'Good deeds': Cops say they hide the bad
Willie Lloyd lectured DePaul University students about the harsh reality of gang life.
Elbert "Pierre" Mahone counseled juveniles in the Cook County detention center.
To judge by their actions, here are three middle-age men who have done some good, making Chicago a better place. But to police and prosecutors, they are strictly dirt--the leaders of three of Chicago's most notorious street gangs--who made a show of doing good deeds as a way of laundering their reputations, just like they might launder illegal cash.
"Unlike Robin Hood, their menacing influence on the community far outweighs their generosity to the community," said William O'Brien, chief of the narcotics prosecutions bureau of the Cook County state's attorney's office.
To supporters, the men are trying to step away from their lives of crime and use their positions to lure younger members away from the gangs and perform good deeds for the neighborhood.
"The police aren't gonna say the [Gangster Disciples] are sponsoring soup lines or doin' this or that," said Jamal, a 30-year-old former Mafia Insane Vice Lords member who asked that only his middle name be used. "They gonna say the GDs are terrorizing the street."
But Ranell Rogers, 23, another member of the Mafia Insane Vice Lords, calls the leaders hypocrites.
"We're going to cut the old folks' grass, cool," Rogers said before he began his shift slinging heroin and cocaine on a busy West Garfield Park corner. "But in a couple of hours, we're going to be out there selling dope. To me, it seems like that's what these guys do to ease their conscience."
Rogers, who said he has never met Wilson, Mahone or Lloyd--the reputed leader of his gang--said he decided to join when he was 10 years old after seeing how men in the top positions lived.
"At that age you aren't thinking about McDonald's and getting grease on your hand and your clothes, you don't want to come home smelling like fries,'' said Rogers, who said he once counted $1.2 million in cash that his leader earned in a single week. "You see this guy and he's got a nice car, a nice setup, probably a lovely home and a nice wife. You don't want nothin' else but what he's got.''
Smokey Wilson
Forty-nine-year-old Wilson, known as Smokey around the Cabrini-Green housing complex where the Gangster Disciples have a stronghold, climbed to the pinnacle of the GDs' leadership before being whisked off the streets on a gun charge last summer, police said.
He was one of the highest-level leaders of the Gangster Disciples when he was arrested, and was a confidant of the gang's chairman, Larry Hoover, who is serving a life sentence in federal prison, Chicago police Sgt. Marc Moore said.
"Smokey became 'The Man' because the older guys were locked up," Moore said.
When his latest arrest hit the papers, supporters rallied to his defense, saying he was known for helping youngsters in his tough Near North neighborhood.
But Wilson's long criminal career paints an uglier picture.
Back in 1970, Wilson was convicted of aggravated assault and sentenced to a year in prison. Three years later, he was convicted of armed robbery and locked up again. In 1975, he was convicted of voluntary manslaughter. In 1981, he was convicted once again, this time for conspiracy to murder.
His latest run-in with the law happened June 18, 2001, while he was driving a maroon 2001 Lincoln Navigator near Cabrini-Green. Police said they pulled him over for a traffic violation in the 800 block of North Hudson, down the block from the Al Carter Youth Foundation. They found a 9mm Cobray semiautomatic pistol with 30 bullets in a magazine stowed under the passenger seat, police said.
Federal prosecutors hit him with weapons charges.
Wilson, who is in the federal Metropolitan Correctional Center in Chicago, says in court papers that the search was illegal. The police officers, who called him Smokey, never showed him a warrant, he said.
One of Wilson's attorneys, Dennis A. Giovannini, calls him a peacekeeper in Cabrini-Green and says residents are upset to see him behind bars again.
"When he was gone, all hell broke loose," Giovannini said, referring to several shoot-outs last summer, including one that left a flight attendant wounded as her airport shuttle drove past the complex.
Wilson's wife, who goes by the name Pretty, insists he is no longer a gang member, but acknowledges his past involvement.
"I'm not going to say he was a good boy. He was a bad boy. He was involved in drugs and all that. The kids of the streets have to do it to eat and survive," she said. "But when he got older, he wanted to give back to the community. He said he doesn't want the kids to grow up like him."
Pretty Wilson, who wears a gold necklace with a "Smokey" medallion, married Wilson in 1990 while he was in federal prison.
When he was released in 1998, he started working as a crisis counselor for the Al Carter Youth Foundation in the shadow of Cabrini-Green's high-rises. Smokey and Pretty invited neighborhood kids to their home in Presidential Towers, where they treated them to Popsicles, cookies and potato chips.
"He's a big kid, a teddy bear," his wife said, pointing out that she bought him a model train set for Christmas last year. "He was Uncle Smokey to the children in the area."
Wilson landed construction jobs for young people in the public housing development through a company affiliated with the youth foundation, his wife said. He arranged neighborhood cleanups and even drove young people to the polls to vote, she said.
"Our dream was to open a skating rink," Pretty Wilson said.
Alvin Carter-Bey, head of the youth foundation, said he also knows the gentler side of Wilson.
Wilson refereed basketball tournaments to keep young gang members focused on the game and not their rival affiliations, said Carter-Bey, a jazz host at WBEE-AM (1570).
"Gang guys were umpiring games," he said. "He was there to volunteer and gave me a lot of time."
The focus was never on Wilson's status as the "don" of the gang, Carter-Bey said. "He would say, 'Let's just play basketball and not get involved in anything stupid. He eliminated a lot of confusion," Carter-Bey said. "He gave me a hand to make sure things went on quietly."
And, he says, they did.
Willie Lloyd
Given that he never graduated from high school, Willie Lloyd would seem to be the last person you'd see teaching college students.
Lloyd, according to police, is head of the Vice Lords Nation, one of the oldest, largest and deadliest street gangs in Chicago.
The 51-year-old grandfather insists he is retired and is writing his memoirs to show others the false promise of gangs.
"You see that glitter, but it's not gold--it's fool's gold," he said recently, interviewed at Grandma Sally's Family Restaurant in west suburban River Forest, where waitresses say he is one of their best customers.
At a 1994 sentencing hearing in federal court, Lloyd's supporters ranged from a confidant of Hoover to a Roman Catholic priest. The Rev. George Brooks told the judge that Lloyd "expressed to me that in fact God had saved him and he had had that experience so that he could have a positive influence."
At the same hearing, Wallace "Gator" Bradley praised Lloyd for brokering a gang truce at Cabrini-Green. Bradley described himself to the judge as a reformed Gangster Disciple and a gang outreach worker for the Boys and Girls Club of Chicago. Bradley, who also called himself a representative of Hoover, ran unsuccessfully for alderman in 1994 and met with President Bill Clinton and the Rev. Jesse Jackson at the White House about crime control.
U.S. District Judge George Marovich wasn't swayed by the flowery words and sentenced Lloyd to eight years in prison, just shy of the maximum.
"I want to believe that Willie Lloyd is sincere," Marovich said. "I want to believe that there is rehabilitation potential in even the very worst of us. ... [But] Willie Lloyd once proclaimed himself king of a nation, and I ask you, what kind of kingdom is it that sends children out to kill and be killed?"
Lloyd was released from federal prison last spring. He said he agreed to lecture to incoming freshmen in DePaul University's Discover Chicago program and even took them on a field trip last fall to give them an inside look at gangs in their "natural habitat."
"I am trying to walk a straight line," Lloyd insisted. "Don't throw barriers into my path. No one knows what's going on in my head or my heart."
But Chicago police and parents of DePaul University students did throw a barrier in Lloyd's path, flooding the school with angry telephone calls when they learned the convicted felon was teaching their children.
Gregory Scott, assistant professor of sociology at DePaul, had planned to pay Lloyd to help craft questions for a federally funded study comparing the experiences of gang members and nonmembers when they leave prison.
Scott dropped Lloyd as a consultant after the backlash from parents, saying he was worried Lloyd's notoriety could affect how people responded to questions. But Scott, who previously worked for the Illinois attorney general's gang-crime prevention center, said he might still ask Lloyd to lecture and believes Lloyd's firsthand knowledge of gang life would be valuable to his project. Lloyd did receive a small payment for his work at DePaul.
Thomas Needham, former chief of staff to Chicago police Supt. Terry Hillard, said Lloyd never should have been allowed near DePaul students. He dismissed Lloyd as nothing more than a "cop killer" for his 1970 conviction in the slaying of an Iowa state trooper.
"Our narcotics investigators noticed a bus full of college students on the West Side with Willie Lloyd on a corner that our officers were surveilling in broad daylight," Needham said. "They found out this was a class of DePaul students. They couldn't believe it."
Elbert 'Pierre' Mahone
Mahone was a "rare jewel" committed to turning youngsters' lives around, Kublai Khan Muhammad Toure, Mahone's boss at Amer-I-Can Illinois, told the Sun-Times two years ago.
Mahone, 38, had worked as a "facilitator" for the organization for about two years, speaking to kids locked up at the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center. The county-funded program paid him more than $12,000 a year.
But then, in October 2000, the flashy high-level member of the Conservative Vice Lords--he wore full-length fur coats and drove a Rolls-Royce--was executed on the West Side in a battle over drug sales. And, all of sudden, the public wanted to know why an active gang leader had been employed by a community counseling program.
The big question: Why did Amer-I-Can's board members--including former Mayor Eugene Sawyer, state Sen. Donne Trotter and Cook County Commissioner Jerry Butler--give Mahone access to children? He had a sordid criminal record that included convictions for rape, robbery and drug dealing.
At the time, Trotter said he would not have allowed Mahone to work with youths if he had known Mahone was still actively involved in gang activities.
More than two years later, Amer-I-Can still works with kids in the Juvenile Temporary Detention Center. But since October 2000, when the Sun-Times reported Mahone's involvement with the center, several changes have been made to ensure that active criminals don't come into contact with the teens.
"Background checks have been stepped up and are more extensive," said Jack Beary, spokesman for Cook County Board President John Stroger. "The individuals that participate in the program are checked to make sure their record with police is clean going back at least seven years. And staff of the Juvenile Temporary Detention Center are present during the program portions when these individuals work with the population."
Mahone was part of an outreach program, according to the organization, to show the "problems, difficulties and heartbreak that [juveniles] bring to their lives when they follow the wrong role models and their consequences."
Flash and cash
For young people, the lure of the gang life is the flashy car, the thick wad of cash and the designer clothing the leaders flaunt.
Leaders ￯﾿ﾽdon￯﾿ﾽt mind showing the young guys how they got the nice car,￯﾿ﾽ￯﾿ﾽ said Rogers, the Mafia Insane Vice Lords member. ￯﾿ﾽThey￯﾿ﾽll say, ￯﾿ﾽLet me show you, you go out there and get rid of this [drug] and I￯﾿ﾽll give you a little something.￯﾿ﾽ Little by little, they get into it.￯﾿ﾽ￯﾿ﾽ
One 27-year-old resident of Chicago￯﾿ﾽs West Garfield neighborhood, where Rogers makes between $1,500 and $2,500 a week selling drugs, said he doesn￯﾿ﾽt approve of the gangs or their leaders, but can see the attraction of the easy money.
￯﾿ﾽThis is a poor area; a lot of the kids selling drugs are helping their parents pay some of the bills,￯﾿ﾽ￯﾿ﾽ said the man, who declined to give his name. ￯﾿ﾽI don￯﾿ﾽt think they are giving back to the community; [leaders] might be by giving them jobs drug dealing, but it￯﾿ﾽs kind of a wrong way. You look at the life of many of these kids, and they don￯﾿ﾽt give a damn about life, they have nothing to live for.￯﾿ﾽ￯﾿ﾽ
When a shoot-out claims another life, the gang leaders aren￯﾿ﾽt the ones on the street trying to quell the violence, said Reggie Murray and Melvin Taylor, outreach workers with the community organization West Garfield Ceasefire. They see nothing legitimate about gang leaders￯﾿ﾽ community work.
￯﾿ﾽThere is no positive aspect to it. I don￯﾿ﾽt look at any gang activity as positive,￯﾿ﾽ￯﾿ﾽ Taylor, the group￯﾿ﾽs project coordinator, said as he walked down the 1100 block of North Keystone, where boarded-up buildings sit side by side with tidy brick homes behind tall, wrought-iron fences. Just weeks earlier, a man in a car was gunned down on the block.
A resident named Wanda, 40, who met with members of the Ceasefire group as they distributed anti-gang literature, called the drug dealers ￯﾿ﾽterrorists.￯﾿ﾽ Two years ago, her 19-year-old son Dwayne was shot dead by drug dealers, and the year before Dwayne￯﾿ﾽs twin brother Dwight was shot in the face.
￯﾿ﾽThe leaders are putting the young ones￯﾿ﾽ lives on the line,￯﾿ﾽ said Wanda, who declined to give her last name because she fears the gangs. ￯﾿ﾽI wonder if the young guys have any sense.￯﾿ﾽ￯﾿ﾽ