Best practices and body bags

November 28, 2004

In one scene, gang members gently shepherd a cluster of perhaps 20 customers across a Chicago street. Drug peddlers await them, wares at the ready. No leisurely shopping allowed. Cops are on the prowl, so the dope will be exposed for only seconds. You buy, you're gone.

Another scene shows a drug giveaway at Washington Boulevard and Keeler Avenue. Businesses can't expand without new customers. How better to hook them than with free samples?

A third scene shows junkies and hookers hired to work as lookouts. If the cops bust this open-air market, maybe they'll get so tied up arresting all these expendable day laborers that the gang members entrusted with guns, drug packets and wads of cash can make an escape.

Individually, these scenes from Chicago police surveillance tapes are instructive. Spliced together, they're infuriating. This is what many Chicagoans see every day when they look out their windows. The shrewdest law-abiders, of course, don't look, for fear of catching stray bullets. Gangbangers cause half, perhaps two-thirds of the homicides in Chicago.

Drug gangs are the prime reason why Chicago's murder rate last year--20.7 homicides per 100,000 residents--was double what it was at the height of the Roaring '20s, when Al Capone's enforcers turned the streets to crimson. Any illicit seller--of alcohol or of drugs--wants to discourage competitors. If that means killing them, so what?

The film clips are galling in the retelling, more so when projected on a screen so big that the gangbangers appear, yes, larger than life.

Curbing those gangbangers and their street carnage has been Philip Cline's top priority since he became police superintendent in 2003. Homicides declined last year by 8 percent. This year's homicide pace is 25 percent below last year. That success is a reason to push harder, not an excuse to slack off.

So, on a crisp autumn Saturday, Cline pulled together 260 officers and prosecutors from city, county, state and federal law enforcement to talk about further reducing the number of body bags. Those film clips? Jolts of adrenaline. Reminders that gangbangers still terrorize many streets. Cline's agenda? To swap "best practices"--fresh tactics the agencies on hand are using against Chicago's hometown terrorists. Examples:

- Gangbangers have vast drug profits but need to launder that money. Some are creating real estate empires, exploiting lax document verification in the mortgage industry to commit huge frauds against lenders. In one scam, a gang "rents" the good credit of a person with no criminal record for, say, $10,000. That person becomes a straw buyer of buildings. He or she uses gang money, plus phony income records and other paperwork computer-generated by the gang, to secure mortgages from careless (or complicit) lenders. Each month, the gang hands the straw purchaser drug proceeds to cover mortgage payments. As the buildings are rented or sold, those proceeds fund purchases of more buildings--or of firearms and drugs. Police and Internal Revenue Service agents are exploiting new ways of tracking and cracking these elaborate schemes. One case now under investigation here involves $84 million in frauds. (Remember, Capone went to prison for tax evasion, not murder.)

- Intentional shootings here are down 40 percent this year--after a 23 percent drop last year--and gun seizures are up. One reason among several: an on-call police squad that specializes in locating hidden compartments for guns and drugs in suspicious vehicles. Crafty auto shops charge up to $7,000 to build an imaginative stash spot in a dashboard, door, floor or ceiling. Each compartment is designed to open only when a driver sends a secret series of electronic prompts. Sgt. John Hamilton's favorite sequence to date (no two are wired alike): Close the doors. Turn on the left map light. Pull out the cupholder. Buckle the driver's seat belt. Turn on the cruise control. Then hit the power window switch to trip that motor. Boing! The hidden compartment pops open--and there's the gun.

- Questioning gang members arrested for recent crimes about unsolved cases involving their gangs is an ancient ritual. But interrogators have had recent successes by zeroing in on old gangbangers--those over 30. Sure, a few owe great wealth to Chicago gangs and won't talk. Others, though, have little but wasted lives and deep resentments for their years of misplaced loyalty. As interrogators have driven home that realization, some of the latter group have been displaying sharp memories and glib tongues.