Police investigate the scene of a fatal shooting on Ohio Street near Homan Avenue on June 8, 2016. A reputed Gangster Disciples hit man was killed just five months after being released from prison.
(Terrence Antonio James / Chicago Tribune)
When Lanarris Webster went to prison in 2010, the name of the reputed Gangster Disciples hit man still meant something in the blocks around Homan Avenue and Huron Street on the West Side. By the time he was paroled in February, that world had changed.
Webster, known on the street as "Baby Folks," returned to the corner he had once controlled to reassert his authority. But the 34-year-old did not last long. Last month, in the middle of the afternoon, Webster happened upon a friend who was having his minivan fixed by a curbside mechanic. As the men chatted and shared a marijuana blunt, a gunman emerged from a vacant lot and began firing, police sources said. In a hail of gunfire, the friend scrambled away as Webster spun and dropped to the pavement.
When Chicago police arrived, they found Webster sprawled on the sidewalk, dying of a gunshot wound to the chest. Gunned down on the turf he once controlled, Webster was another casualty of the gang violence spinning out of control in the city this year.
A tent revival service was held at Union Missionary Baptist Church Thursday, July 21, 2016, in the East Garfield Park neighborhood of Chicago. Pastor Raymond Hillman helped organize the revival in response to violence in the area. 34-year-old Lanarris Webster was shot and killed less than two blocks from the church last month.
Street gangs, once compared with Fortune 500 companies for their organizational skills and ruthless pursuit of profits, are now mostly made up of small, leaderless sets of members bound together by personal relationships rather than geographic or narcotics-trade ties. Personal insults and petty conflicts, often inflamed by social media posts, are just as likely to lead to a shooting as is competition for drug turf. Taken together, these changes have created an anything-goes atmosphere on the streets.
The causes of violence in Chicago are complex and defy simple explanation. But police and other experts identify the fracturing of Chicago's gangs as one apparent contributor to a surge in violence that includes more than 2,300 people shot so far this year.
It is no secret that the nature of Chicago's street gangs has changed, resulting in less centralized and less hierarchical organizations. Chicago's top police officials have spoken frequently about how the splintering of the city's gangs has fueled the city's nonstop violence. Stature of the kind that Webster once enjoyed now means nothing, and gang members on the street have no bosses giving orders. The violent results have become increasingly unpredictable.
As the gang affiliations and conflicts have become more chaotic, the criminal justice system has become less effective in dealing with the violence, according to interviews with five investigators who together have decades of experience in local and federal law enforcement agencies dealing with gangs. All spoke on the condition that they remain anonymous, either because of security concerns or because they were not authorized by their agencies to speak publicly.
The investigators say that, at a time of dwindling resources and increased scrutiny of their credibility, law enforcement is struggling to keep up with the fast-changing identities of the gangs and their rivalries. Indeed, since May, the Cook County sheriff's office has begun weekly security meetings inside Cook County Jail to talk about the shifting landscape of gang alliances and conflicts. Much of the information they share comes from interviews with the young inmates; those interviews have yielded a picture of chaos on the street.
"It's really confusing. Every day we learn something new," said a gang expert at the County Jail. "It's constantly changing."
Lanarris Webster was a Chicago gang leader who went to prison and died in a recent shooting when he got out. (Illinois Department of Corrections)
For the most part, the gangs are leaderless inside the jail, the source said. The Latin Kings still appoint a leader, known as an "Inca," to supervise members behind bars. That gang, like many other Hispanic gangs, largely continues to operate under more traditional hierarchy, which law enforcement continues to pursue. Just this past week, federal authorities announced sweeping indictments that rounded up dozens of Latin King leaders and members in the suburbs and Far South Side.
But other gangs, and especially black gangs such as the Gangster Disciples, or GDs, are rudderless, mirroring the situation outside the jail, he said.
"Every GD they interviewed," according to the source, "said they didn't answer to anybody."
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"Public housing scattered," he said. "You used to have a hierarchy of people who had to live together. You have this big housing event, and now GDs are living with Four Corner Hustlers."
The disruption in gang structure also changed the way they did business, according to the investigators. Most of the drug dealing is now controlled by the individual sets, with the proceeds used to fuel activities on the street rather than funneled up a chain of command.
"There's not as much wealth out there," said one federal agent, who has participated in undercover operations against gangs. "They're like a virus that kills the host too quickly."
Another federal agent described an uptick in gang members stealing luxury vehicles from North Shore suburbs. But instead of selling the cars and SUVs to make money and fuel expansion, the federal agent said, "they're just driving them around and doing shootings."
Investigators said the breakdown in the system of control over gangs has fueled violence for violence's sake. Social media, they say, has contributed to the atmosphere of quick, pointless violence. YouTube is jammed with videos of amateur local rappers, surrounded by their friends chanting boasts and taunts. Often, the teens and young adults in the videos can be seen wielding firearms.
Investigators are troubled, too, by a breakdown in the code of what kind of violence is acceptable, and which targets are fair game.
The killing of 9-year-old Tyshawn Lee last year signaled that children could be targets in the ongoing disputes. Authorities allege Lee's father was a gang member involved in a string of retaliatory gang violence, and that his son was lured into an alley and killed as a substitute.
Investigators in the jail said they have found a similar, and deeply troubling, mentality among jail inmates affiliated with gangs. One teenage gang member from the South Side recounted a conflict in which the gang was targeting a rival who drove a black Mercedes-Benz.
"So they started targeting black Mercedeses," the county sheriff's investigator said. "They started shooting at any black Mercedes."
The results of Chicago's violent subculture have been alarming this year. As of Friday afternoon, the city had seen at least 381 homicides, according to data compiled by the Tribune, with 68 killings in May and 72 in June. The bloodshed has put the city on pace to surpass 600 homicides in 2016, a total not seen since 2003.
Stopping the retaliatory violence that contributes to those sorts of figures has always been the biggest challenge for police. In 2003, when Chicago police first launched a version of the CompStat data analytics system, the principal goal was to quell retaliation. Data gathered from gang intelligence on the street was used to predict where retaliatory shootings were most likely to happen next. Police would then saturate those areas with large teams of officers.
In 2004, the homicide rate dropped by 25 percent, taking the city's homicide tally below 600 for the first time in decades. But in the intervening decade, a combination of budget crises and misconduct scandals have undermined efforts by police. The big saturation teams — the Special Operations Section and Targeted Response Unit — have been disbanded, replaced by smaller units that investigators say do not have the same impact.
And levels of mistrust between police and the communities they patrol are high, making it difficult to solve gang crimes.
It is a problem Chicago police have had a significant hand in building. The culture of mistrust between the department and residents has a foundation based on much more than just the current uproar — the fatal shooting of Laquan McDonald by Officer Jason Van Dyke. Since the early 1980s, the department has repeatedly been tarnished by scandals involving detectives and special units assigned to combat gangs, and who instead have been convicted of committing ganglike crimes such as shaking down drug dealers. A veteran gangs detective said some fault for the spiking violence lies with a department on its heels because of the McDonald scandal.
"A lot of it has to do with the fact that we're not getting out of the car. Not locking people up — that's a huge thing," the detective said, noting that gang members have benefited from the troubles of the police. "We're no longer believable. They're more believable than we are. We're not believable in court, and we're having to add more and more things to show that what happened was actually what happened."
Half a block west of where Webster was killed, the Union Missionary Baptist Church has been holding nightly "tent revival" meetings in the parking lot. The Rev. Raymond Hillman hopes to show people that the community has something other than gunfire to offer after the sun goes down. When asked about a shooting that happened down the street on Ohio, he immediately blurted out, "Oh, yes. Baby Folks."
"With that murder, I had heard about it," Hillman said, noting he knew Webster by reputation only but was surprised by the brazen killing of a high-ranking Gangster Disciple. "I think that marks a shift."
Hillman said something needs to change with the level of mistrust with the police. The black community, he said, lacks the leadership to negotiate better relations with the police, and the police are too quick to write off every black man they encounter in certain neighborhoods.
We're going to need, I wouldn't say more police, but I'd say more compassion from them," Hillman said.
The situation, he said, is dire. Having grown up in the gang-afflicted ABLA Homes housing development, Hillman agrees that the breakup of public housing and scattering of gang members has caused confusion about gang alliances. That, he added, has resulted in more unpredictable violence.
"I felt safer there than I do in this kind of community," he said. In the housing developments, "we all knew each other."
The slaying of Webster remains unsolved, but police are pursuing leads that suggest he may have been shot by someone from a faction of the rival Vice Lords gang associating with members of the victim's own Gangster Disciples, sources said. The clues in his homicide mirror the emerging confusion about traditional gang alliances; that is, other gang members resisted Webster's efforts to reclaim his place, not giving him the deference he once enjoyed.
Webster's death also seems to be an example of the ongoing trend of indiscriminate violence when gang members are pursuing a target. A week before he was killed on the West Side, Webster was shot at but the gunfire missed, police sources said. But the gunman wounded four other people.
dheinzmann@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @davidheinzmann
That's how suburbs up here ended up with gangs, so I can only imagine Chicago.
