ANOTHER CHICAGO TAKEDOWN

In the late 1980s, federal prosecutors in Chicago invented a novel
strategy for attacking drug gangs that ravage, terrorize and often
rule impoverished neighborhoods. In Chicago, those gangs traffic not
only in narcotics, but also in blood: They are responsible for well
over half of this city's long stratospheric homicide toll.

Law enforcement's traditional (and widely derided) strategy had been
to focus on arresting street dealers in the hope that the small fry
would implicate higher-ups. That often yielded plodding investigations
that went nowhere.

The new, top-down strategy grew from the observation--gospel today,
but novel in the '80s--that violent drug gangs mimicked vertically
integrated corporations, with strict pyramidal command structures,
tight controls from wholesale distribution through retail sales, and
rigidly enforced codes of conduct. Viewed through that prism, drug
gangs were businesses, vulnerable to racketeering and other federal
laws.

In less than a decade, prosecutors vanquished the leaderships of what
were Chicago's two most ruthless drug gangs, the El Rukns and the
Gangster Disciples. U.S. Department of Justice officials impressed
with the assault on gangs as illicit businesses dispatched a Chicago
prosecutor to Los Angeles to train his federal colleagues in tactics
for taking on that city's Crips and Bloods.

On Thursday, Patrick Fitzgerald, now the U.S. attorney here, invoked
that proud local legacy--call it the Chicago takedown--in laying out
drug conspiracy charges against 47 suspects. They're accused of
playing roles in a 15-year enterprise that netted fabulous riches for
another notorious Chicago cartel, the Black Disciples.

The feds have yet to prove in court that those charged are in fact
Black Disciples, or that they broke the law. They are innocent until
found otherwise. If otherwise occurs, though, they could face life
without parole in far-off federal prisons.

Prosecutors strongly hinted that they aren't finished. The
government's 185-page criminal complaint alleges that BDs who broke
gang rules such as stealing one another's drugs or talking to police
risked "being shot in the leg or murdered." The complaint also
describes a gang demand that ranking BDs donate $5,000 apiece "to
provide lawyers and bond money to BD members who were arrested on
murder charges." Asked who allegedly ordered or committed homicides,
Fitzgerald said only that--as of now--"No murders are described or
charged." In 1995, when the GDs went on the griddle, Chicago police
said that gang alone was responsible for 75 murders here a year. While
the big GD takedown wasn't the only reason for improvement, Chicago's
homicide toll declined in each of the next five years.

More recently, federal prosecutors have brought other cases here
against alleged gang members, notably Latin Kings and Vice Lords. But
the El Rukn and GD mega-cases, which took years to build and which
sliced off top tiers of gang organizational charts, were most
successful at throwing those hierarchies into chaos. Today the El
Rukns, once ruled by Jeff Fort, are history, the GDs far weaker now
that Larry "King" Hoover's empire has been Balkanized. Both leaders
are in prison.

Chicago takedowns pair the gang intelligence and street savvy of
Chicago police with four federal capabilities that are the envy of
local law enforcement nationwide: broader authority to wiretap
incriminating conversations; deep-pocket resources; experience at
turning early arrestees into gang informers; and rugged federal
sentencing guidelines that give defendants who know the evidence
against them is overwhelming an incentive to cooperate with
authorities in hopes of cutting their prison time. In the past, the
prospect of waiting decades to die in a federal penitentiary, far from
fellow gang members in cozier Illinois state prisons, has helped many
alleged drug conspirators recall details of unsolved gang homicides
they've witnessed. The case unveiled Thursday is based largely on
information gathered from 26 as yet unnamed cooperating witnesses.
That's a potential treasure trove of testimony from alleged BD insiders.

When Fitzgerald became interim U.S. attorney here in 2001, his office
was emerging from a confused time in which the emphasis had shifted
from prosecuting ambitious mega-cases to prosecuting more cases. Mayor
Richard Daley had complained in 1998 to then Atty. Gen. Janet Reno
that federal prosecutors here were filing fewer drug cases than their
cohorts in other cities. The story has numerous twists and turns, but
the net result was less emphasis here on major cases to cripple big
and violent gangs.

Fitzgerald, though, was committed to combatting street violence, which
many feds used to dismiss as a local issue unworthy of their time. He
has loaded considerable resources into Project Safe Neighborhoods, an
effort to curb gun crimes, especially those committed by parolees with
violent records. In a 2002 interview, he grew soft-spoken and
elliptical in telegraphing his hope to replicate the effectiveness of
the El Rukn and GD cases. "Nothing would make us happier than to do
what others have done with gang cases here," he said. "Whatever it
takes to bring the violence rate down, we're willing to try."

At the time, Fitzgerald's words appeared in a Tribune editorial that
went on to argue: Nothing is more likely than big drug-gang cases to
lower Chicago's murder rate. Quite apart from the new case, in which
no homicides are alleged, that remains true today--and helps explain
aggressive police efforts to reduce Chicago's street slaughter by
disrupting open-air drug markets and the bloody turf wars they provoke.

Does Fitzgerald have more such cases in the pipeline? Again, Thursday,
he turned soft-spoken and elliptical: "We're aware [the BDs] are not
the only gang out there."

There's a clue at the close of Justice's thick complaint that the
alleged kingpins of Chicago's violent gangs may sense that their
mayhem days are now numbered. In a conversation surreptitiously
recorded at 63rd Street and Calumet Avenue on May 5, just 11 days ago,
three alleged Black Disciples discussed the probability that they'd
soon be arrested, imprisoned and stripped of their power over the
gang. "They [federal law enforcement] gonna try to make a grand move .
. . " one speaker lamented. "They want to cut the head off the snake
and the tail."

Not exactly. The feds want the whole snake. But that's close enough
for government work.