“You wanna be a punk gang member or do you wanna be a gangster? This guy there has his pants hanging off his ass—the gang member standing on the street corner. This guy there has got tunnel vision, only sees so far. . . . This guy here—the gangster . . . is going to all the fine restaurants and nightclubs and going to political fundraisers, getting things done.”
In the privacy of those locked cubicles, Sal told Hagedorn stories he had never heard before. “Now, I’d been doing gang research for almost 30 years,” Hagedorn told me. “I doubted that anything some guy I’d never heard of could say was something I hadn’t heard many times before. I was wrong.” Hagedorn later corroborated the facts with his own gang contacts. What began to take shape was the daring plan of gang leaders incarcerated in Statesville—Fernando “Prince Fernie” Zayas from the Maniac Latin Disciples, Anibal “Tuffy C” Santiago from the Insane Spanish Cobras, and David Ayala from the Two Sixers—to create a local Latino Mafia.
Hagedorn confesses that the book is partly an attempt to understand why SGD could not stop the rampant violence on the west side. “Police, the press, and the public all saw the carnage as irrational and basically about turf, revenge, or drugs,” he writes in The Insane Chicago Way. The collapse of the SGD left in its wake fractured gangs and a breakdown in gang leadership. “I’m doing these juvenile life-without-parole cases,” Hagedorn told me. “I got 100 kids coming back to Cook County Jail waiting for resentencing. And they can’t believe the disorganization of gang members today. It is all up in the air. The structure has been broken.”
By John M. Hagedorn (University of Chicago Press)
