecue joints, used-car dealerships, a strip club and dozens of pawnshops. This time, nine guns were in the trunk of King’s Dodge Intrepid, and ATF and Memphis police officers were watching. Agents arrested King and Holloman and persuaded King to cooperate.
As federal agents listened in, King called his middleman in Chicago, Lester Green. King said he would be back in Chicago the next day, May 15, 2002. Green was pleased: He had buyers for all the guns, according to government transcripts of recordings of their discussions.
Demand was high, Green said, fueled by a turf skirmish on the West Side between Gangster Disciples and Traveling Vice Lords. And Green was selling to both sides.
The day after he was arrested in Memphis, King drove into the parking lot of a strip mall at Roosevelt Road and Kedzie Avenue in the Lawndale neighborhood. Wearing a hidden transmitter, he stepped into the Hollywood Video store and met Green.
“What’s going on, man?” King asked.
“Rocking and rolling,” Green said.
“With them Travelers?” King asked, meaning the faction of Vice Lords with whom Green’s gang was fighting.
Green said that they were battling over turf near the Rockwell Gardens public housing complex and that the buyer waiting in the parking lot, Demetris “Meech” Thompson, was supplying guns to the Gangster Disciples.
“Meech is supplying them … with some guns out here,” Green said.
“Who?”
“You know Meech … school brother … he got $2,100 he can spend.”
As Green and King left the video store and walked out to meet Thompson in the parking lot, Green said he was in the market for a new gun himself.
“I don’t have nothing but my four nickel out there,” Green said, using slang for a .45-caliber pistol. “I need something to chop … [them] down…. [They] droppin’, they be looking at me like, Damn, G., what’s up?”
In King’s car, the negotiations began over the guns in the trunk. Thompson wanted 9mm guns. All but one of King’s guns were less-coveted .380-calibers.
The one 9mm that King had in the trunk was an Intratec assault pistol, a prized gun on the street because of its large bullet capacity and oversize, menacing appearance. Thompson wanted guns like this.
“I ain’t got no more 9s,” King told him.
“What you got?”
“.380s and a Tec,” he said. “I sold all the 9s.”
“Hmmm.”
“Yeah, I won’t have no more of them for a minute. I have to go back down and make another trip” to Memphis.
King asked for $250 apiece for the Bryco Jennings .380s he was selling. Receipts for the guns King purchased in Memphis showed he paid between $110 and $150 each. King dealt in guns considered low-quality–mostly Bryco, Lorcin and Hi-Point brands. Gang members treat them as throwaway weapons.
Eventually, Thompson negotiated King down to $150 a gun, arguing they were cheap weapons that would jam.
While Thompson went to his car to retrieve his money, Green got back in King’s car. He was disappointed to learn Thompson wanted the Tec-9 pistol, because Green had been eyeing it for himself.
“I need you over there to aid me. I’m at war with them. … I just need one big thang,” he said, according to the transcript. “I need to whack a few of them. … That’s why I called. I am like, Monda, … just bring me one, man, and let’s go ahead and go to war.”
Green then said he had more buyers lined up, but he would hold them off a few days to allow King to make another trip to Memphis. Minutes later, as King and Thompson were exchanging a bag of guns for a bag of money, ATF agents and police moved in.
Between November 2001 and his arrest in May 2002, King brought at least 35 guns to Chicago from Memphis, according to investigators.
King was sentenced Wednesday to 4 years and 6 months in prison. Thompson was sentenced last year to 7 years, 8 months. Green is awaiting sentencing later this month.
U.S. Atty. Patrick Fitzgerald filed trafficking charges against Holloman last week, just before his office announced it was shifting the focus of Project Safe Neighborhoods to put more emphasis on straw buyers.
Legal system’s fatal flaw
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The way gun laws are written, gun shops that sell to straw buyers are rarely prosecuted.
Lobbyists for stricter gun laws say that’s a fatal flaw. The federal government focuses on the end users–poor, mostly minority men caught up in the cycle of urban violence–while giving the manufacturers and dealers of guns a pass on flooding the market with weapons, said Louis Tolley, director of state legislation for the Brady Center, a group that lobbies for tougher gun laws.
“When you’re talking about multiple sales, no law-abiding citizen is going to walk in and want to buy 10 or 12 really cheap weapons,” Tolley said.
During 2001, Westbrooks bought 10 guns at Krosstown Trade & Pawn in Clarksdale. Local police said Krosstown is the sort of place where gunrunners can usually buy many guns without raising eyebrows.
At the counter on a hot, sunny August afternoon, Jason Wood said he has managed the pawnshop for a decade. Behind him, a long row of bolt-action rifles and shotguns in varied condition crowded a rack. They were hunting guns. In front of him, in a dirty glass counter case, were dozens of used and new handguns, which are intended for self-defense, he said.
“I get a lot of guys in here from Chicago trying to buy guns,” Wood said. He cannot sell a gun to anyone from out of state. But he knows some of those Chicagoans he turns down end up getting guns through straw buyers. “We try to watch out for that.”
Wood said he can turn down anyone who makes him feel uncomfortable. If a young woman walks in and asks to buy a number of cheap handguns, such as the Bryco Jennings .380s that seem to be in the counter cases of nearly every pawnshop in the Delta, Wood said he would not do it.
“I won’t sell her five guns. I’ll sell her one,” he said. “But I have the right not to sell to anyone.”
Sometimes it is difficult to spot the straw buyers, he said.
“I had one guy buy 12–one a month,” he said. “And they all turned up in Chicago. ATF came out and questioned me. I hadn’t recognized him when he was just coming in once a month.”