SOCIOLOGY: Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Crosses the Line, By Sudhír Venkatesh Allen Lane, 302pp, £18.99A RESEARCHER'S unusual study offers first-hand insight into the violent life - and complex economy - of a Chicago gang, writes Carlo Gebler.
Sudhir Venkatesh is the son of Indian immigrants to the US. He was raised in California and in 1989 he arrived at the University of Chicago as a sociology graduate student. Interested in poverty and race, he walked, one cold November afternoon, into the inner city high-rise slum South Lake Park.
His plan to interview young black men was aborted almost immediately when he was "arrested" by drug dealers from the Black Kings gang. They summoned their local leader, JT, who took a liking to Venkatesh and suggested he write a book about his gangster life.
The pair bonded and when JT's bosses (older criminals in the suburbs) ordered him to relocate to Robert Taylor Homes, Chicago's most infamous project - 27,000 inhabitants, 95 per cent unemployment and JT's home place - he took Venkatesh with him, giving him a corner in his mother's apartment where he could write up his field notes.
THE ACCESS WAS incredible but there was a price - Venkatesh got to see things. For instance: he was present when JT dealt with an elderly squatter, C-Note, who'd defied the gang by mending a car in a basketball court they wanted for a game: "'I told you, nigger,' J.T. said, his face barely an inch away from C-Note's, 'but you just don't listen do you?' . . . He started slapping C-Note on the side of the head . . . C-Note's head flopping back and forth like a toy . . . then JT's henchmen pushed him to the ground. They took turns kicking him, one in the back and the other in the stomach."
C-Note took two months to recover while it was several months more before Venkatesh finally asked JT why he did it. "'C-Note was challenging my authority . . . I had niggers watching me and I had to do what I had to do.'" Venkatesh was appalled but didn't argue. After all, he wanted to keep in.
In the C-Note episode Venkatesh was merely a cowardly onlooker. Later, though, he morphed into a participant. He was gang leader for a day (from which event the book takes its title), though JT allowed him to make only insignificant decisions, and on another occasion he joined the posse organised by Ms Bailey, an elected tenant leader, to catch a domestic abuser. When the posse caught the man, he beat him with the other men, albeit ineffectually, then delivered the man to Ms Bailey who had him pulverised by two tenants while Venkatesh listened outside her office.
Only later did Venkatesh remember the police. When he raised this with Bailey's secretary, Catrina, she explained that as the police never came to the Robert Taylor Homes her boss had no alternative but to administer rough justice and again, because he wanted to keep in with his subjects, Venkatesh kept quiet.
But even more extraordinary than this was something he did towards the end of his research. Encouraged by JT and Bailey, he interviewed all the small-time hustlers, prostitutes and marginal players in the blocks under JT's control about the economic facts of their lives. Incredibly, he then told JT and Bailey what the tenants were really making and the pair immediately upped the taxes they extorted, JT from the hookers, Ms Bailey from all the other women.
HOWEVER, IN VENKATESH'S defence, he wasn't the only one whose cavalier way with the economic facts of the lives of others bordered on the suicidal. JTs bookkeeper, T-Bone, secretly gave him the gang's ledger books. This was a coup because with the information they contained (plus what he'd gleaned from his own interviews) he was able to do what no one had done before, which was analyse the economy in the Robert Taylor Homes.
As we might expect, it was a pyramid. At the top sat JT, pulling $100,000 a year from selling crack and taxing shopkeepers, prostitutes and squatters. Ms Bailey, also extorting money from tenants, was up there too, somewhere. In the middle sat JT's foot soldiers, the street dealers who earned $30,000 a year, which was less than the minimum wage.
Finally, trapped at the bottom were the majority, the poor, all eking a living from almost nothing. These included prostitutes who earned $5 or $10 a blowjob, and squatters who pulled a $100 a month from recycling rubbish.
However, as Venkatesh also showed, it was impossible for these people to escape from poverty because they were caught in a web of dreadful contracts and arrangements, underwritten by violence, between themselves and the Black Kings. For demonstrating, as he does so brilliantly, that contrary to fashionable opinion these poor were never the architects of their woes, Venkatesh deserves huge praise.
After 10 years in Chicago, Venkatesh got a Harvard fellowship and left, though he maintained relations with JT from his new East Coast home. His subject, he reports, is now out of crime and running a dry-cleaning business, while the Black Kings are fractured and "the crack market . . . depleted".
Gang Leader for a Day is therefore already retrospective, being about a time that's past. One thing, though, won't have changed, whatever's happened. And Venkatesh, because we can't be reminded of this enough, must also be congratulated for making this argument as well as he does: while the richest suffer the least from crime, it is the poorest who suffer the most.
Carlo Gébler is an author and writer-in-residence in HMP Maghaberry. The Lagan Press will publish his novel about crime and punishment, A Good Day for a Dog, next month