SERIAL : 48

GANG LEADER FOR A DAY

The Stay-Together Gang

Dorothy had never been an elected tenant leader, but she was a self-appointed godmother to countless families. She helped squatters find shelter, fed tenants who couldn’t afford to eat, and provided day care for many children, some related by blood and others not. Spurred on now by the demolition, she began to act as a sort of relocation counselor for several families who were determined to live near one another in a new neighborhood. They thought that sticking together was their best, and maybe only, chance for survival. These families became informally known as “the Stay-Together Gang,” and their undisputed ringleader was Dorothy.
I caught up with her one day in her living room as she was looking over a list of the families she most wanted to help.
“Let’s see,” she said, “I got Cherry, three kids. Candy, two kids, Marna, a son and a daughter. Princess, three kids. Carrie, two young girls. And there’s probably a few more. “All these young women were friends who shared baby-sitting, cars, and cooking. Now their mission with Dorothy’s help, was to find a place to live where they could keep their network intact.
“See, here’s the problem,” Dorothy explained. “I know what it’s like out there in the private market. You end up in some apartment, with no one around, no one to help you. And you’re scared. At least if a few people can move with each other, stay together, they can help each other. Lot of people out there don’t like us because we come from the projects. They may not answer the door if we knock for help. So I want to make sure people don’t get stuck in the cold.”
It was important, she said, to start with the most stable family in the network. That was Cherry, who worked thirty hours a week as a fast-food cashier and also went to night school. Dorothy’s plan called for Cherry to find an apartment in a good neighborhood and then bring the other families over.
While this plan seemed pretty straightforward, Dorothy told me that success was hardly guaranteed.  “Things never go as planned,” she said bluntly, “because we’re dealing with poor people.”
Dorothy’s first obstacle was Ms. Reemes, a powerful tenant in her building, who was not elected to any office but had great influence with the CHA and police. Like Ms. Bailey, Ms. Reemes expected families to pay her a fee, anywhere from fifty to two hundred dollars, for smoothing the relocation process. Every family that Dorothy helped meant one less potential bribe for Ms. Reemes. Although the building hadn’t even been singled out yet for demolition, Ms. Reemes was already accepting “deposits” from families who wanted a rent voucher or relocation services.
“She wanted me to give her a cut,” Dorothy said, “and I told her I’m not even getting paid to help these people! So I told her to go to hell. That lady is so selfish.”
As Dorothy told it, Ms. Reemes was so miffed by Dorothy’s refusal to play the payoff game that she went on a harassment campaign. First, Dorothy said, Ms. Reemes put in a bad word about Dorothy with the CHA. Within a week Dorothy’s two grown daughters, both of whom lived in the same building received eviction notices for late payment of rent. This was particularly surprising, since one of her daughter had no income and was therefore excused from paying any rent at all. Dorothy successfully got the eviction notices rescinded. Then a CHA janitor cutoff the electricity in Dorothy’s apartment. But Dorothy paid a squatter to restore it. Ms Reemes then tried to get gangs to harass Dorothy, not realizing that Dorothy’s own son was a senior gang leader. He paid Ms.Reemes a personal visit, and she backed down.
Through a classified ad in the Chicago Sun-Times, Dorothy found a two-bedroom apartment for Cherry’s family in Woodlawn, a poor but stable neighborhood about a two miles away, near Hide Park and the universities. Because Dorothy had a CHA connection who helped Cherry get a $ 500-a –month housing voucher, she had to pay only $ 150 a month out of pocket.
Soon after Cherry moved in with her children and an aunt who would provide day care, Dorothy found a large apartment nearby for Princess and her three children. The only problem was that Princess’s brother and uncle heard about this and decided that they also wanted to move in. If they were found to be living there, Princess would lose her rent voucher on the grounds of illegal tenancy. Worse yet, her brother and uncle were drug dealers who wanted to use Princess’s apartment as a new base of operations. “Princess has put up with those two fools for too long, and it’s hurting her kids,” Dorothy told me. “I wanted her to start over, and now her brother and uncle are going to mess everything up.”
So Dorothy, with Princess in tow, went  to confront the two men at a local bar where they hung out. Princess was worried, since both of them smoked crack and were prone to violence, but Dorothy feared no one. As Princess later described it, Dorothy stormed into the bar and loudly told the two men they’d have her to deal with if they moved in with Princess. The men threatened to beat up Dorothy and then stomped away. They retaliated by calling Princess’s new landlord and, posing as CHA officials, warned the landlord that Princess was a gang member. The landlord promptly called Dorothy. He didn’t necessarily believe that Princess was in a gang, he said, but he wasn’t willing to take the chance. So Princess lost her lease. Dorothy eventually found Princess another apartment, but it was smaller, more expensive, and a few miles away from Cherry.
And then Marna was thrown in jail for six months for stabbing her boyfriend. Dorothy moved Marna’s children around from one apartment to another so that the social workers couldn’t find them and send them to foster care. Soon after, Dorothy heard that Candy had promised J.T. that the Black Kings could stash guns and drugs in the new apartment that Dorothy was helping her rent. Since J.T. was paying Candy for this service, Dorothy had little leverage to persuade her to do otherwise. Within a year Candy would lose her lease (and her rent subsidy) when the landlord called the police, having seen so many people tromping in and out of her apartment.
The most astounding story concerning Dorothy-one that I could never independently verify-also had to do with police. She told me that Ms. Reemes called in Officer Jerry, the rogue cop, who caught her in the lobby, dragged her into a vacant apartment, planted drugs on her, and threatened to arrest her for possession if she didn’t stop competing with Ms. Reems. When Dorothy refused, Officer Jerry arrested her, and threatened to arrest her for possession if she didn’t stop competing with Ms Reems. When Dorothy refused, Officer Jerry arrested her, but she managed to enlist some other police officers, including Officer Reggie, to set her free. According to Dorothy, Officer Jerry returned two weeks later and told Dorothy that if she just paid Ms. Reemes a share of “her cut” – which, Dorothy insisted, didn’t exist-then he would leave her alone.
In the end Dorothy’s list included twelve families chosen for the Stay-Together Gang. Despite her perseverance, she was able to help only four of them move out together, to neighboring apartments in Woodlawn and South Shore. I would spend much of the next decade keeping track of Robert Taylor homes’ former tenants to see how they adapted to life beyond the projects. As it turned out, Dorothy’s success rate was easily as good as that of the various social-services agencies contracted by the CHA, each of which was awarded hundreds of thousands of dollars to carry out the job. Dorothy herself would stay in Robert Taylor until it was demolished, and then she joined her daughter, Lee-Lee, in Eaglewood, a high-crime predominantly black neighborhood a few miles away.
Dorothy’s move to Lee-Lee’s house was, unfortunately, a typical outcome for many tenants who left Robert Taylor and other CHA projects. While the goal of  the demolition was to move families to safer, integrated communities, the CHA was so inept that nearly 90 percent of the relocated tenants wound up living in poor black areas that left them badly off as being in the projects, or worse.
In place of the projects, the city began to build market-rate condominiums and town houses, three-story structures tucked cozily together instead of the sixteen-story high-rises separated by vast expanses. Robert Taylor tenants had been promised the right to return to the community once construction was done, but fewer than 10 percent of the units were set aside for public-housing families. It is little wonder that the prevailing wisdom in Chicago is that the Daley administration and the powerful low-income housing, in fact knocked down the projects to initiate a land grab. As of this writing, the new apartments are set to  house mostly middle-and upper-class families.
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