Jeff Fort Family Tree

As discussed in previous posts (here, here, here, and here), Jeff Fort was one of the most notorious gangsters in Chicago history. Like better-known Italian mob leaders such as Colosimo, Torrio, and Capone, he perceived arbitrage profits from government policy (primarily drug prohibition in Fort's case), then developed and managed a huge criminal distribution and marketing enterprise to exploit them. Also like other top gang leaders, he used ingenious methods to distract law enforcement and to massage political and community perceptions, and became a controversial community leader.

Fort was critical in establishing several important gang entities, including the Blackstone Rangers, the Black P. Stone Nation (a collection of local affiliated "stone" gangs), the People Nation (a national cartel of gangs including the BPSN as well as other lage organizations including the Vice Lords), and the El Rukns (a religiously-motivated gang). While the Italian mob in Chicago is today a mere shell of its former self, Fort's gangs, with the possible exception of the Rukns -- whose influence is nevertheless still felt -- are going strong.

It is not uncommon for gang members to draw their family into a criminal organization. Without the ability to enforce employment contracts through the court system the way legal businesses do, trust becomes a next-best substitute for formal contracts in underground industries. Ethnicity and common background engender some level of trust -- hence the fact that most gangs are composed of members of the same race or ethnicity -- but family ties are even stronger. Shirking and disloyalty to the gang in such cases thus means turning one's back on loved ones. In addition, family members of prominent criminals may face discrimination in the labor market (would you think twice before hiring someone named "Gotti"?), so non-gang opportunities become relatively scarce.

The Fort family exemplifies the role relatives play within a gang. Jeff Fort had seven brothers and three sisters, most of which are known to have been active in his criminal enterprise. He is believed to have fathered at least seven children, and two of these rose to leadership positions in the gang. In addition, nephews and even grandchildren have also been connected with criminal activity.


Brothers

• Andrew Fort (born c. 1959)

Active in developing the drug sales operations of the El Rukns in the 1970s and 1980s after Jeff Fort's release from prison in 1976. In 1986, convicted of the April 1985 murder of Robert "Dog" Johnson on Stony Island and 67th Place. Johnson, a former Rukn, had left the gang to deal drugs independently and was allegedly killed by Andrew Fort in a territorial dispute.

(Pictured: Andrew Fort, being arrested for marijuana possession in 1979 at the El Rukn Temple)

• Bennie Fort (born c. 1949)

Active in the Blackstone Rangers and BPSN during the 1960s and 1970s. Served two years in prison between 1968 and 1970 for aggravated battery. After release, rejoined gang and was among top leadership during Jeff Fort's first prison sentence, 1972-76. He apparently continued to be active in the El Rukns during the 1980s, and in 1982 was involved in a physical altercation with a woman in a dispute over ownership of a television set. The woman called police, and while accusing Bennie Fort of aggravated battery, also fingered him as the killer in a murder a few months before, a bar fight that ended in the death of Darryl Poindexter. Fort went on trial for the slaying, but after some witness intimidation by his brothers Eugene and Johnny Lee (see below), was acquitted. He did serve two years in prison for the woman's battery, however.

Televisions were bad news for Bennie Fort. In June 1988, a fellow El Rukn, Perry Squire, sold a broken TV to Fort for $40. Fort managed to repair it, and when Squire saw his broken set working again, he insisted it be returned to him. Fort refused, but a few days later, the television was stolen, and Fort confronted Squire about it. An altercation ensued, during which Squire stabbed Bennie Fort to death.

• Eugene Fort (born c. 1951)

A low-level enforcer in the Rukns. Along with Johnny Lee Fort, he was involved in intimidating witnesses during Bennie Fort's 1983 murder trial. On July 14, 1983, the day after police arrested Bennie Fort, Eugene and Johnny Lee Fort allegedly broke into the home of the woman who had accused him of the killing and threatened to kill her.

• James Fort (born c. 1962)

Drug dealer in the Rukns. Convicted of crack cocaine distribution and imprisoned in 1994.

• Johnny Lee Fort (born c. 1947)

The oldest of the brothers and the namesake of his father. Despite age, does not appear to have held high office in the gang, though together with Eugene Fort, was involved in intimidation of witnesses in Bennie Fort's 1983 murder trial (see above).

• Lawrence Fort (born c. 1960)

Ran one of the El Rukns' ancillary businesses in the 1980s, a security firm known as Security Maintenance Services, Ltd. The firm was unlicensed, and Fort was arrested as part of a police sting operation at McCormick Place. Pled guilty in the case to operating a security firm without a license, and carrying an illegal firearm.

Sisters

• Pee Wee Fort (born ?)

Active in El Ruks during 1980s. In 1985, Yonava Eason and two girlfriends were walking down a street when they saw Andrew Fort (above) and David Carter, both El Rukns, open fire on Robert "Dog" Johnson. Eason picked Carter's photo from a lineup, but when asked to testify in court, recanted her identification. Andrew Fort was convicted, but without Eason's testimony, Carter went free. Later, in 1991, Eason admitted she had changed her testimony after being threatened out of court by Pee Wee Fort, who told her she "better not testify". "My family was more important to me than telling the truth in that courtroom that day," she said.

Carter was convicted of murder, but eventually had his sentence reduced to 8-1/2 years on narcotics distribution charges, based on prosecutorial misbehavior. Prosecutors in the case had allowed gang snitches to use drugs, liquor, and to have sex with their wives and girlfriends while under state guard.

• Merriam Rice (neé Fort) (born ?)

No known gang activities in Chicago. Today is an anti-gang activist, working alongside former Gangster Disciples leader K.G. Wilson in inner-city Minneapolis, who is involved in street preaching and anti-violence community organizing. See this article for details. The Disciples are the chief Chicago rivals of the BPSN, and form the core of the "Folk Nation", a gang cartel organization rival to Fort's "People Nation"; hence, Rice's work with Wilson is significant. Wilson said,

I heard Jeff Fort had a sister here. I introduced myself and told her to come out with me. She did, and she's been with me ever since. Here I am, an ex-chief of the Black Gangster Disciples, and God gave me the sister of Jeff Fort. I think that allows us to show people that this gang thing is garbage.

[Thanks to Otto Sotnak for the tip about Merriam Rice, which inspired this post.]


Children

• Antonio Fort (born c. 1966) (also known as "Prince Akeem")

Believed to have been among top Chicago-based leadership of the El Rukns during the 1980s (Jeff Fort commanded the gang from prison in Beaumont, Texas, for most of the period), Antonio Fort was the target of the arrest warrant police used to infiltrate and eventually demolish the El Rukn Grand Major Temple and mosque headquarters on 39th and Drexel in 1989. Antonio Fort was apparently not fully loyal to the gang (possibly under the influence of a substance abuse problem), leading Jeff Fort to direct "drummings" [beatings] of his own son by fellow gang members as punishment on at least two occasions.

In the early 1990s, Antonio Fort is believed to have led a large Stones set the South Shore neighborhood (colloquially known as "Terror Town" during the gang's reign). Between 1992 and 1996, he served a prison sentence for conspiracy to purchase cocaine in Evanston. His release may have created a power struggle in the gang; in any case, his body washed up on the shore of Wolf Lake, separating Illinois and Indiana, in March, 1997.

• Watkeeta Valenzuela Fort (born c. 1970) (also known as "Prince Watkeeta")

In the power vacuum left after the government takedown of the Rukns in the late 1980s, Valenzuela came to power, leading one of the major Stones sets which controlled the Englewood neighborhood, with headquarters at 54th St. and Bishop St. (pictured at the top of this post). Valenzuela led the Stones in violent clashes with the Gangster Disciples gang, which also tried to move in on Rukn territory on the South Side during the early 1990s. In March, 1997, he pled guilty to running a cocaine trafficking operation, telling the court "I was born into this. I had no other choice."

Valenzuela is believed to have remained the closest of his siblings to father Jeff Fort, and to have incorporated much of the quasi-Islamic religious aspects of the Rukns in the 1990s Stones sets. His followers called themselves "Moes", a reference to the "Moorish Science" tenants of the Rukns. That name is still common among some factions.


Others

• Eugene Fort, nephew and son of Eugene Fort, brother (born c. 1972)

Active in Minneapolis crack trade during the early 1990s. Was chief suspect in 1990 murder of 11-year old boy Marcus Potts, who was at home alone while his house was being burglarized. A trail of footprints in the snow from the boy's home led police back to Eugene Fort's house, where traces of the boy's blood were found. However, the evidence was not strong enough to convict in court, and so the case was not brought to trial for 15 years, when DNA testing technology had advanced to the point where the blood could be more authoritatively matched. Eugene Fort was convicted of murder in 2007, though a new trial was briefly considered in 2007 based on the apparent jailhouse confession of his cousin Paul Rice. However, Fort's conviction was upheld.

• Paul Rice, nephew and son of Merriam Rice, sister (born ?)

After the conviction of his cousin Eugene Fort in the murder of an 11-year old boy, Rice supposedly bragged to jail inmates that he had "killed a little boy" on at least two occasions. On this basis, Eugene Fort received a hearing to determine whether a new trial was warranted, though Fort's conviction was subsequently upheld.

• Antonio Fort, grandson and son of Antonio Fort, son (born c. 1987) (also known as "Peanut")

Allegedly involved in 2002 mob beating that made national news. Jack Moore and Anthony Stuckey were driving drunk and high through the Oakland neighborhood, and crashed their van into a house on Lake Park Ave., where three young women were sitting. The crash injured the women, killing one. A crowd of men who were nearby at the time of the wreck dragged Moore and Stuckey out of the van and beat them to death on the street. A police officer who arrived on the scene to break up the violence claimed that Antonio was a leader of the vigilante mob, and had personally attacked Moore and Stuckey.

At trial in 2003, Antonio Fort testified that he arrived on the scene after the violence had already begun, and that he left quickly when he heard his mother calling him. Fort was acquitted. Reports indicate he is not closely associated with the Stones.

Woodlawn Immanuel Evangelical Lutheran Church

A previous post discussing the history of the Blackstone Rangers street gang during the 1960s and early 1970s illustrated the perverted genius of gang founder and leader, Jeff Fort, in subverting social and community organizations to help cartelize criminal activities in the Woodlawn neighborhood.

One of the earliest of these efforts was a close relationship with Ed Woods, extension director of the Woodlawn Chicago Boys Club. Together with Fort and gang co-founder Eugene Hairston, Woods searched for a space where the gang could create a supervised teen hang-out. They found their first location here, at Woodlawn Immanuel Evangelical Lutheran Church, 6401 S. Kenwood Ave. The lot where the church edifice once stood is now an empty lot.

The early 1960s were a time of increasing racial strife in Woodlawn. For the past decade, the neighborhood, which was previously majority-white, had seen an influx of black residents from residential areas to the west, plus additional black immigration from southern states. “White flight” out of the neighborhood was increasing rapidly, and the economic prospects for Woodlawn seemed poor. In 1964, median family income in Woodlawn was $4,199 (roughly $30,000 in 2008 dollars) – not poverty-level, but well below the city average, and on a downward trend.

Hyde Park, just to the north of Woodlawn across 60th Street, remained primarily white, as students and faculty from the University of Chicago dominated the housing market there. Hyde Park residents were increasingly concerned about the changing nature of Woodlawn (as well as Kenwood to the north and Washington Park to the west), and the University feared a growing inability to attract students from wealthy families into the city if conditions in the neighborhoods surrounding it did not improve.

Thus, the U of C began floating ideas about building a “south campus” between 60th and 61st Streets, and sought city support for a massive urban renewal campaign intended to demolish much of the decaying housing stock between 60th and 63rd. The effort would have undoubtedly improved the condition of these blocks, but understandably, the program also raised the ire of some poor residents of Woodlawn, who feared losing their homes. Into this political minefield stepped the Industrial Areas Foundation, an organization headed by the famed radical, Saul Alinsky, “to unite dispossessed peoples into power groups”. The IAF worked with the pastors of two Woodlawn churches, Rev. Charles T. Leber of First Presbyterian, the oldest congregation in the city, and Rev. Arthur Brazier, pastor of the Apostolic Church of God at 63rd and Kimbark, to found the Temporary Woodlawn Organization (T.W.O.) (after the new group proved not to be temporary – it still exists today – it was renamed “The” Woodlawn Organization, keeping the same initials).

T.W.O. spearheaded the opposition to the U of C south campus plans, and also began attempting to consolidate power in Woodlawn, promoting itself as the singular representative of the community. T.W.O. organized “rent strikes” against slum building landlords, picketed in front of the homes of school principals who they accused of facilitating back-door segregation, and attempted to change the zoning laws to rid 63rd street of saloons.

Given that T.W.O. was founded by church leaders, it is unsurprising that the Greater Woodlawn Pastors’ Alliance held a membership position in the organization. Nevertheless, not all Woodlawn-area churchmen supported the group’s efforts and radical political positions. Associate pastor Otto Sotnak at Woodlawn Immanuel Lutheran Church criticized Alinsky’s role in T.W.O., arguing that black residents saw him as patronizing and an interference. He described Alinsky’s IAF as “an agency whose organizing tactics are based on the cultivation of fear, hatred, and useful antagonism.” Along with five other Woodlawn pastors, he resigned from T.W.O. because, as he wrote to me in recent correspondence, “we realized the philosophy of the organization was essentially totalitarian, and therefore our ideas didn't matter.”

Woodlawn Immanuel was founded in 1899 with 25 members, styling itself as “Immanuel English Evangelical Lutheran Church”. At that time, most Lutheran services were confined to the historically-Germanic north side, but, as the new church’s name suggested, it offered services on the south side in English. The original meeting place was at 43rd St. and S. Champlain Ave, and the church built its first edifice at that site in 1903. In 1917, the Lutheran General Synod (forerunner of the modern United Lutheran Church) was seeking an opportunity to build a congregation close to the University of Chicago, in order to support Lutheran students at that institution. Immanuel English Evangelical answered the call in 1921, and moved to Woodlawn, meeting at the Masonic Temple at 64th St. and University Ave. for three years while a new edifice at 6401 S. Kenwood was under construction. At that time (also the congregation’s 25th anniversary), the church added “Woodlawn” to its name.

(Pictured: Woodlawn Immanuel Evangelical Lutheran Church)

The church that had begun with 25 members grew quickly under the skilled ministry of Rev. Dr. Clarence E. Paulus, who had found his way to the congregation as a guest minister in 1914, and remained at the church until 1951. By 1948, when the church paid off its debt for the building in a “mortgage burning ceremony,” the membership stood near 750. The church served the community continuously in those years, offering its sanctuary for use by Boy and Girl Scout groups, women’s clubs, youth groups, and other civic organizations. In 1960, the church offered free polio innoculations for Woodlawn residents.

As the neighborhood changed during the 1950s and 1960s, Woodlawn Immanuel responded to residents’ concerns regarding crime. Already by 1952, crime in the neighborhood was serious enough to warrant a mass meeting of neighborhood groups at the church to discuss the problem. At that meeting, Woodlawn Immanuel’s new pastor, Rev. Carl H. Berhenke (who had recently succeeded Rev. Paulus) argued that the solution to growing street crime was to “help the people to realize they are not standing alone in their demand for a good, clean, and decent community, and that by working together we can bring it about.”

Woodlawn Immanuel and T.W.O. were not the only organizations growing in size during the early 1960s. Juvenile delinquents Jeff Fort and Eugene Hairston founded the Blackstone Rangers in the late 1950s, and by the summer of 1963, their control over the streets of eastern Woodlawn was complete, with purse snatchings, robberies, fights, and bloody turf wars with the Cobras, Disciples, and other gangs becoming increasingly commonplace.

Ed Woods, extension director of the Woodlawn Chicago Boys’ Club, worked assiduously to develop a rapport with Fort and Hairston, and in 1964, fearing another vicious summer, he approached Rev. Sotnak at Immanuel Lutheran about opening a youth center at the church where gang members could play basketball, pool, car games, ping pong, and checkers under adult supervision. In an email to me regarding a previous post, Rev. Sotnak described the origins of the Rangers’ hang-out at Immanuel Lutheran:

In the summers of 1963, -64 and -65, gang activity had become a growing threat to residents and business people in South Chicago, which included Englewood and Woodlawn. I remember a block club meeting held in our church basement when we invited a youth officer from the Woodlawn Police Station to speak to us. Afterward, he begged me to do anything I could to get those “kids” off the street.

By coincidence Ed Woods, who was director of a detached worker program at the Chicago Woodlawn Boy's Club, stopped at my office to ask if they could use our church facilities to open a center for the Blackstone Rangers, since the Boy's Club building was in rival gang turf at that time, and the Rangers wouldn't go there. I agreed, and that was how my church and I got involved.

We had about a dozen gang members the first night we opened. After that we had over 100, and the number grew ever larger after that. The Chicago Woodlawn Boy's Club got funding to hire detached workers to mingle with the gang members, gain their confidence and encourage them to leave the gang and either get into school or some kind of legitimate career that, "Put money in their pockets," since most of the gang members, given a choice, would rather not hustle.

We had several success stories. One gang member said he always wanted to be a chef. Mr. Woods found him a job at Passavant Hospital in the kitchen. To the best of my knowledge, the fellow left the gang, at least for a time. However, we learned that leaving any gang is difficult. It's like going AWOL from the army.

Employment was a key part of the program. At the time of his work with Rev. Sotnak and Immanuel Lutheran, Ed Woods told reporters, “In the past, social workers were sent here when trouble was brewing,” but argued that employment would provide a more permanent solution to the gang problem: “If a man has pride it can make him a king, and a job can give the boy the necessary pride.” Jeff Fort himself found himself employed through Woods’ efforts, earning $1.25 per hour.

In 1965, Rev. Sotnak left Woodlawn Immanuel, and the collaboration with Woods and the Rangers ended. As Rev. Sotnak described it to me,

In 1965, I left Chicago and moved to Minneapolis, where I became pastor of Lake of the Isles Luth. Church. That summer was also a long hot summer on the streets of Woodlawn. Pastor John Fry became pastor of First Presbyterian Church at 64th. & Kimbark. The interim pastor at Woodlawn-Immanuel was afraid to get involved with the gang, so Pastor Fry invited the gang to use his church facilities (just a block west of Woodlawn-Immanuel).

First Presbyterian’s previous pastor had been a founder and charter member of T.W.O., so when the Rangers moved their headquarters, they also came into contact with T.W.O. leadership. By 1967, T.W.O. was working together with the Rangers in running a federally-funded job training program, in which the gang leadership (most of whom were high school drop-outs) would administer classes in reading and arithmetic. As preposterous as it may sound today, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission supported the effort to the tune of nearly $1 million between June, 1967 and June, 1968. Like Rev. Sotnak, Rev. Fry, the EEOC, and the community of Woodlawn were facing desperate problems of poverty, crime, and racial strife, and they were willing to adopt unconventional approaches where traditional ones had failed.

The relationship between the Rangers, T.W.O., and First Presbyterian can only be described as a total debacle. The police accused Rev. Fry at First Presbyterian of not only offering space to the Rangers, but actively participating in and supporting their criminality, blessing their attempts at extortion, and passing information about “hits” between gang members. The gang-operated training centers turned out to be a complete farce, with a Chicago Tribune investigation revealing that eight of the program’s top administrators, including Fort and Hairston, were either awaiting trial (for crimes including rape and murder) or had lengthy rap sheets. Police surveillance of the “classes” found no textbooks, rulers, paper or lectures, but dice-throwing, sleeping, and discussions focused on women and sports. The only books available were of the comic variety.

For their part, T.W.O. blamed the bad publicity the programs received on Mayor Richard J. Daley, who, they claimed, despised T.W.O. for the fact that the job training programs they and the Rangers administered were the only government monies in Chicago not directly under city control.

Nevertheless, between June, 1967, and June, 1968, when the EEOC chose not to renew T.W.O.’s grants, two program trainees and one instructor had been charged with murder, three other staff members were arrested for assault and robbery of a youth who had refused to join the program, and one teenager was shot during a class. A subsequent congressional investigation found that the Blackstone Rangers had demanded kickbacks of nearly 50% of the federal checks that students in the program received. Gang leader Jeff Fort eventually went to prison for three years starting in 1972 for his role in defrauding the government.

Perhaps, given his experiences with T.W.O. and the Blackstone Rangers, Rev. Sotnak could have predicted some of these problems. In a speech to a church group shortly after he left Woodlawn Immanuel, he called claims that T.W.O. was improving conditions in the neighborhood “absolutely pathetic”. In recent correspondence, he wrote to me, “As I see it, Mr. Woods and the Chicago Boy's Club completely lost control of the Blackstone Rangers in the summer of 1965. Given the duplicity of the gang's leadership, it was an inevitable development.”

Woodlawn Immanuel Lutheran Church closed in 1973. By that point, the neighborhood had completely changed from the one in which the church had been built in 1924, and there were other Lutheran congregations in Hyde Park and elsewhere that could serve the University community. The edifice at 64th and Kenwood was sold to a Baptist congregation, which worshipped there for a decade, until the building was destroyed. It remains an empty lot today.

The Woodlawn neighborhood continued to deteriorate into slum conditions in the 1970s and 1980s; however, over the last fifteen years, real estate values have improved substantially and crime has declined. The green line elevated tracks, which once darkened 63rd street, were demolished in 1996, and the street which once primarily served as a one-stop shop for liquor, drugs, and prostitutes, is now overwhelmingly empty lots. Since 2001, University of Chicago police have extended their patrols down to 64th St., and the area between 60th and 63rd is increasingly populated again by University students and faculty. Many beautiful and expensive new homes and townhome complexes have been constructed where the dilapidated buildings the U of C once sought to demolish once stood. The recent recession notwithstanding, continued gentrification in Woodlawn seems likely.

It is difficult to imagine a similarly close relationship developing today between street gangs and community and church leaders. Partially that is due to the increasing violence of gangs and their role in retailing crack and other illegal drugs. It is also a reflection of the differences between that time and ours. Then, rioting in ghetto neighborhoods threatened to destroy the city, and radicalism bordered on revolution. As Rev. Sotnak wrote in recent correspondence:

Would I do what I did again? I probably would. Just because life is fraught with danger doesn't mean one should shrink from it. "Damn the torpedoes! Full steam ahead."

I suppose those of us who tried to "straighten-out" gang members were naive, but we were also desperate. Someone ought to do something, so we did what we could. As theologian Reinhold Niebuhr said, "Politics is the application of proximate solutions to insoluble problems."

Those were indeed the days.

Jeff Fort Founds the Black P. Stone Nation

UPDATE: Rev. Otto Sotnak, previously associate pastor at Woodlawn Immanuel Lutheran Church, and who is mentioned briefly below, wrote to me after reading this post, and his thoughts provide further insight into the relationship between the Blackstone Rangers and Woodlawn community organizations. Rev. Sotnack gave me permission to reprint his letter, and I have done so in a new post.
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Intelligence tests indicated that Jeff Fort had an IQ between 48 and 58, a score indicating moderate mental retardation; however, Fort possessed exceptional leadership skill, organizational genius, and a magnetic personality. He misused these qualities to found and lead what was once Chicago’s largest street gang, the Blackstone Rangers, and to consolidate a gang cartel that endures to the present day. While building that empire during the 1960s, he lived here, at 1504 E. 66th Pl. (townhome on the right in the photo above), near the corner of Blackstone Ave.

The neighborhood of Woodlawn was developed as a middle-class alternative to the higher-rent Kenwood and Hyde Park districts to the north. The World’s Fair of 1893, which took place in nearby Jackson Park, brought the demand to house thousands of workers associated with that event, and many of these remained after the Fair. Up through the 1940s, Woodlawn was a white, though not ethnic, neighborhood, but in the 1950s and 1960s, black residents from the Grand Crossing and Washington Park districts to the west began moving in. White flight to the suburbs, plus continued migration into Chicago by southern Blacks fleeing racial strife added to the flow, including Jeff Fort’s family, which arrived in Woodlawn from Mississippi in 1955. After the rioting following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968, most of the remaining white residents moved out, with the exception of a few University of Chicago students and faculty huddled at the north end of Woodlawn between 60th and 62nd streets. The neighborhood remains almost entirely black to this day. (Personal story: in 1995, as a college freshman at the U of C, I attended an orientation session in which University Police presented us with a street map of the south side and told us never to go south of 60th street (or north of 47th); the primary effect of this talk was to generate great curiosity and frequent “forbidden” visits to Woodlawn).

Jeff Fort was a troublemaker as a boy, and in the late 1950s, found himself in a juvenile detention camp at suburban St. Charles. There, he befriended a fellow Woodlawn delinquent, Eugene Hairston. Upon returning home, the two dropped out of school and founded the Blackstone Rangers, a street gang named after Blackstone Ave., which runs north-south through the heart of Woodlawn.

Most street gangs are principally businesses -- businesses that offer extra-legal security services not provided by the police and a range of prohibited products, including narcotics, high-interest loans, prostitution services, and so on. These organizations operate in market niches created by unintended consequences of legislation; they are arbitrageurs of government policy. Like all businesses, however, their profitability is a function of competition, and a successful cartel can reap huge rewards.

Cartels, however, are inherently unstable, as each conspiring business has an incentive to overproduce at the higher market prices created by the cartel, and the resultant glut of product causes prices to fall and breaks up the conspiracy. Thus, a cartel can only be maintained if the participants are able to closely monitor each other and punish those who chisel on the agreement. Efforts to do so are complicated by the fact that meetings of business managers for this purpose are prohibited by vigorously enforced federal and state antitrust laws.

But for those businesses already ducking the law to provide illegal products and services, the additional cost of avoiding prosecution under the Sherman Act is low. Low IQ or not, Jeff Fort intuitively understood the tremendous profits to be made by cartelizing Chicago street gangs. Throughout his life, he showed a genius for subverting legitimate community and government institutions to reduce competition on the streets and consolidate power. He was also a master marketer and manipulator, using the noble image of the civil rights movement to deflect criticism and enforce his power in maintaining the cartel.

A 1965 Tribune article, which appears to be the first mention of Fort in print, found him working with Edward Woods, head of the Woodlawn Chicago Boys Club and Rev. Sotnak of the Woodlawn Immanuel Lutheran Church to create a “meeting place for teens” where they could defuse tensions and find help in obtaining work. Fort quickly learned that the image of a reformed gang member who just wanted to help his community was incredibly seductive to credulous do-gooders, and he took full advantage. The police were more suspicious of his motives:

Youth Officer Julius Frazier of the Grand Crossing police district is not as confident of the Rangers’ rehabilitation as Woods and the Rev. Mr. Sotnak. “Wait until nice weather comes again, and then we’ll see how good the boys are,” he said.

(Pictured: Edward Woods, extension director of the Woodlawn Chicago Boys Club, with Jeff Fort at age 19 (center) and Eugene Hairston (right))

The following year, in 1966, Fort convinced Woodlawn police superintendent Orlando W. Wilson to broker a very public “truce” between the Rangers and their longtime rivals, the Gangster Disciples. Wilson trumpeted his supposed achievement in the press, criticizing those who said he should be arresting these hoodlums, not engaging them, and these statements hamstrung Supt. Wilson in responding to the subsequent wave of violence unleashed by the Blackstone Rangers. Within 12 hours of the agreement, five rival gang members were shot. A month later, the president of the East Side Disciples, the local Gangster Disciples chapter, was dead on the street.

Similarly, Fort convinced the Rev. John Fry, pastor of First Presbyterian Church at 64th and Kimbark, to allow the Rangers to use the edifice for their headquarters. First Presbyterian, the oldest congregation in the city, and with a long history of anti-crime organizing, had moved to Woodlawn in 1928 from its previous locations in the Loop and the Prairie Avenue district). The newspapers reported Fry’s disputes with the police, who were shocked to learn that the Reverend had made a pact with the devil:

The Rev. John R. Fry, pastor of the First Presbyterian church, 6400 Kimbark av., said yesterday that he is attempting to hold together the Blackstone Rangers, a teen-age gang, and that he is considering a court injunction to stop police efforts to break up the gang...."The Rangers is the only organization that offers safety from hostile forces at home, in school, and on the streets," he said. The gang has learned that violence solves nothing and is working for the betterment of the Woodlawn community, he said.

In fact, the Blackstone Rangers were becoming increasingly violent. In September, 1966, gang members yelled “almighty Blackstone Rangers” before opening fire on a group of boy scouts leaving a meeting at the Essex Community Church at 74th and Blackstone. The following month, twenty Rangers invaded the lunchroom at South Shore High School during school hours, creating chaos by throwing furniture around and breaking glasses, dishes, and silverware, while assaulting twelve students there.

During this time, Fort used his ability to subvert community organizations to consolidate a cartel of south side street gangs, forming the Black P. Stones in 1967. Obviously a play on the original Ranger name, the separation of “Black” and “Stone” in the name of the new group made the gang less location-specific and added racial and religious overtones. The “P.” variously indicates “People” or “Power,” depending on the context. The Stones were led by a council called the “Main 21,” chaired by Fort and Hairston, with representatives of different gangs working together to organize extortion, narcotics, and other rackets.

In the civil rights movement and the country’s increased awareness of the slum conditions inhabited by many blacks, Fort saw an opportunity to milk government and charitable organizations for funds to support gang activities. Fort was not alone in this endeavor (on the west side, the Conservative Vice Lords were doing the same), but his audacious success brought him national fame.

At the end of 1966, The Woodlawn Organization (“TWO”), a major community group, applied for a federal government grant amounting to over $950,000, in which the Blackstone Rangers would administer job training programs to young gang members in the community. It is difficult to imagine now how anyone could have thought that a known criminal organization would have the ability to run such a program and to avoid corruption, but government officials were as interested as anyone in appearing to be supportive of black community interests (not to mention buying black votes).

The grant was accepted, and Fort personally oversaw the funds. Trainees (selected by the gang) received federal checks for $45 for every week they attended the Rangers’ programs. In fact, the Rangers demanded kickbacks of $10-$20 from each check, or sometimes just cashing the checks directly while forging attendance records. When training sessions did occur, participants learned little of value, but “played cards, rolled dice, or talked about women and sports,” according to one “student”. In one case, Fort held a dogfight during a government-supported job training session.

While collecting a hefty salary from TWO, plus the kickbacks, Jeff Fort continued the violent business of running a street gang. In April, 1968, he used the opportunity presented by the riots after the Martin Luther King, Jr. assassination to sell millions of dollars in protection services. Store owners purchased placards to place in their shop windows which read simply

Do NOT Touch – Black P Stones – Jeff

So complete was the Stones’ control over the south side that the simple mention of the first name of their leader inhibited riotous mobs, and stores that purchased the placards survived intact.

Other violence directly involving Jeff Fort includes an October, 1968 case in which Fort was arrested for assisting in the beating of a postal employee who had caught a 13-year old Stone initiate stealing a car and was holding him for the police. In July, 1969, Fort was again arrested for ordering the murder of Jackie Turner, a Navy midshipman returning from Vietnam, and an anti-gang organizer who had refused to join the Black P. Stones. Four Stones, wearing the gang’s trademark red berets, shouted “almighty Blackstone Rangers” before stepping out of a darkened gangway at 71st and Ridgeland and opening fire on Turner with machine guns. Amazingly, Turner survived.

In late 1969, Fort again used the veneer of civil rights as a cause for gang enrichment. Operation Breadbasket, the Jesse Jackson-led wing of the Southern Christian leadership Conference, had waged a public boycott against the Red Rooster Supermarket chain for allegedly overcharging customers and serving low-quality products in black neighborhoods. Fort offered the company the opportunity to “hire” 22 gang members, including 15 of the Main 21, at inflated salaries, as a way to show solidarity and mend ties with the Woodlawn community. Fort personally was hired as an “outside store inspector”. The gang’s deal helped end the boycott, but their increasing demands finally bankrupted Red Rooster; Fort had killed the rooster that laid the golden eggs!

In 1970, the P. Stones even allegedly extorted $160,000 from entertainer Sammy Davis (Sr.), who had an ownership interest in a Dixmoor-based liquor store, which he agreed to let gang members run.

As some of the previous examples indicate, Jeff Fort was increasingly becoming a political figure, especially after he took complete control of the Black P. Stones when Eugene Hairston went to prison in 1968. Later revelations indicated that the Rangers had even weighed the possibility of high-profile assassinations during the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, including those of incumbent Vice President Hubert Humphrey and Sen. Eugene McCarthy.

But Jeff Fort’s most famous political statement came about not in Chicago, but in Washington that year. A January, 1968, investigation by the Tribune had revealed the extent to which the TWO grant was being misused by the Rangers. Fort was asked to testify before the U.S. Senate subcommittee on investigations to explain the apparent fraud. When asked his name, he replied, but after that refused to answer further queries. His attorney, sitting next to him at the hearing, demanded that Fort be allowed to cross-examine previous testifiers, who had claimed they witnessed fraud. Upon being reminded that a Senate subcommittee was not a trial court, Fort stood up and walked out on Congress, leaving his questioners shouting threats of contempt charges after him. In fact, Fort was later tried and convicted for contempt. The scene of the young black militant showing evident disrespect to the Senate made the front pages and headed the evening news.

(Pictured: Jeff Fort in Almighty Black P. Stone jacket)

With his heightened political profile, Fort began to flex political muscle back in Chicago. In December, 1968, he led a march down the Midway Plaisance to State Street, demanding that the city rename State Street in honor of a slain fellow gang member, Jerome "Pony Soldier" Cogwell. After the march reached State, Fort led the crowd in smashing windows, jumping on cars, and generally rioting, until the police arrested him and scores of others. In fact, the scene was manufactured by Fort expressly for the intent of challenging Illinois laws against disorderly conduct. After his arrest, Fort sued Mayor Richard J. Daley claiming the statutes were vague and that city police used them to harass residents. The Illinois Supreme Court eventually ruled in favor of the validity of the laws.

The police did keep close tabs on the Stones, and vice-versa. Fort once personally offered a Woodlawn officer $200 for pictures of members of the city’s Gang Intelligence Unit. In another case, he stopped a police car on the street and, as the officer later described it,

Fort laid a $100 bill on the seat of our car, and I said, “What’s that for?” He said: “Nothing right now. You do whatever you want with it. There’s plenty more where that came from.”

The Chicago police weren’t the only ones tracking Jeff Fort. In January, 1969, J. Edgar Hoover approved an FBI plot to stir up disputes (and possibly violence) between the Blackstone Rangers and the nascent Black Panther Party. FBI agents forged an anonymous letter, which they sent to Fort. The letter read:

Brother Jeff:

I've spent some time with some Panther friends on the West Side lately and I know what's been going on. The brothers that run the Panthers blame you for blocking their thing and there's supposed to be a hit out for you. I'm not a Panther, or a Ranger, just black. From what I see those Panthers are out for themselves, not black people. I think you ought to know what their [sic] up to, I know what I'd do if I was you. You might hear from me again.

[signed] A black brother you don't know

An internal FBI memo released later indicated the agency was aware of the fact that their letter might lead to violence. The memo noted,

It is believed that the above may intensify the degree of animosity between the two groups and occasion Fort to take retaliatory actions which could disrupt the BPP [Black Panther Party] or lead to reprisals against its leadership.

All of this power and fame certainly inflated Fort’s ego. Fort had always been a smart dresser, but now he began incorporating wild colors and exaggerated hats. In fact, Fort’s first adult arrest, back in 1965, indulged his sartorial tastes:

Early in March Calvin Williams, 21, purchased a pair of gray slacks. They were belt-less, cuffless, and tailor-made, and his friends often remarked to him that he stepped in them with noticeable aplomb. He had worn them only a few times when on March 19 his apartment at 6134 Kimbark av. was looted of a television set, radio, phonograph, record albums, silverware -- and his treasured pants. ....

While enjoying a walk yesterday afternoon along 67th street near Blackstone avenue, Williams spotted a crisp looking pair of slacks worn by another stroller....He telephoned detectives who had investigated the burglary of his home. Police arrived and took Williams and the youth in his pants, Jeff Ford [sic], 19, of 1504 E. 66th pl., to the south side detective headquarters....Ford surrendered the pants to Detectives James McDonough and William McHugh, who found Williams' name on the label....

Williams, however, will have to wait for return of the trousers. Police said the slacks are evidence and will be needed during the court hearing. As a result, Ford was left pantsless. He telephoned his home and his mother brought another pair to the station.

By August, 1970, Jeff Fort could afford his own pants. In that month, he was involved in a high-profile dispute with another community organization, the Kenwood-Oaklawn Community Organization (KOCO), the leader of which had recently testified before Congress about gang problems in Chicago. The Stones had unsuccessfully attempted to worm their way into a $3.5 government grant being dispensed by KOCO. One afternoon, Fort decided to call a press conference about the issue, to be held at his headquarters in First Presbyterian. Most of the city’s radio and print outlets sent a reporter within an hour of the announcement, but only one of the television stations did so.

“I have important things to say,” Fort announced, casting a disappointed eye at the single television camera from CBS. “Maybe I ought to put off this press conference until tomorrow when the press can come.”

Luckily for Fort, NBC finally showed up, and the press conference went forward, as he complained about the leader of KOCO, who was black, "going to white men for help."

While he had committed countless crimes over the past decade, September, 1970, saw the beginning of the end for Jeff Fort’s freedom. In that month, he ordered an all-out war on the police. In the instance that led to his arrest, Fort told a group of gang members to break out all of the lights along a certain elevated train platform, then to take up sniper positions against police there. That evening, an officer was wounded by a bullet shot from the position.

When he found out the heat was on, Fort fled Chicago, moving between Detroit, New York City, and Barbados for over two months on the run. While at Barbados, the increasingly erratic Fort, who by that time insisted on being called "Black Prince," sent a oddly messianic letter back to a meeting of P. Stones in which he referred to himself in the third person:

He is in contact spiritually with each and every Stone. As a matter of fact, if you look around you from time to time you will get a glimpse of him. When the time is right each Stone who is truly Stone to the bone -- Stone to the spirit -- will be able to see "The Chief".

During Fort’s time on the lam, detectives began trailing his girlfriend, Janis Connors. On October 30th, they saw her purchase a plane ticket for New York City. The detectives followed her onto the flight and, in New York, traced her to an east Manhattan hotel, where they arrested Jeff Fort and extradited him to Illinois. With him at the time of his arrest were papers indicating Fort was soon planning to flee with Connors to Algeria, where he would have joined Eldridge Cleaver and Timothy Leary.

Fort had been arrested countless times before without being jailed. At the time of his extradition on the police sniping charge, he was under indictment or conviction for: two charges of attempted murder, three charges of aggravated battery, one charge of aggravated kidnapping, one of conspiracy, and one of concealing a fugitive.

How had he managed to remain a free man during this time? Fort had excellent legal counsel, paid for at the expense of Charles Kettering II, grandson of the famed General Motors engineer and philanthropist. Kettering funded the Stones in the amount of $11,000 per month, which he openly admitted was intended for bail bonds and attorneys’ fees. Kettering, too, was entranced by Fort and the prospect of appearing sympathetic to minority interests. He also appears to have relished in the propinquity to dangerous criminals his money bought. He frequently referred to the Stones in public as “cats,” employing the slang of the era to signal just how hip he was.

After his imprisonment, Kettering’s lawyers incredibly managed to eliminate most of Fort’s criminal charges. In the case of the attempted murder of anti-gang activist Jackie Turner, Fort was tried three times, and in each case, the judge declared a mistrial. In other cases, the state dropped the charges or found their evidence or their victim mysteriously missing. Between 1970 and 1972, Fort continued to actively lead the Black P. Stones, and it was common for 30-40 gang members to visit Fort daily at Cook County Jail.

Finally, however, in May, 1972, Jeff Fort finally began serving a prison term for fraud in misdirecting funds at the TWO training center. He served four years, plus an additional year for contempt of congress, divided between state and federal prison.

Jeff Fort was released from prison in the spring of 1976. During his imprisonment, he hatched an even grander scheme, to rebuild the Stones as a religious organization, which could hold cartel meetings in secret, protected by the First Amendment. The continuing story of that organization, the El Rukns, which Fort led into the 1980s, their consolidation of the drug trade in Chicago, and their audacious attempts at international terrorism, are detailed in this post and this one.

The Black P. Stone Nation still exists as a major coordinating organization for Chicago-based street gangs, though it is better known today as the "People" (they are opposed by the “Folk”, those gangs associated with the Rangers’ primordial enemies, the Gangster Disciples). Local Stones chapters, while no longer held together in a rigid organizational hierarchy as they did when Fort was leading the gang, inhabit many south side neighborhoods, as well as many suburbs. Affiliate gangs are notable in several other states, as far away as Florida.

The home at 1504 E. 66th Place, where Jeff Fort lived while building the Blackstone Rangers and the Black P. Stones, up until his arrest in 1970, suffered a major fire, suspicious for its timing, in November, 1970, within a few days of his arrest in New York. The building is still standing, and appears to be inhabited (though two of the neighboring townhomes show evidence of abandonment). It wouldn’t be surprising if the property were still controlled by the gang.

El Rukn Leader Jeff Fort's Home

After serving a prison sentence for misappropriating funds from a federal government grant, Jeff Fort, the founder of the Blackstone Rangers (later the Black P Stone Nation) returned to Chicago in 1977 and began rebuilding his criminal empire, ingeniously disguising its purpose behind that of a religious and community organization, the El Rukns.

Fort was also at the head of a gang-owned property holding company, the El Pyramid Real Estate and Maintenance Corp., which owned a building previously located on this lot at 6417 S. Kenwood Ave. Fort's made the building his home and personal headquarters, occupying an apartment on the third floor, from which he directed the gang's massive drug operations, as well as its other criminal businesses.

The building was originally constructed in 1925 as the Kenrose Hotel, with 150 rooms, most rented out to long-term apartment tenants. As the rooms were studios, the majority of the Kenrose's guests were adult singles and divorcees; thus, the Kenrose was frequently in the newspapers for various love triangles gone bad over the years.

In 1949, an expert con man named William Carlson moved into the hotel, and soon began charming the young women with claims he was a retired Marine colonel and a war hero. Eventually, he proposed marriage to two different lucky girls (ignoring the fact that a warrant for his arrest on child abandonment charges had already been issued by Mrs. Lulu Carlson, his real wife, who lived in Kenosha, Wisconsin). After absconding with several thousands of dollars from his new lovers' bank accounts, he was apprehended and imprisoned.

The very same year, another true gentleman, Henry Benson, checked into the Kenrose while in Chicago attending his sisters' funeral. Benson's wife in Flushing, New York, had recently left him, taking the children with her, so while in Chicago, he telephoned an old girlfriend in town, Miss Dorothy Stone. The two went out on the town for a long night of drinking before returning to Benson's room at the Kenrose. There, an argument began about one of Stone's old lovers, at which point Benson took off his shoes and beat his drunken girlfriend into unconsciousness. He then climbed into bed and slept off the hangover. When he awoke and found Miss Stone still on the floor where he left her, he washed the blood off her, tucked her into bed, and casually told the hotel clerk a physician might be needed as he checked out. Miss Stone died a few hours later, and Benson went to prison on murder charges.

So the building had a long history of criminal activities, but nothing like what arrived after the Woodlawn neighborhood's economic deterioration in the 1960s. In 1969, the Kenrose burned, though apparently there was enough of the building left to continue occupancy as an apartment building. During a 1970 "back-to-school" parade by the Black P Stones, the Stones' major rivals, the Gangster Disciples, opened fire with a shotgun, wounding three marchers, including one who lived at the old hotel. Two years later, Fort was in prison for misusing money from a government grant intended for community development the Stones had received.

(Pictured: Black P Stone back-to-school march along 63rd St., in August, 1970)

By 1981, Fort was out of prison, and his El Rukn gang controlled vast stretches of Southside drug territoriy. The gang's specialties were two drugs known as talwin and pyrabenzamine, commonly known as "Ts and Blues", which when combined and injected, produce a similar sensation to heroin, though at a substantially lower price than that drug, making them attractive to denizens of the economically depressed neighborhoods where the gang operated.

With their drug earnings, Fort led the gang into prostitution, protection ("street tax"), and labor racketeering, as well as real estate and politics. The El Pyramid Corp., which ran the real estate operations, was known for intimidating building owners into selling at below-market rates. It is not known if this was the case with the old Kenrose building, however. Fort, who demanded his followers call him "Prince Malik," and who paraded around town in a long fur coat adorned with heavy gold jewelry, bragged to the media that the police would never put him in jail.

In 1981, however, events took place that would eventually lead to Fort's downfall. Fort ordered a hit on the leader of another gang, Willie "Dollar Bill" Bibbs. Bibbs' gang represented competition for the Rukns, and, moreover, he called his gang the "Stones," impinging on Fort's "copyright" on that name for criminal operations. Fort sent Earl Hawkins, a top Rukn lieutenant, to organize the killing. "Shoot anybody that's out there! No, my brothers, I'm not a madman," Fort told Hawkins before a group of El Rukns. "Let's do it!" In June, 1981, Bibbs was shot by Hawkins and another Rukn outside a 43rd Street bar.

Police traced the shooting to Hawkins, and in October of that year, they entered the building at 6417 S. Kenwood with a warrant for his arrest. When the police entered the hallway where Hawkins was holed up with Fort, Fort sprinted down the hall and threw a 9 mm pistol and $8,000 in cash down a stairwell. The Rukn leader was arrested on weapons charges and harboring a fugitive. After a lengthy legal fight, Jeff Fort agreed to plead guilty and received a 90 day sentence in County jail.

While serving his sentence, evidence collected at his home during subsequent raids was used to indict Fort on federal narcotics trafficking charges, which eventually led to his imprisonment at Bastrop, Texas. This did not stop Jeff Fort from leading the Rukns, as he continued to hold sway over the gang by telephone from prison. For years, police knew that Fort was continuing to run the gang through an elaborate and intricate set of codes he used in telephone conversations with his generals back in Chicago, but law enforcement was unable to crack the code.

That is, until 1986, when Earl Hawkins was sentenced to death for his murderous role in the El Rukn gang, including his killing of Willie Bibbs. In return for his life, Hawkins turned state's witness against his former boss, and explained to investigators the meanings of Fort's complex coded statements. When interpreted, Fort's own words implicated him in a number of contract murders, as well as, fantastically, a plan to commit terrorist acts in Chicago on behalf of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi. Though the plan didn't get far, it revealed for the first time to the public the level of sophistication in the Rukn organization, and the grand ambitions Fort held for the group.

With Hawkins' testimony, Jeff Fort, still imprisoned in Texas, was convicted in October 1988 for ordering Willie Bibbs' murder, and placed in isolation where he could no longer communicate with the Rukns in Chicago. Eventually, in 1995, he was moved to the Colorado SuperMax prison. Without Fort's leadership, the El Rukn gang crumbled, and the name fell out of use around 1990.

The old Kenrose building, already falling apart, was demolished during the early 1990s, and in 2001, a group of small, but attractive single-family homes was built along Kenwood Ave. on the lot where Jeff Fort directed the El Rukn criminal empire.

El Rukn "Temple"

The El Rukns were a gang of ruthless drug dealers and pimps operative between 1977 and 1990, who attempted to shield themselves from federal inquiry under the facade of a religious organization. Between 1985 and 1987, the gang even dabbled in international terrorism, allegedly traveling to Libya and meeting with agents of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi to offer their services as domestic terrorists in return for money and weapons.

Jeff Fort founded the El Rukns upon his release from prison in 1977. Most of the gang leadership were comprised of select members of the gang Fort led during the 1960s, before his stint in prison, the Black P. Stones. The name "Rukn" refers to stones or rocks in Arabic. In 1977, Fort purchased a building at this location, 3947 S. Drexel, to serve as the new gang's headquarters, which he rechristened the "El Rukn Grand Major Temple". Here is a contemporary photo of the building during its Rukn heyday:


The building was originally constructed as a theater in 1915, and was one of the city's first film-only venues, as well as one of the city's largest theaters, offering over 1,000 seats. The Oakland Square Theater remained in business until the late 1960s, when the decline of the movie theater industry, plus the changing demographics of the neighborhood, forced its closure. Ironically, one factor in the owner's decision to close was the continuing extortion attempts by the Black P. Stones.

For a few years, the "Affro-Arts Theater" took its place, and served as a major community center, offering African-themed productions to the largely Black residents of the neighborhood. The Theater offered some major attractions; Mohammed Ali and Gwendolyn Brooks both appeared there at various times. The radical politics of the Theater's ownership (for example, Stokely Carmichael spoke there in 1968) created recurring clashes with Chicago police, who shut down the Theater several times for trumped-up building code violations, and eventually the Affro-Arts closed in 1971.

The building sat empty for several years, until it was seized by the county and sold at auction to the Rukns, who referred to it informally as "the fort". The Rukns wore fur coats and flashy hats, changed their names to include the word "el," and offered public fealty to their leader, Jeff Fort, who they called "Prince Malik". In fact, however, the Rukns were not really a religious organization at all (a federal judge ruled so in 1986, clearing the way for RICO indictments of its leadership), but a ruthless drug-selling gang with enormous ambitions. With about 250 members, the Rukns' core business was the marketing of various inexpensive pharmaceutical substitutes for heroin, and they controlled big portions of the South side as their sales district. Prostitution, protection, and labor unions were subsidiary operations.

As their success grew, they branched out into real estate, forming a subsidiary business, the "El Pyramid Corporation," to manage their property holdings, which they usually acquired by intimidating the owners into selling below market value. The Rukns also opened their own private security service, which they offered for use at major events. They even started their own non-accredited "law" school, by which gang associates could receive degrees; these "attorneys" could then privately visit gang members in jail to transmit orders from leadership on the outside.

El Rukns were also active in politics. In 1982, election commissioners were surprised to see a group of Rukns bring in thousands of new voter registrations -- acting like the community organization they claimed to be, instead of the predatory criminals the police said they were. However, the fact is that an Illinois State Representative from the Temple's district, Larry Bullock, had paid the Rukns $70,000 to campaign throughout the South side for incumbent Chicago mayor Jane Byrne in the Democratic primary. When the newspapers published the fact that a known criminal organization was supporting Byrne, her campaign disowned the Rukns, but the publicity damage was substantial, and Byrne lost in the primary to Harold Washington.

The Temple was continually raided by police throughout the 1980s, who usually had to use battering rams and acetylene torches to break through the thick steel doors the Rukns had installed, and in June, 1982, Jeff Fort and several other top Rukn leaders were arrested for drug distribution charges. Fort, with his previous convictions, was sent to lockdown at a federal prison in Bastrop, Texas, for a 13 year sentence. Fort's telephone privileges in prison were not, however, curtailed, and he continued to lead the gang throughout the 1980s, using a sophisticated system of secret codes by which he communicated back to the Temple.

By 1985, the government managed to turn a top El Rukn into a prosecution witness, which led to a major RICO investigation. In the next year, they cracked Fort's codes, in which the Rukns' five fundamental "principles," love, truth, peace, justice, and freedom, could be combined in various ways to form numbers.

What they found in those codes astounded them. As Fort's indictment stated, "the conspirators proposed to perform...violent acts in the United States on behalf of or at the direction of the government of Libya," although these proposals had not been carried particularly far. In 1987, Jeff Fort was sentenced to another 80 years for the Libyan plot. In addition, he was also moved to a SuperMax prison in Colorado from which he was unable to communicate with the Rukns in Chicago.

Without Fort, the gang suffered a serious lack of business acumen and leadership. Rukn leaders began using drugs (Fort had strictly prohibited the use of any substance stronger than marijuana), and infighting between rival factions led to bloody confrontations. The Rukns had always been vastly outnumbered by their major rival organization, the Gangster Disciples, and without Fort's leadership, the paucity of street-level manpower showed.

The police seized the Temple in 1989 and razed it to the ground in 1990. With the demolition of the Temple, the "El Rukn" name fell out of use and the gang split into several "stones" gangs, each of which controlled a small amount of territory. There were attempts in the 1990s by Jeff Fort's two sons to reconstitute the Rukns, but neither had anything like the leadership skill of their father, and these attempts failed.

The lot on which the El Rukn Temple stood remained empty for a decade, until a large, attractive private home was built on the site.