LONG ARM OF THE OUTLAW
By KEVIN FEDARKO/CHICAGO
Nothing can hurt the duck but its bill," Larry Hoover liked to tell members of his gang. The parable--one of many bits of wisdom the leader of the largest street gang in the U.S. was fond of imparting to his followers--implied that a duck is safe so long as it doesn't open its mouth and start making noise. It was a sound precept. And one that "the Chairman," as he is known, no doubt reflected upon during the eight weeks he spent in a Chicago federal courtroom watching the jury listen to secretly recorded conversations through which he ran his drug empire from an Illinois state prison.
Last Friday afternoon that jury found Hoover and six cohorts guilty of narcotics conspiracy. Though sentencing may not take place for several weeks, the verdict could consign Hoover--already serving a 150-to-200-year sentence for murder--to a maximum-security federal penitentiary for the rest of his life, without possibility of parole and, equally important, cut off from almost all communications. His conviction was the capstone of an eight-year effort by federal prosecutors to break up the Gangster Disciples, the Chicago-based street gang that for more than two decades has controlled some of the most lucrative drug territory in Chicago. In 1995 federal prosecutors indicted Hoover and 38 members of the gang, which is estimated to have some 30,000 members and annual revenues of $100 million a year. In recent years the G.D.s have made audacious bids for social legitimacy and political clout, both of which have expanded their influence to Chicago churches, schools and community institutions up through City Hall and even into the White House.
Two portraits of the gang emerged vividly from tapes recorded through wafer-thin listening devices in prison visitors' badges and from the testimony of fellow gang members who took the witness stand in exchange for reduced prison sentences. The first portrait was of a narcotics empire that virtually controlled the Illinois state prison system. Hoover held jailhouse meetings, dictated memos and issued orders into his cell phone. He wore $400 alligator boots, dined on specially prepared food and splashed himself with expensive cologne. Payoffs to corrections officers permitted his bodyguards to arm themselves with shanks and bedposts. At one prison near Joliet, they even bragged about having keys to every door in the facility except the one to the outside.
As young criminals filtered through prison, they were given application forms to fill out and, if their references proved solid, were indoctrinated into the gang. Everyone who joined had to memorize a 16-rule code dictated by Hoover. The flow of G.D.s back onto the streets enabled Hoover to set up two "boards of directors"--one inside and the other outside the prison--through which he controlled his network of "governors," "coordinators" and "regents." These men in turn managed the gang's day-to-day drug operation: teenage pushers, lookouts and "mules" who worked the inner-city schoolyards, housing projects and streets. Discipline was enforced through punishments, ranging from warnings to fines to beatings with fists, bats or heated curling irons.
But the other image that emerged from the tapes--and the one Hoover's lawyers stressed--is of a dedicated community leader struggling to transform the Gangster Disciples from a criminal organization into a force for grass-roots empowerment called "Growth and Development." Throughout Chicago's poorest districts, the gang organized neighborhood cleanups, midnight basketball games and food drives in which hundreds of bags of Cornish hens, macaroni-and-cheese dinners and boxes of Stove Top stuffing were given away to the poor. Through such "righteous endeavors," said Hoover on the tapes, the G.D.s could become a force for prosperity and change
By the early 1990s, the G.D.s' political-action committee, 21st Century VOTE, was financing Chicago voter-registration drives, conducting gang "peace summits" and holding rallies in support of health-care reform. This eventually won them support from inner-city schools, churches and community leaders, including former Chicago Mayor Eugene Sawyer. It also gave them political power. Wallace ("Gator") Bradley, a spokesman for 21st Century VOTE who describes himself as a former G.D.s "war counselor," ran for alderman twice (he lost both times, but forced a runoff on his second attempt) and, in January 1994, was admitted to the White House with Jesse Jackson to speak to Bill Clinton about combatting crime.
But impressive as all this evidence may have been, it was ultimately undermined by Hoover's own words. The tapes revealed that even as he spoke of the need to "enlighten these young brothers" and "stop selling drugs" in 1993, Hoover was laying down a citywide tax, ordering every drug dealer to give one day of profits each week to Hoover. The boast that this would net $200,000 to $300,000 a week was one of the most damaging pieces of evidence the jury heard, thereby proving what Hoover had been telling his disciples all along: crowing like a rooster can turn you into a dead duck.