CHICAGO - (KRT) - The Black Disciples ran a business that was the envy of Chicago's underground economy.
The South Side gang's distribution network for heroin and crack cocaine brought in as much as $300,000 a day.
Its drug-selling territory was divided into clearly defined franchises. Gang members paid dues and "taxes" for the right to sell drugs. There was even an annual company picnic.
A recent federal raid threw a wrench into the Black Disciples' lucrative operation, but it also opened a window on a rarely examined economic enterprise that holds sway over large parts of urban centers like Chicago.
It's unlikely to become a source of civic pride, but some South Side Chicago gangs have been among the most successful in the nation at taking the best practices of corporate America and adapting them to their use, gang experts say.
"I've always believed they were run the way IBM should have been run," said Jonathan King, a former U.S. attorney who prosecuted the Black Disciples' archrival, the Gangster Disciples. That gang, he said, was adept at putting the right people in the right jobs and identifying legitimate business opportunities to launder cash.
"They were incredibly efficient at what they did. A lot of these people could have been business leaders if they had chosen to run a legitimate firm instead of a drug cartel."
The Gangster Disciples and the Black Disciples adopted a pyramid-type organization led by a CEO-type leader. Each had its own board of directors that held regular meetings.
Although they used different designations, both gangs had the equivalent of middle managers who oversaw drug sales, and enforcers who collected fines and administered "violations," physical discipline that went far beyond the corporate norm for poor performance.
While the leaders made fortunes, front-line employees - the street-level gang members who sold drugs - earned roughly the equivalent of minimum wage in many cases, researchers found.
Except for the 40 or 50 Black Disciples who hold positions of rank, "the rest of them are the frymakers at McDonald's," said Andrew Papachristos, a sociologist and director of field operations for the National Gang Crime Research Center in Peotone, Ill.
"They're not all driving Benzes and Lexuses. They're not making the cash," he said.
Both gangs had a code of conduct and a benefits package of sorts. Gang members who were arrested usually could count on the organization to foot the bill for an attorney and to post bail. The gangs regularly paid for funeral expenses, not an uncommon occurrence, and sometimes paid annuities to families of those killed or incarcerated.
Another thing the gangs had in common with big business: a glass ceiling. An estimated 30 percent of Black Disciples in some parts of the city were women, but they rarely, if ever, rose to prominent positions.
The rise of the corporate gang was a product of the 1980s, when many manufacturing jobs were leaving inner cities and crack cocaine arrived on the scene, social scientists and gang researchers say.
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