Our Daley Gangbanger, by Mike Gold – Brainiac On Banjo #177

July 5, 2010 Mike Gold 0 Comments

Last night (as I type) I was watching one of those American Gangster shows. I believe the purpose of this series is to prove that guys like Lucky Luciano, Al Capone, and Meyer Lansky weren’t so bad after all.

I was sucked into this one because it profiled Larry Hoover, co-founder of what was perhaps the largest street gang of all time, Chicago’s Gangster Disciples, some 50,000 members strong. Formed in the late 1960s, the GDs are still around today and their presence is nationwide. Indeed, the Gangster Disciples have been seen in U.S. military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan and, of course, throughout our prison system.

Hoover was such a bad motherfucker that he could have sued Isaac Hayes for slander. I won’t go into detail about his activities; you can easily Google the Gangster Disciples or watch the teevee show (it’s in rotation on the Centric channel). Drugs, murder, the usual – they have made Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood possibly the single most dangerous area in the United States, and that location is largely responsible for the city’s life-takingly high crime rate today.

Hoover was an organizational genius and, as it comes to most such “common” criminals (read “not Enron or BP”) the Feds targeted him and ultimately tossed him in SuperMax for life. Of course, this was after decades of running the Gangster Disciples from a less secure prison, expanding his organization’s reach, membership, and activities. Unless you have seen the results of Richard Speck’s in-prison illicit sex change operation, Hoover’s prison successes were the most amazing in recent history. He’s still alive, at 59 years old.

During his more social incarceration, Hoover took on the public image of turning the GDs around and making them a social improvement organization. He also clamped down on prison violence. Let’s be honest here: he never let his positive work get in the way of his gang’s real activities, and he often merged the two for the benefit of each. But it is Larry Hoover’s rationalization that impressed me.

Hoover pointed to Richard J. Daley, Chicago’s mayor from 1955 until his death in 1976. Daley, a.k.a. “The Boss” (take that, Bruce Springsteen!) ruled the city with an iron hand using his legion of patronage workers to get out the vote by providing a very high degree of community service. These positives did not interfere with Daley’s support of his buddies in the business communities, particularly real estate and insurance. Daley was a builder of great things, and in the process he made his buddies great money. He understood power better than anybody I’ve ever read about: his motto was “good government is good politics” and he was right about that. He ran for mayor six times, winning each time by a substantial margin – particularly in the black wards such as Larry Hoover’s.

Mr. Hoover pointed out that as a kid, Richard J. Daley was a gangbanger. He was a member of the powerful Hamburg gang (a name that could only exist prior to radio and teevee), and he was its president in the mid-20s. From July 27 to August 2, 1919, a race riot broke out after the drowning of a black youth after he drifted onto a white area of a beach 96-degree day. When it was over 38 people were dead and 537 were injured. The Hamburgs played a critical role in this week-long affair; given protocol, Daley had to have been involved.

Okay, he was a kid. So was Larry Hoover when he started the GDs. That’s not an excuse for violence and murder, but the point wasn’t lost on Hoover: Daley channeled his gang activities into a more reputable outlet, politics (ironic, isn’t it?), and in the process he did a lot of good. Daley brought the first blacks into major public office, he expanded infrastructure, highways and airports without destroying the ethnic neighborhoods, and his machine provided excellent and very human service to people throughout the city. Mind you, he had his faults: the public schools continued to badly deteriorate, his personal approval had to be sought for every action and every public job, and there was that police riot in 1968 that, in fact, put me in business.

I found Hoover’s parallels fascinating. Would he have been mayor had he been white? Probably not; he was a major drug dealer and a really nasty guy.

No, my question is: would Richard J. Daley have been a major drug dealer and a really nasty guy were he black?

Media metaphysician and www.ComicMix.com editor-in-Chief Mike Gold performs the weekly two-hour Weird Sounds Inside The Gold Mind ass-kicking bizarro music and blather radio show on The Point, www.getthepointradio.com, every Sunday at 7:00 PM Eastern, replayed three times during the week (check the website above for times). Likewise, his Weird Scenes Inside The Gold Mind political and cultural rants pop up each and every day at the same venue.