Apr 2 2003
Almost from the city�s founding, the gangs of Chicago have courted and been courted by the city�s political elite. Some have been more successful than others.
At the turn of the century, political bosses recognized the important role that gangs could play in their get-out-the-vote drives, distribution of political spoils and punishment for disobedience.
Many political machines even had a man who was responsible for keeping the affiliated toughs in line:
�The ward �heeler� often corrals a gang like a bee man does his swarm in the hive he has prepared for it,� wrote University of Chicago professor Frederic Thrasher in his 1927 book �The Gang.�
�In return his prot�g�s work for him in innumerable ways and every gang boy in the hive is expected to gather honey on Election Day.�
Ragen's Colts, a gang sponsored by Cook County Commissioner Frank Ragen, not only took part in electoral violence but became notorious bootleggers.
In later years, Al Capone was able to buy and sell politicians and judges thanks to the limitless cash Prohibition and the accompanying vice trades provided him.
Capone literally owned the city of Cicero where no one was elected to public office without his official approval.
In the 1920s, Richard J. Daley, Chicago�s legendary mayor took the reins of the Hamburg Athletic Association which helped vault him to power in 1955. He served as mayor until his death in 1976, in part due to the machine which the social clubs supported.
Daley�s gang, the Hamburgs, took part in the 1919 race riots in Chicago but years later, recognizing the political threat street gangs presented, he declared war on them in the late 1960s, writes John Hagedorn, a senior research fellow at the Great Cities Institute and associate professor of criminal justice at the University of Illinois-Chicago.
More recently, leaders of some of the largest Chicago street gangs flirted with legitimacy thanks to a na�ve willingness of politicians to believe their promises of peace and urban renewal.
In at least 10 of Chicago's 50 wards, a Chicago Sun-Times investigation found in 2002, gang members were expected to work in the February 2003 elections as political foot soldiers.
�Though no one could offer proof of a gang engaging in wholesale thuggery on Election Day--or of an alderman coddling a gang in return--the potential for corruption is evident,� the newspaper wrote.
"If you think about it, if the gangs get an alderman elected, is he beholden to them?" asked Joe Sparks, a Chicago cop who spent most of his 32 years on the police force going after the gangs. "I think it has a pretty big effect. An alderman is a heck of a guy to step up on your behalf. If you're a gang member, he carries a lot of clout and weight."
In the 1960s, the Vice Lords worked alongside Black civil rights leaders to empower minorities and bring change to the city.
Vice Lords who took a pledge of nonviolence served as security for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Please continue reading below...
when he came to Chicago and later with the Rev. Jesse Jackson. With Jackson, the Vice Lords picketed and applied other pressures to construction firms that would not hire black workers.
Unfortunately, like so many other gangs, the lure of the street and the enormous profits to be made there in illegitimate ventures proved too strong for most of the Vice Lords and they became a group of thugs who spurned the ballot for the bullet.
El Rukns and P Stone Nation
One of the most successful (for a time, at least) was Jeff Fort, who was not only invited to Richard Nixon�s inauguration as a social leader, he managed to get his hands on hundreds of thousands of federal dollars earmarked for the War on Poverty.
In the early 1970s, Fort, the leader of the P Stone Nation, was convicted of misspending some $1 million in grant money.
In prison, Fort converted to Islam and converted P Stone Nation into El Rukns. The gang continued to operate on a quasi-legitimate nature, quelling street violence and running job training programs.
Fort was eventually convicted of taking $2.5 million from Libya in return for trying to shoot down an American airplane. He was sentenced to 155 years in prison after the gang tried to purchase a Stinger anti-aircraft missile.
The Gangster Disciples
In 1992, Larry Hoover, imprisoned head of the Gangster Disciples, helped form 21st Century VOTE, a political action committee that won the support of local politicians. In 1995, the group received $45,000 to recruit minority workers for a Chicago Transit Authority project. They never got the money because other politicians objected.
The Gangster Disciples did run a slate of candidates and gang strongman Wallace �Gator� Bradley lobbied President Clinton on a crime bill.
A 1996 survey of the Gangster Disciples showed that 15 percent had worked for a politician, the National Gang Crime Research center reported. More than half had been paid for their work and 80 percent said they had been directed to the work by a gang leader.
~ Mark C. Gribben http://organizedcrime.about.com/cs/gangs/a/aa040303na.htm
