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Inner city communities in the US have become junkyards of dreams, to quote Mike Daviswastelands where gangs package narcotics to stimulate the local economy, gunshots occur multiple times on any given day, and dreams of a better life can fade into the realities of poverty and disability. Laurence Ralph lived in such a community in Chicago for three years, conducting interviews and participating in meetings with members of the local gang which has been central to the community since the 1950s. Ralph discovered that the experience of injury, whether physical or social, doesn t always crush dreams into oblivion; it can transform them into something productive: renegade dreams. The first part of this book moves from a critique of the way government officials, as opposed to grandmothers, have been handling the situation, to a study of the history of the historic Divine Knights gang, to a portrait of a duo of gang members who want to be recognized as authentic rappers (they call their musical style crack music ) and the difficulties they face in exiting the gang. The second part is on physical disability, including being wheelchair bound, the prevalence of HIV/AIDS among heroin users, and the experience of brutality at the hands of Chicago police officers. In a final chapter, The Frame, Or How to Get Out of an Isolated Space, Ralph offers a fresh perspective on how to understand urban violence. The upshot is a total portrait of the interlocking complexities, symbols, and vicissitudes of gang life in one of the most dangerous inner city neighborhoods in the US. We expect this study will enjoy considerable readership, among anthropologists, sociologists, and other scholars interested in disability, urban crime, and race."
As the queen of the Gangstress, Star’s entire life has suddenly changed. She’s swapped out her impoverished lifestyle for one filled with luxury and prestige. However, it also came with the constant threat of violence. Life with Polo is like living with a ticking time bomb, and it doesn’t take her long to realize that she’s caught up in a situation that may kill her if she doesn’t find a way out in time. When she finds real love with the unlikeliest person, she is hopeful that her luck will change. Unfortunately, that’s not at all the case. Kato awakes from his coma and Polo is eager to find out the details of what exactly happened the night that his brother was killed. Being able to claim Star was the trophy he was seeking, but the nagging in his mind about what really happened to Mink just won’t go away. When he forces Star to assist Kato in gaining back his memory, he unknowingly lays the foundation for an unforeseen romance that just may be the end of them all. Now awake, Kato’s struggle to fully recover from the injury that nearly claimed his life becomes the least of his worries. Once he receives news from a reliable source that the Disciples have a betrayer in the midst, he wants nothing more than to get to the bottom of it and take out revenge on the person whose loyalty is in question. After finding out that it may be his own best friend, Polo, behind it all, he finds himself on the brink of initiating an all-out war in the streets. To make matters worse, his growing feelings for Star only further complicate the situation when he suspects that she’s being abused. Will his budding love affair with Star be the one thing capable of bringing the entire Disciple organization down?
This engrossing tale of gangs and organized criminality begins in the frontier saloons situated in the marshy flats of Chicago, the future world class city of Mid-continent. Gangland Chicago recounts the era of parlor gambling, commercialized vice districts continuing through the bloody Prohibition bootlegging wars; failed reform movements; the rise of post-World War II juvenile criminal gangs and the saga of the Blackstone Rangers in a chaotic, racially divided city. , Gang violence and street crime is endemic in contemporary Chicago. There is much more to the saga of crime, politics, and armed violence than Al Capone and John Dillinger. Gangland Chicago explores the changing patterns of criminal behavior, politics, gangs, youth crime and the failures of reform in its historic totality. Richard Lindberg takes the reader on a journey through decades of a troubled past to delve deep into the evolution of street gangs and organized violence endemic in Chicago. Small ethnic gangs organized in ethnic slum districts of the city expanded into the well-known organized crime syndicates of Chicago’s history. Gangland Chicago is full of stories of unchecked violence, lawlessness, and mayhem. Unlike other standard true crime accounts focused exclusively on the Prohibition era, this historical look-back probes the obscure and forgotten dark corners of city crime history. Lindberg details how both “organized” and “dis-organized” street gangs have paralyzed city neighborhoods and transformed the crimes of the Windy City from street thuggery and common ruffians protected and nurtured by politicians into a protected class is gripping. Gangland Chicago is a revealing look at the Chicago underworld of yesterday and today. This comprehensive volume is sure to entertain and inform any reader interested in the evolution of organized crime and gangs in America’s most representative city of the American Heartland.
Torture is an open secret in Chicago. Nobody in power wants to acknowledge this grim reality, but everyone knows it happens—and that the torturers are the police. Three to five new claims are submitted to the Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission of Illinois each week. Four hundred cases are currently pending investigation. Between 1972 and 1991, at least 125 black suspects were tortured by Chicago police officers working under former Police Commander Jon Burge. As the more recent revelations from the Homan Square “black site” show, that brutal period is far from a historical anomaly. For more than fifty years, police officers who took an oath to protect and serve have instead beaten, electrocuted, suffocated, and raped hundreds—perhaps thousands—of Chicago residents. In The Torture Letters, Laurence Ralph chronicles the history of torture in Chicago, the burgeoning activist movement against police violence, and the American public’s complicity in perpetuating torture at home and abroad. Engaging with a long tradition of epistolary meditations on racism in the United States, from James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, Ralph offers in this book a collection of open letters written to protesters, victims, students, and others. Through these moving, questing, enraged letters, Ralph bears witness to police violence that began in Burge’s Area Two and follows the city’s networks of torture to the global War on Terror. From Vietnam to Geneva to Guantanamo Bay—Ralph’s story extends as far as the legacy of American imperialism. Combining insights from fourteen years of research on torture with testimonies of victims of police violence, retired officers, lawyers, and protesters, this is a powerful indictment of police violence and a fierce challenge to all Americans to demand an end to the systems that support it. With compassion and careful skill, Ralph uncovers the tangled connections among law enforcement, the political machine, and the courts in Chicago, amplifying the voices of torture victims who are still with us—and lending a voice to those long deceased.
A comprehensive historical reference on metropolitan Chicago encompasses more than 1,400 entries on such topics as neighborhoods, ethnic groups, cultural institutions, and business history, and furnishes interpretive essays on the literary images of Chicago, the built environment, and the city's sports culture.
Even in a town notorious for gangsters like Al Capone, much of Chicago's lawless lore has remained uncharted. Chicago's Chinatown, in particular, was home to a vast criminal enterprise, strictly bound by old-country rituals, rules and traditions. Few kno
From the acclaimed author of The Town, an epic thriller about the secret right‑hand man of one of the most infamous unprosecuted mob bosses in American history, and the hidden crime that will bring down an empire. In the late 1970s, The Outfit has the entire city of Chicago in its hands. Tony Accardo is its fearless leader. Nicky Passero is his loyal soldier, though no one knows he has a direct line in to the boss of bosses. When the Christmas gift Accardo got for his wife, an inscribed bracelet with gold and diamond inlay, is stolen along with other items in a jewelry heist, Nicky is charged with tracking down and returning all of the items—by whatever means necessary. Forced into an impossible situation, Nicky must find a way to carry out Accardo's increasingly unhinged instructions and survive the battle for control of Chicago. What Accardo doesn't know: Nicky has a secret which has made his life impossible and has put him in the pocket of the FBI. Based on the true story of Tony Accardo, the longest‑reigning mob capo in history, Gangland is a Shakespearean-esque drama of integrity, lost honor, and revenge. Gritty and action‑packed, it is the ultimate gangster tale and Chuck Hogan's most thrilling novel yet.
Beginning with the changing definition of organised crime, this history traces the complex links, trading and even homage which extends between the criminals of one country and another. Morton also looks at local gangs and their international links.
"Based on 25 years of research using all available sources, this is the definitive history of organized crime in Chicago through the end of the Prohibition Era"--
Police, the press, and the public all see the kind of violence that besets the inner city today as irrational and basically about turf, revenge, or drugs. Renowned criminologist and expert on gangs, John Hagedorn here tells a very different and little-known story centered on the dramatic rise and fall of a Mafia-like Latino organization in Chicago called "Spanish Growth & Development." Hagedorn's main informant is 'Sal Martino, ' an Italian Mafioso who became intimately involved with the "In$ane Family," one of the factions of Spanish Growth & Development. Through Sal's first-hand account, Hagedorn shows that the violence was not a result of "disorganized crime" but rather the outcome of SGD's prolonged demise. He gives us for the first time a detailed the history of SGD-the reasons for its creation, the uneasy alliances between gang families, the organization's reliance on bottom-up police corruption, and its ultimate collapse in a pool of blood at a 1999 "peace" conference. Revealing the hidden and riveting stories of Chicago gangs' efforts to build structures ostensibly to reduce violence and to organize crime, of the integration of gang and mafia history, and of the central role of police corruption in Chicago's gangland, "The In$ane Chicago Way" makes a powerful argument for the need to regard corruption as the bedrock of gang power. It dispels the notion that gang violence can be explained solely by ecological, neighborhood-based processes and sheds light on the current gang situation in Chicago by laying bare its history while raising disturbing questions for researchers, policy-makers, and the public.