How One Chicago Gang Leader Negotiated Directly With The US Government — Then Got 80 Years

How One Chicago Gang Leader Negotiated Directly With The US Government — Then Got 80 Years 

In 1959, a 12-year-old boy from Mississippi formed a street crew on Blackstone Avenue with fewer than a dozen members. Within 6 years, that crew had absorbed 21 separate gangs and commanded 5,000 soldiers across Chicago’s entire south side. By 20, he had secured nearly $1 million in federal funding directly from the United States government, put himself on the government payroll at $6,000 a year, and received a personal invitation to the presidential inauguration.

 By 30, he had converted his organization into a religious empire, purchased a fortified headquarters on South Drexel Boulevard, and built a narcotics operation generating $1,000 a week. By 40, he was running that empire from a federal prison cell in Texas, issuing coded orders 15 times a week through a telephone system so sophisticated that federal agents spent years trying to crack it.

 And then he did something no American gang leader had ever done before or since. He picked up the phone and negotiated a $2.5 million deal with the government of Libya to commit acts of terrorism on American soil. His name was Jeff Fort. The streets called him angel. The El Rukans called him Chief Malik. And this is the most dangerous story in Chicago history that nobody ever told you.

 To understand what Jeff Fort became, you have to understand what America gave him to start with, which was nothing. He was born on February 20th, 1947 in Aberdine, Mississippi, a small town in the northeast corner of the state where the cotton fields stretched flat and endless to the horizon. And black families lived in the kind of poverty that doesn’t make the history books because nobody with a pen thought it was worth recording.

 His father, John Fort, and his mother, Annie Baconfort, had 10 children. Jeff was the second. The family survived on whatever work was available in a town that had been built on the backs of black labor and had never once considered sharing the profits with the people who generated them. In 1955, when Jeff was 8 years old, the forts did what hundreds of thousands of black families had done during the Great Migration.

 They packed up everything they owned and headed north on a bus with no idea what was waiting for them, just the certainty that anything had to be better than Mississippi. They landed in Woodlon on Chicago’s South Side. If you have never seen Woodlon in the 1950s, picture block after block of crumbling apartment buildings with busted radiators and peeling lead paint, streets that the city refused to pave, schools that the district refused to fund, and a police force that treated every black boy over the age of 10 like a suspect waiting to

be processed. The forts moved into a building at 6536 South Blackstone Avenue, and that address would become the birthplace of one of the most powerful criminal organizations in American history. Jeff Fort dropped out of Hyde Park High School after the 9th grade. He was not stupid. He was bored by a system that had already decided he was disposable.

 He spent time at the Cook County Temporary Juvenile Detention Center and at the Illinois State Training School for Boys in St. Charles, a reform school where the state warehoused the children it had already decided to throw away. It was at St. Charles that Fort met Eugene Bull Haristen, and the two of them formed a crew that they named after the street where Fort lived, the Blackstone Rangers.

 In the beginning, it was nothing. A dozen boys on a corner, stealing purses, breaking into corner stores, fighting the Egyptian cobras and the devil’s disciples for control of a few blocks that nobody with money would have wanted anyway. But Ford had one quality that set him apart from every other teenage gang leader on the south side of Chicago. He could talk.

 He could negotiate. He could walk into a room full of hostile young men carrying weapons and walk out with an alliance. They called him angel, not because he was gentle, not because he was kind, but because he had a supernatural gift for resolving disputes that would have ended in gunfire under anyone else’s leadership.

 And that quality was the difference between everything and nothing. By the time Fort was 18, he had done something that no gang leader in Chicago had ever accomplished. He had assembled a coalition of 21 formerly independent gangs under a single governing body he called the main 21. Each of the 21 gangs kept its own leader, its own general.

But all 21 answered to Jeff Fort. 5,000 members, one organization, one voice at the top. Think about that. An 18-year-old high school dropout from Mississippi had built the largest street gang in the United States of America. and he did it without firing a single shot. This is what made Jeff Fort from every other gang leader in 1960s Chicago.

 He did not think like a street hustler. He thought like a CEO running a company whose stock was about to go public. While other gangs were fighting over corners and counting the take from last night’s robberies, Fort was building infrastructure. He understood something that most criminals never figure out, and most legitimate businessmen take decades to learn.

Visibility was not a liability if you controlled the narrative. In 1965, with the help of a Presbyterian minister named Reverend John Fry, who had opened his church on the south side to the Rangers and genuinely believed he could channel their energy into something constructive. Fort began repositioning the Blackstone Rangers as a community organization with political ambitions.

He formed a political arm called the Grassroots Independent Voters of Illinois and applied for and received a state charter from the state of Illinois. He was no longer running a gang. He was running an institution. And then he did the most audacious thing any gang leader in America had ever attempted. He applied for a federal grant, not a small one.

 Fort’s organization, operating through a community group called the Woodlon Organization, applied to the Office of Economic Opportunity, the federal government’s own anti-poverty Agency created under Lynden Johnson’s war on poverty for nine toum 7341 to run a job training program for gang members on the south side. The application stated that the program would leverage the apparent leadership skills of the Rangers to provide education and employment to 800 out of school unemployed young men.

 And the United States government said yes. Think about what that means. The federal government of the United States of America wrote a check for nearly $1 million to a street gang. Jeff Fort was placed on the federal payroll at $6,000 a year as a center chief. His generals were hired as supervisors and teachers. His soldiers were enrolled as students in four job training centers set up in the Ranger’s own territory.

 The program was supposed to teach basic reading, writing, and arithmetic, then connect the graduates with prospective employers. On paper, it was a high-risk anti-poverty initiative. In practice, it was Jeff Fort using the American government’s own money to fund, organize, and legitimize the most powerful gang in Chicago.

 The branding was flawless. The supply chain of federal dollars flowed directly into the organization’s hierarchy. The payroll was real, and the weekly salary checks went to Fort’s people. The distribution network for those checks followed the exact same chain of command as the gang itself. Fort had turned a criminal enterprise into a federally funded nonprofit without changing a single thing about how it actually operated.

 He had not conned the government. He had made the government his investor. And then the invitations started arriving. Senator Charles Percy, one of the most powerful politicians in Illinois, publicly praised Jeff Fort as a bright young man who should consider entering politics. And in January 1969, following Richard Nixon’s election, Fort received a personal invitation to attend the presidential inauguration ball in Washington, DC, a gang leader from the south side of Chicago, invited to the White House. Fort declined the

invitation himself. He sent two of his top generals instead, Mickey Cogwell and Herman Moose Holmes, to mingle with senators and congressmen at the inaugural ball. While back in Chicago, the police were actively trying to arrest Cogwell on outstanding warrants. Think about that. While law enforcement was hunting Fort’s men on the streets of the South Side, the president of the United States was hosting them at his inauguration party.

 That is not a failure of communication. That is what happens when one man understands power better than every institution trying to control him. Now, here is the part that most people don’t know. The part that tells you everything. The money came fast and Jeff Fort spent it like he was afraid it would disappear.

 But here is the contradiction at the center of this entire story and you need to hold it in your mind for everything that comes next. The Blackstone Rangers were not just a gang. On the south side of Chicago in the 1960s, where the city government had abandoned entire neighborhoods to poverty, where the police were an occupying force rather than a protective service, where banks refused to lend, where employers refused to hire, and where schools refused to teach, the Blackstone Rangers were the closest thing to a functioning government that

many residents had ever seen. The Rangers policed their own neighborhoods when the Chicago Police Department would not. During the long hot summer of 1967, when cities across America erupted in riots, when Newark burned and Detroit burned and Milwaukee burned, the Blackstone Rangers walked the streets of the Southside and kept the peace.

 No riot broke out in Woodlon that summer. The Rangers were the reason. They organized voter registration drives. They participated in civil rights marches. In January 1970, the Stones backed the Coalition for United Community Action, a group that protested the systematic denial of construction jobs to black workers.

 They shut down over 20 construction sites with contracts valued at more than $80 million across the south and west sides of the city. These were real things, real accomplishments, real power exercised on behalf of a community that had been abandoned by every legitimate institution in the city of Chicago. But at the exact same time and in the exact same neighborhoods, Fort’s organization was running extortion rackets, demanding protection payments from prostitution operations and drug dealers, beating and shooting rivals, and enforcing its

authority through a level of violence that terrified the very community it claimed to protect. Eugene Haristen, Fort’s co-leader and one of the supervisors of the fedally funded job training program, was convicted of soliciting teenage gang members to commit murder. The payment for the contract killing was cold meat, cheese, orange juice, and $1 each.

 $1 per teenager to take a human life. Think about that. Fort’s organization was paying children a dollar to kill, while the federal government was paying that same organization nearly a million dollars to save those same children. The grant money was being stolen, falsified, and redirected. Rangers signed attendance sheets and went home.

 Checks were issued for work that was never performed. By conservative estimates, barely onethird of the 9227341 actually went to the training program. The rest vanished into the organization. He was destroying the community with one hand and building it with the other. And the community loved him for it because nobody else, not the mayor, not the governor, not the president, not a single person with legitimate power was doing anything at all.

 A youth worker who spent years with the Rangers said something that captures the entire paradox in one sentence. He said that he and Reverend Fry wound up learning more from Jeff Fort than they could ever have taught him. That tells you everything about who really understood power on the south side of Chicago.

 The people sent to reform the gang were reformed by the gang leader instead. Picture the scene. It is 1977 on Chicago’s South Side and Jeff Fort has just been released from Levvenworth Federal Penitentiary after serving 2 years for misusing those government funds. He is 30 years old. He has converted to Islam while in prison, adopting the name Abdullah Malik Cabba.

He has a new vision for the organization and it is unlike anything the streets of Chicago have ever seen. Fort returns to the south side and purchases a vacant movie theater at 3947 South Drexel Boulevard for cash. He renames it the Elukin Grand Major Temple. Elukin means the cornerstone in Arabic.

 The building is fortified with reinforced steel doors so thick that when police later try to raid it, they need battering rams, acetylene torches, and the Chicago Fire Department to break through the entrance. The interior is transformed into something between a corporate headquarters and a palace. There are meeting rooms, offices, and a grand gathering space where Fort holds court like a head of state receiving ambassadors.

El Rukan members wear fur coats and wide-brimmed hats. They adopt new names with the prefix L. They offer public feely to Fort whom they call Chief Malik or Prince Malik. From the outside, it looks like a mosque. From the inside, it operates like the executive suite of a multinational corporation. Fort has replaced the old main 21 governing structure with a tighter, more controlled hierarchy.

 Five trusted generals sit directly below him. Below them in descending rank are officer muies, ambassadors, and soldiers, each with clearly defined roles, responsibilities, and revenue targets. The organizational chart would have looked at home pinned to the wall of a Fortune 500 boardroom. Fort has effectively rebranded the Blackstone Rangers for the second time.

 first as a political organization in the 1960s, now as a religious institution in the 1970s. Each transformation served the same strategic purpose to create a legal shield around an illegal empire. Law enforcement speculated openly that the conversion to Islam was calculated, designed to take advantage of constitutional restrictions on government surveillance of religious organizations.

 Whether Fort was a true believer or a tactical genius is a question that has never been answered, but the branding worked. For years, federal investigators struggled to penetrate the El Rukan temple because they could not easily justify surveilling what Fort insisted under the protection of the First Amendment was a house of worship.

 But here is what Jeff Fort did not know. The very thing that made him untouchable, his ability to command loyalty and issue orders from any location on Earth, would become the mechanism of his destruction. By 1983, the Elukans had mastered the narcotics trade on the South Side. They were selling everything from codine-based cough syrup to heroin to processed cocaine.

 Their initial batch of 500 bags of heroin sold out in a single day from 9:00 a.m. to midnight. Within months, they had heroin and cocaine at curbside sales locations across Woodlon, Southshore, and the West Side. Their weekly gross revenue ran between $5,000 and $1,000,000. They had a sophisticated cocaine processing and distribution network that would have impressed logistics executives at any legitimate company.

They stashed millions of dollars in pipes, sewers, and holes dug into the basement of the temple. They bought dozens of apartment buildings across the Southside as both income properties and housing for members. They operated a restaurant. They formed a licensed security guard company. They established a political action committee that donated to local campaigns.

 An assistant US attorney who later prosecuted the case told reporters that had these men been channeled into legitimate business, they had the potential to be equally successful in any industry. a University of Chicago professor who studied the gang’s internal structure called the El Ruckins, the inventors of the corporate model for street gangs in America. Think about what that means.

Academics were studying Jeff Fort’s organization the way Harvard Business School studies Amazon or Goldman Sachs. In 1983, Fort was convicted on drug trafficking charges and sentenced to 13 years in federal prison. He was sent to the federal correctional institution in Bastrop, Texas. And this is where the story becomes something that defies belief. Prison did not stop Jeff Fort.

It did not slow him down. It barely inconvenienced him. From his cell in Bastrop, Fort continued to run every aspect of the El Rukans through daily telephone calls, sometimes as many as 15 in a single week. He and his generals had developed an elaborate coded language based on the organization’s five founding principles: love, truth, peace, freedom, and justice.

 Each word used alone or in specific combinations represented numbers, drugs, weapons, dollar amounts, or operational instructions. Love meant one or 100 or 1,000 depending on context. Love, truth meant two. Justice alone meant a weapon. Perfect meant marijuana. Race car and brewery meant cocaine. The brewery will not be in manifest meant the cocaine will not be delivered.

 N federal agents tapped the phone lines and monitored fort’s calls for months, listening to conversations that sounded like gibberish before they finally cracked the code with the help of former gang members who had turned informant. When they deciphered it, what they heard was Jeff Fort barking orders about drug shipments, debts owed, product quality, pricing decisions, and personnel changes while his generals gathered around a speakerphone inside the fortified temple on South Drexel Boulevard, taking notes like junior executives in a quarterly

board meeting. And then the phone calls revealed something far more dangerous than drug trafficking. Federal investigators discovered that members of the El Rukans had traveled to Libya, to North Africa, and to a Libyan embassy in Panama. They had met face-to-face with representatives of Colonel Muamar al- Gaddafi’s government, and they had negotiated a deal that remains one of the most extraordinary criminal conspiracies in American history.

 In exchange for $2.5 million in cash and weapons, the Elukans agreed to commit acts of terrorism inside the United States on behalf of Libya. Fort orchestrated the entire arrangement from his prison cell in Texas, using the same coded telephone system he used to manage his drug operation. His emissaries had crossed oceans and sat in rooms with agents of a foreign dictator to formulate the terms.

 The gang purchased what they believed was a functioning law anti-tank rocket launcher from an undercover FBI agent posing as an arms dealer. They stockpiled hand grenades and automatic weapons inside the temple. No acts of terrorism were ever carried out. The FBI dismantled the plot before it could reach execution.

 But what Ford had done was unprecedented in the history of American crime. He had taken a Chicago street gang and turned it into an instrument of international geopolitics. He had negotiated directly with a hostile foreign government from inside a federal prison through a code language built on the gang’s own theology, running every detail through a telephone system that the Bureau of Prisons had given him as a basic inmate right.

 The phone calls the prison gave him to stay in touch with his family became the communications backbone of the first domestic terrorism conspiracy ever charged against American citizens. That is the irony that defines Jeff Fort’s entire life. Every single system designed to contain him became a system he weaponized to expand his power.

 The government funded him. The prison system connected him. The telephone system carried his orders. and the religion he adopted became the shield that delayed his prosecution by years. In August 1986, authorities raided the Elroken Grand Major Temple. They used axes, acetylene torches, and shovels to tear open the walls of the fortified building while passers by stared in from the street at the exposed interior.

 They found the rocket launcher. They found hand grenades. They found automatic weapons. They found narcotics records. They found millions in cash stuffed into pipes and hidden cavities behind the walls. A 50-count federal indictment was returned against five Elukan members, including Fort. The trial lasted 6 weeks.

 Fort’s defense attorneys argued that the Elukans were a legitimate social and religious organization, no different from any church or civic group. One defense lawyer compared them to the Knights of Columbus. The prosecution played the tapes. Hundreds of hours of coded telephone conversations decoded and translated for the jury in which Fort directed drug sales, weapons acquisition, and the Libya conspiracy from his prison cell.

The jury deliberated for 5 and 1/2 days. Guilty. Every count, every defendant. On December 30th, 1987, Jeff Fort was sentenced to 80 years in federal prison. 80 years, consecutive to the 13-year drug sentence he was already serving. He was 40 years old. the man who had once been invited to the presidential inauguration, who had secured nearly a million dollars from the federal government, who had been praised by a United States senator who had kept the Southside from burning during the deadliest summer of riots in American

history, who had built an organization so sophisticated that professors compared it to Fortune 500 companies. That man was sent to ADX Florence, the most secure federal prison facility in the United States, a supermax buried in the mountains of Colorado, where the nation warehouses its most dangerous prisoners.

He was placed in solitary confinement. His telephone privileges were permanently revoked. The tool he had used to run an empire to negotiate international conspiracies to manage a drug network spanning multiple states was taken from him with a single administrative order. In 1988, Fort was convicted again, this time for ordering the 1981 murder of a rival gang leader named Willie Bibs.

 He received an additional 75 years. His total sentence climbed to 168 years. The most charismatic gang leader in American history was sealed inside a concrete cell under a mountain in Colorado and the world moved on without him. After Fort sentencing, the Elukans disintegrated. Without his voice on the speakerphone, without his coded instructions, without the fear and loyalty that only his personal charisma could command, the organization fractured.

 His generals turned on each other. members began consuming the same drugs Fort had strictly forbidden anyone in the organization from using. Anything stronger than marijuana had been grounds for punishment under Fort’s rules. Without him to enforce those rules, the discipline collapsed overnight. Over the next several years, 52 Elukin members were convicted in a cascading series of federal and state prosecutions.

 The temple on South Drexel Boulevard was seized by the city, raided one final time and demolished. The city of Chicago raised it to the ground. The building that had served as Fort’s throne room, his boardroom, his mosque, his fortress, the former movie theater he had purchased with drug money and transformed into a symbol of black institutional power on the south side was reduced to an empty lot.

 The corner of 39th and Drexel became nothing, just another vacant space in a neighborhood full of them. Here is the math of Jeff Fort’s life. From a sharecropper shack in Aberdine, Mississippi to the most powerful gang leader on the south side of Chicago. From a dozen boys on Blackstone Avenue to an army of 5,000 soldiers organized under 21 generals with a single command structure that made the Chicago Police Department looked disorganized.

 From a 9th grade dropout to a man who secured 927341 from the United States government, put his organization on the federal payroll and received an invitation to the president’s inauguration ball. from a fortified temple on South Drexel Boulevard to a solitary cell at ADX Florence, Colorado, where only his lawyers and his immediate family are permitted to speak to him, and no other human voice reaches his ears.

 And here is what makes this more than just a story about one man. The United States government gave Jeff Fort nearly a million dollars and told him to save his community. When the money ran out, when the program failed, when the Senate investigation revealed what everyone on the south side already knew, that same government spent tens of millions more to dismantle his organization and put him in a cage for the rest of his natural life.

 They funded him when it was politically convenient and destroyed him when it was politically necessary. The system never asked why a 12-year-old boy in Woodlon needed a gang to feel powerful in the first place. It never asked why the only job training program available to 800 young black men on the south side of Chicago in 1967 had to be run by the gang that controlled those streets because no legitimate institution would go near them.

 It never asked what it meant that a street gang could keep the peace during a summer of nationwide riots while the city of Chicago could not. America did not fail Jeff Fort. America created Jeff Fort and then it buried him alive for becoming exactly what it made him. He has been locked in a cell for over four decades, and the south side of Chicago is still waiting for that job training