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Last annotated on February 15, 2017
2 How Is the Ku Klux Klan Like a Group of Real-Estate Agents?Read more at location 799
3 Why Do Drug Dealers Still Live with Their Moms?Read more at location 1263
The media eagerly glommed on to this story, portraying crack dealing as one of the most profitable jobs in America.Read more at location 1320
not only did most of the crack dealers still live in the projects, but most of them still lived at home with their moms.Read more at location 1322
spent three months following the Grateful Dead around the country.Read more at location 1331
His assignment: to visit Chicago’s poorest black neighborhoods with a clipboard and a seventy-question, multiple-choice survey. This was the first question on the survey: How do you feel about being black and poor? a. Very bad b. Bad c. Neither bad nor good d. Somewhat good e. Very goodRead more at location 1333
Some families lived on the lower floors, pirating water and electricity,Read more at location 1342
“Fuck you, nigger, what are you doing in our stairwell?”Read more at location 1349
The gang members started arguing over what should be done with Venkatesh. Let him go?Read more at location 1355
The crowd grew bigger and louder. Then an older gang member appeared.Read more at location 1358
he realized that the multiple-choice answers A through E were insufficient. In reality, he now knew, the answers should have looked like this: a. Very bad b. Bad c. Neither bad nor good d. Somewhat good e. Very good f. Fuck youRead more at location 1364
“I ain’t no African American either, you idiot. I’m a nigger.”Read more at location 1374
Venkatesh would occasionally try to discuss his survey, but the young crack dealers just laughed and told him how stupid his questions were.Read more at location 1382
It struck Venkatesh that most people, including himself, had never given much thought to the daily life of ghetto criminals. He was now eager to learn how the Black Disciples worked, from top to bottom.Read more at location 1384
As it happened, J. T. was a college graduate himself, a business major. After college, he had taken a job in the Loop, working in the marketing department of a company that sold office equipment. But he felt so out of place there—like a white man working at Afro Sheen headquarters, he liked to say—that he quit. Still, he never forgot what he learned. He knew the importance of collecting data and finding new markets; he was always on the lookout for better management strategies. It was no coincidence, in other words, that J. T. was the leader of this crack gang. He was bred to be a boss.Read more at location 1389
J. T. promised Venkatesh unfettered access to the gang’s operationsRead more at location 1394
For the next six years, Venkatesh practically lived there. Under J. T.’s protection he watched the gang members up close, at work and at home.Read more at location 1397
watched a woman use her baby’s bib to sop up the blood of a teenaged drug dealer who was shotRead more at location 1402
He handed Venkatesh a stack of well-worn spiral notebooks—blue and black, the gang’s colors. They represented a complete record of four years’ worth of the gang’s financial transactions. At J. T.’s direction, the ledgers had been rigorously compiled: sales, wages, dues, even the death benefits paid out to the families of murdered members.Read more at location 1409
It would be the first time that such priceless financial data had fallen into an economist’s hands, affording an analysis of a heretofore uncharted criminal enterprise.Read more at location 1422
So how did the gang work? An awful lot like most American businesses, actually, though perhaps none more so than McDonald’s. In fact, if you were to hold a McDonald’s organizational chart and a Black Disciples org chart side by side, you could hardly tell the difference.Read more at location 1424
J. T. paid the board of directors nearly 20 percent of his revenues for the right to sell crack in a designated twelve-square-block area. The rest of the money was his to distribute as he saw fit. Three officers reported directly to J. T.: an enforcer (who ensured the gang members’ safety), a treasurer (who watched over the gang’s liquid assets), and a runner (who transported large quantities of drugs and money to and from the supplier). Beneath the officers were the street-level salesmen known as foot soldiers.Read more at location 1430
(autumn was the best crack-selling season; summer and Christmastime were slow)Read more at location 1435
At the very bottom of J. T.’s organization were as many as two hundred members known as the rank and file. They were not employees at all. They did, however, pay dues to the gang—some for protection from rival gangs, others for the chance to eventually earn a job as a foot soldier.Read more at location 1437
In the first year, it took in an average of $18,500 each month; by the final year, it was collecting $68,400 a month.Read more at location 1441
The gang did allow some rank-and-file members to sell heroin on its turf but accepted a fixed licensing fee in lieu of a share of profits.Read more at location 1444
The extortionary taxes were paid by other businesses that operated on the gang’s turf, including grocery stores, gypsy cabs, pimps, and people selling stolen goods or repairing cars on the street.Read more at location 1446
Mercenary fighters were nonmembers hired on short-term contracts to help the gang fight turf wars.Read more at location 1450
The miscellaneous expenses include legal fees, parties, bribes, and gang-sponsored “community events.”Read more at location 1452
The gang not only paid for the funeral but often gave a stipend of up to three years’ wages to the victim’s family.Read more at location 1454
“That’s a fucking stupid question,” he was told, “’cause as long as you been with us, you still don’t understand that their families is our families. We can’t just leave ’em out. We been knowing these folks our whole lives, man,Read more at location 1455
Here is the single line item in the gang’s budget that made J. T. the happiest: Net monthly profit accruing to leader $8,500 At $8,500 per month, J. T.’s annual salary was about $100,000—tax-free, of course, and not including the various off-the-books money he pocketed.Read more at location 1460
And J. T. was just one of roughly 100 leaders at this level within the Black Disciples network.Read more at location 1464
Each of those top 20 bosses stood to earn about $500,000 a year.Read more at location 1466
So the top 120 men on the Black Disciples’ pyramid were paid very well.Read more at location 1468
But the pyramid they sat atop was gigantic.Read more at location 1468
there were some 5,300 other men working for those 120 bosses. Then there were another 20,000 unpaid rank-and-file members, many of whom wanted nothing more than an opportunity to become a foot soldier.Read more at location 1469
J. T.’s hourly wage was $66. His three officers, meanwhile, each took home $700 a month, which works out to about $7 an hour. And the foot soldiers earned just $3.30 an hour, less than the minimum wage. So the answer to the original question—if drug dealers make so much money, why are they still living with their mothers?—is that, except for the top cats, they don’t make much money.Read more at location 1474
For every big earner, there were hundreds more just scraping along.Read more at location 1478
In other words, a crack gang works pretty much like the standard capitalist enterprise: you have to be near the top of the pyramid to make a big wage.Read more at location 1480
Notwithstanding the leadership’s rhetoric about the family nature of the business, the gang’s wages are about as skewed as wages in corporate America. A foot soldier had plenty in common with a McDonald’s burger flipper or a Wal-Mart shelf stocker.Read more at location 1481
In fact, most of J. T.’s foot soldiers also held minimum-wage jobs in the legitimate sector to supplement their skimpy illicit earnings.Read more at location 1482
“You got all these niggers below you who want your job, you dig?” he said. “So, you know, you try to take care of them, but you know, you also have to show them you the boss. You always have to get yours first, or else you really ain’t no leader. If you start taking losses, they see you as weak and shit.”Read more at location 1484
For starters, they had to stand on a street corner all day and do business with crackheads. (The gang members were strongly advised against using the product themselves, advice that was enforced by beatings if necessary.) Foot soldiers also risked arrest and, more worrisome, violence.Read more at location 1487
A 1-in-4 chance of being killed! Compare these odds with those for a timber cutter, which the Bureau of Labor Statistics calls the most dangerous job in the United States. Over four years’ time, a timber cutter would stand only a 1-in-200 chance of being killed.Read more at location 1496
compare the crack dealer’s odds to those of a death-row inmate in Texas, which executes more prisoners than any other state. In 2003, Texas put to death twenty-four inmates—or just 5 percent of the nearly 500 inmates on its death row during that time. Which means that you stand a greater chance of dying while dealing crack in a Chicago housing project than you do while sitting on death row in Texas.Read more at location 1497
Well, for the same reason that a pretty Wisconsin farm girl moves to Hollywood.Read more at location 1502
They all want to succeed in an extremely competitive field in which, if you reach the top, you are paid a fortuneRead more at location 1503
To the kids growing up in a housing project on Chicago’s south side, crack dealing seemed like a glamour profession.Read more at location 1505
Fifty-six percent of the neighborhood’s children lived below the poverty line (compared to a national average of 18 percent). Seventy-eight percent came from single-parent homes. Fewer than 5 percent of the neighborhood’s adults had a college degree; barely one in three adult men worked at all. The neighborhood’s median income was about $15,000 a year,Read more at location 1508
The problem with crack dealing is the same as in every other glamour profession: a lot of people are competing for a very few prizes.Read more at location 1513
These budding drug lords bumped up against an immutable law of labor: when there are a lot of people willing and able to do a job, that job generally doesn’t pay well. This is one of four meaningful factors that determine a wage. The others are the specialized skills a job requires, the unpleasantness of a job, and the demand for services that the job fulfills. The delicate balance between these factors helps explain why, for instance, the typical prostitute earns more than the typical architect.Read more at location 1517
little girls don’t grow up dreaming of becoming prostitutes, so the supply of potential prostitutes is relatively small. Their skills, while not necessarily “specialized,” are practiced in a very specialized context. The job is unpleasant and forbidding in at least two significant ways: the likelihood of violence and the lost opportunity of having a stable family life. As for demand? Let’s just say that an architect is more likely to hire a prostitute than vice versa.Read more at location 1522
In the glamour professions—movies, sports, music, fashion—there is a different dynamic at play. Even in second-tier glamour industries like publishing, advertising, and media, swarms of bright young people throw themselves at grunt jobs that pay poorly and demand unstinting devotion. An editorial assistant earning $22,000 at a Manhattan publishing house, an unpaid high-school quarterback, and a teenage crack dealer earning $3.30 an hour are all playing the same game, a game that is best viewed as a tournament. The rules of a tournament are straightforward. You must start at the bottom to have a shot at the top.Read more at location 1525
You must be willing to work long and hard at substandard wages.Read more at location 1532
But with a gang war, sales plummet because customers are so scared of the violence that they won’t come out in the open to buy their crack. In every way, war was expensive for J. T. So why did he start the war? As a matter of fact, he didn’t. It was his foot soldiers who started it. It turns out that a crack boss didn’t have as much control over his subordinates as he would have liked.Read more at location 1547
“We try to tell these shorties that they belong to a serious organization,” he once told Venkatesh. “It ain’t all about killing. They see these movies and shit, they think it’s all about running around tearing shit up. But it’s not. You’ve got to learn to be part of an organization; you can’t be fighting all the time. It’s bad for business.”Read more at location 1554
J. T. was a winner. He was paid well because so few people could do what he did. He was a tall, good-looking, smart, tough man who knew how to motivate people. He was shrewd too, never tempting arrest by carrying guns or cash. While the rest of his gang lived in poverty with their mothers, J. T. had several homes, several women, several cars. He also had his business education, of course. He constantly worked to extend this advantage. That was why he ordered the corporate-style bookkeeping that eventually found its way into Sudhir Venkatesh’s hands.Read more at location 1558
Not long after he made the board of directors, the Black Disciples were essentially shut down by a federal indictment—the same indictment that led the gangster named Booty to turn over his notebooks to Venkatesh—and J. T. was sent to prison.Read more at location 1566
By 1941, some sixty-four million pairs of nylon stockings had been soldRead more at location 1571
invention of nylon stockings was markedly similar to the invention of crackRead more at location 1573
In the 1970s, if you were the sort of person who did drugs, there was no classier drug than cocaine. Beloved by rock stars and movie stars, ballplayers and even the occasional politician, cocaine was a drug of power and panache. It was clean, it was white, it was pretty. Heroin was droopy and pot was foggy but cocaine provided a beautiful high. Alas, it was also very expensive.Read more at location 1574
They found that mixing powdered cocaine in a saucepan with baking soda and water, and then cooking off the liquid, produced tiny rocks of smokeable cocaine. It came to be called crack for the crackling sound the baking soda made when it was burned. More affectionate nicknames would soon follow: Rock, Kryptonite, Kibbles ’n Bits, Scrabble, and Love.Read more at location 1581
During the late 1970s, the wholesale price of cocaine in the United States fell dramatically, even as its purity was rising. One man, a Nicaraguan émigré named Oscar Danilo Blandon, was suspected of importing far more Colombian cocaine than anyone else. Blandon did so much business with the budding crack dealers of South Central Los Angeles that he came to be known as the Johnny Appleseed of Crack.Read more at location 1586
putting massive amounts of cocaine into the hands of street gangs,Read more at location 1594
gangs have traditionally been a sort of halfway house for recent immigrants.Read more at location 1596
these criminals never seemed to get locked up. The 1960s and 1970sRead more at location 1602
the heyday of a liberal justice system and the criminals’ rights movement—Read more at location 1603
By the 1980s, however, the courts had begun to radically reverse that trend.Read more at location 1604
their fellow inmates were Mexican gang members with close ties to Colombian drugRead more at location 1606
the black gangsters had made the connections to buy their cocaine directly from Colombian dealers.Read more at location 1608
Cocaine had never been a big seller in the ghetto: it was too expensive. But that was before the invention of crack.Read more at location 1610
the four decades between World War II and the crack boom had been marked by steady and often dramatic improvement. Particularly since the civil rights legislation of the mid-1960s, the telltale signs of societal progress had finally taken root among black Americans. The black-white income gap was shrinking. So was the gap between black children’s test scores and those of white children. Perhaps the most heartening gain had been in infant mortality. As late as 1964, a black infant was twice as likely to die as a white infant, often of a cause as basic as diarrhea or pneumonia.Read more at location 1626
After decades of decline, black infant mortality began to soar in the 1980s,Read more at location 1635
James Alan Fox, perhaps the most widely quoted crime expert in the popular press, warned of a coming “bloodbath” of youth violence.Read more at location 1644
