THE BUSINESS OF MURDER

Alphonse Capone perfected the model, a marvel of vertical integration. From
a hodgepodge of small alcohol distillers, he crafted a manufacturing,
distribution and retailing juggernaut that mocked Prohibition. To discourage
competitors, he masterfully deployed a weapon built to slaughter whole
squads of enemy soldiers in the trench warfare of World War I: the Thompson
submachine gun, which fired .45-caliber bullets in numbers that ably
protected Capone's share of market.

Ah, for those placid yesteryears. At the height of the Roaring '20s, with
Capone's enforcers on the prowl, Chicago's murder rate reached 10.6
homicides per 100,000 citizens. That's not even half of Chicago's murder
rate last year: 22.9 killings per 100,000 citizens.

What Capone once achieved, modern gang chieftains still try to emulate. But
their modus operandi is deadlier. Chicago recorded 697 gangland slayings
between 1919 and 1932, when Capone went to prison for evading income tax.
Last year alone, of the 570 slayings in which police determined motives, 260
were tied to gangs, narcotics or narcotics turf disputes. And because
killers often don't stick around to explain their motives to cops, it's
likely that more murders--including some of the 95 for which Chicago police
don't yet know the motives--also erupted from the commercial nexus of gangs
and drugs.

The number of deaths blamed on the gang and narcotics industry in Chicago
last year was almost 100 more than in 2000. That bounce reversed years of
declines. Triple-digit numbers of these murders, year after year, are the
main reason why Chicago's murder rate--killings divided by population--has,
for seven of the last eight years, topped those of the nine U.S. cities with
populations of more than 1 million.

These killings don't fit the normal concept of industrial deaths. But as a
group, that's what they are--hazards of an industry driven by greed,
savagery and eager customers. Attacking gang and narcotics murders is one
crucial element to reducing Chicago's overall murder toll.

There is irony here. If Chicago has given America some of its most ruthless
gangbangers--a term Capone, who adored opera (especially "Aida"), might
think undignified--this city's law enforcers also pioneered use of the best
strategy ever devised to behead and disrupt deadly gangs. In the late 1990s,
though, that effort lost some of its focus. Now is the time for federal and
Chicago law enforcement officials to re-energize that strategy--with a
vengeance.

The idea, first applied here in the late 1980s, was to treat deadly gangs as
business endeavors vulnerable to tough federal laws: one against
racketeering and another against what are daintily called continuing
criminal enterprises. The biggest targets were this city's two most ruthless
gangs, the El Rukns and the Gangster Disciples. U.S. Department of Justice
officials were so impressed with the inventiveness of federal prosecutors
here that they tried to replicate the strategy elsewhere, even dispatching a
Chicago prosecutor to train Los Angeles colleagues in ways to attack that
city's notorious Crips and Bloods.

Both cases paired the street savvy of Chicago police officers with four
federal capabilities that are the envy of local law enforcement across the
U.S.: broader authority to wiretap incriminating conversations; more
experience at turning early arrestees into informers; deep-pocket
investigative resources; and rigid sentencing guidelines that can make
defendants who've been caught red-handed eager to implicate others in hopes
of cutting their own prison time.

The El Rukns began here in the 1960s as the Blackstone Rangers. They
advanced from street crime to swindling the federal government out of
anti-poverty money--they had portrayed themselves as disadvantaged
youths--to plotting terrorist acts for Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi.
Pursuing the likes of the El Rukns, who adopted that name to affect Islamic
overtones, didn't appeal to most assistant U.S. attorneys, who were more
oriented to battling white-collar crimes.

But starting in the late 1980s, federal prosecutor William Hogan exploited
racketeering statutes normally used against traditional organized crime to
prosecute the gang, from their leader Jeff Fort on down, for 24 years of
murders, drug trafficking and intimidation. The feds scored 37 convictions
and 16 guilty pleas. Allegations that turncoat El Rukns had received sexual
and other favors while jailed and waiting to testify against other members
of the gang subsequently led to many of those who'd been convicted getting
new trials, but all pleaded guilty or were reconvicted. The El Rukns were in
ruin--and the concept of attacking homicidal gangs as illicit business
entities was entrenched.

The Gangster Disciples case similarly aimed high, targeting previously
convicted murderer Larry Hoover--who, like Fort, had managed for years to
run his vast enterprise from a prison cell. The GD's quasi-mystical air,
built around "King Hoover," clashed with the vicious reality of a gang that
at times used 8-year-olds to run guns and drugs. Even at the peak of their
power, before the government's first indictment of 38 top members in 1995,
they kept a lower profile than the Crips and Bloods did in Los Angeles. But
their so-called "gang nation," based in Chicago, numbered 50,000 members in
35 states.

Tactics employed against the GDs, like those used against the El Rukns,
could fuel more such cases today. Prosecutors established a continuing
criminal enterprise, or CCE, by using undercover buys and search warrants to
document a pattern of narcotics transactions. With that predicate evidence
in the bank, they also used wiretaps to nail their real targets: the gang's
top bosses. That doesn't require overhearing someone say "Go kill
so-and-so"; CCE penalties alone are so draconian that they can send gang
leaders to far-off federal penitentiaries for life. The devastating evidence
that proved who was heading the operation: conversations picked up at
Hoover's prison by tiny microphones hidden in the visitors' badges his
lieutenants were required to wear when they met with him. Prosecutor Ronald
Safer used Hoover's own words and records of gang receipts to prove that the
GDs' revenues exceeded $100 million a year.

As with the fall of the El Rukns, the greatest beneficiaries of the GDs'
demise were residents of impoverished African-American neighborhoods. Police
estimated in the early 1990s that the GDs alone were responsible for 75
murders a year--of their rivals, of each other, and of innocents caught in
crossfires. The gang is no longer the force it was, although the willingness
of underlings to carry on allows it to survive. More than 100 members, many
of them high-ranking, have been convicted, with dozens awaiting trial on
subsequent indictments. Hoover, now powerless in a federal prison cell, will
never walk free.

Federal prosecutors still regularly score significant drug-gang cases in
Chicago and, increasingly, its suburbs as well. It will, though, take
more--and more ambitious--cases to move the murder numbers. And yet the U.S.
attorney's office here is still emerging from a confused time in which the
emphasis turned from instigating big cases to instigating more cases.

In 1998, Mayor Richard M. Daley complained to then-U.S. Atty. Gen. Janet
Reno that federal prosecutors here were developing fewer drug cases than
their colleagues in other big cities. The saga has many plot twists, but the
upshot was less emphasis on kingpin cases, and more on cases too small to
cripple big, violent organizations.

Now, though, Chicago's current U.S. attorney, Patrick Fitzgerald, is
signaling a return to the era of the big takedown. He has re-engineered his
staff to put more throw weight into aggressive gang cases. And while he
began as a New York prosecutor, Fitzgerald knows the history of the office
he now runs. He won't discuss specific plans other than to say: "Nothing
would make us happier than to do what others have done with gang cases here.
Whatever it takes to bring the violence rate down, we're willing to try."

That said, mounting the more ambitious cases will be difficult. Prosecutors
have the gun, drug, violence and conspiracy statutes they need. But the work
is expensive and slow--instigation to indictment easily can take two
years--and invites clashes of law enforcement cultures. Turf battles have
been legion--especially among federal agencies. Fitzgerald also is likely to
need as much costly commitment from Chicago police as it took in the past to
bring down major kingpins.

Nothing is more likely than big drug-gang cases to lower Chicago's murder
rate. It is too soon to say whether the 2001 leap in these killings was just
a blip. But the brutal pattern continues. Among this year's victims: Charles
H. Watson, 23, allegedly beaten to death by 10 fellow gang members on June
24 in a dust-up over drug money. Watson's body was unearthed Oct. 6 from a
4-foot-deep grave, overgrown with weeds, between two houses on West Monroe
Street. His death is emblematic of an evolution: In some areas of Chicago,
more gang members now are being killed by their brethren than by their
rivals.

Gang loyalty oaths still exist, but these days, money rules. Financial data
developed by federal agents in prior cases here suggest that a productive
drug-selling location can gross $100,000 a week. Police use a number in the
same order of magnitude: $20,000 a day. Philip Cline, Chicago's chief of
detectives, says one busy expanse of the city's West Side has some 300
retail locations catering to suburban and city drug buyers--yet selling
product from only 10 or so suppliers.

That's a concentrated oligopoly ripe for attacks like those that hit leaders
of the El Rukns and Gangster Disciples. Those cases should inspire more
assaults soon on the gangs that, more than Capone's ever did, are bleeding
Chicago.