The Ethnology of a Chicago Gang

I have a new theory. Dirty money is spread so wide and deep that perhaps most of the wealthy families in this world started out in the underground economy, like drug and human trafficking. That would certainly explain the Kennedy's, Bush and the EU willing to look the other way in Kosovo where a gangster is running the government, and the history of the Iran Contra as well as seeding the start of Osama's Islamic jihad against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan funded by Reagan and the Saudi family. Here is a book review about a Chicago gangster that offers some confirmation of what I'm suspecting.
Salon Books

None of Robert Taylor residents really liked the gang, but it evolved to serve a purpose: As is often the case when civil order breaks down -- whether it happens in Afghanistan, Somalia or the South Side of Chicago -- strongmen emerge to provide security, at a cost. On the other hand, at least the residents of Robert Taylor knew exactly what they were getting for their "taxes."


[..]As soon as people start using the word "community," you can be pretty sure they're trying to put something over on you. In time, Venkatesh became just as disillusioned with Ms. Bailey, the neighborhood clergy, the director of the local Boys and Girls Clubs (inventor of the much-celebrated midnight basketball leagues of the 1990s) and the cops -- the ones with the "real power" in the ghetto, and in a few cases all too prone to abusing it. Everyone he met was jostling for influence, offering protection or resources, and distributing both to whoever had the most to offer them in return.


What the budding sociologist found, in the end, was not the depraved chaos that the political right imagines ghetto life to be, nor the left's tragic melodrama of a powerless, victimized population terrorized by its most hopeless members. (J.T., a gifted manager by Venkatesh's account, went to college on an athletic scholarship and gave up a job selling office supplies when he realized that white employees were receiving preferential treatment.) What he did find was an economy, and a rough social order that the residents had assembled out of the broken pieces left to them by society at large. Without meaningful police services, they cobbled together a security force of sorts. Without much in the way of social services, they figured out how to extract some of what they needed from the main economic engine in their environment: the gang. Within the borders of a major American city, they lived in the equivalent of a corrupt third-world nation.


At times, the creativity and ingenuity of the people Venkatesh meets are impressive, but they were still spent in getting what most of their fellow citizens take nearly for granted: a roof over their heads, food for their kids, protection from thieves and brutes. The Robert Taylor Homes have since been torn down, J.T. left the gang to manage a dry-cleaning business, and Venkatesh moved on to Harvard and to see his work featured in the bestselling book "Freakonomics." (He's currently writing a blog that gathers real-life gangsters' responses to the television series "The Wire.")


He writes that few of today's gangs are as extensive, stable and well organized as the Black Kings once were, and by the time you get to the end of "Gang Leader for a Day," it's hard not to wonder if that's such a good thing. Criminals though they were, the job they did wasn't always as dirty. And somebody's got to do it.