In January of 1993, they were the most powerful gang in one of the most violent parts of the world-Chicago’s West Side. But on April 13, 1994, they ceased to exist.
-Lt. Phil Cline, Gang Investigative Unit,
Chicago Police Department
If indeed that Chicago street gang died that day, it died quietly at dawn. No shootouts. No jumping out the back window. No car chases. No argument.
Just as the night’s blackness mellowed into a slate gray sky, as the city’s buses started pulling out of their barns, scrolling out the new route numbers in the oval window over the windshield, and the corner diners started to smell good again with fresh coffee and hash browns, and stoplights stopped blinking to empty intersections; just at the time that the common working man’s lights went on in the kitchen and the bathroom showers were running hot, this gang called the Unknown Vice Lords, whose members never had to get up before noon because they didn’t work, got a heavy knock on their individual doors.
One by one, surprised and full of sleep, they got out of bed and found police looking at them with warrants in their hands. They immediately gave in, put their hands up and walked out into the morning chill to waiting squad cars with their heads down. Not quite as tough as they were the night before.
This was Willie Lloyd’s gang. The man who last summer got a peace prize at Englewood High School but was too afraid for his life to show up and accept it. Whose own gang members in 1993 tried twice to kill him. Whose lawyer took to wearing a bulletproof vest to court while he was defending him on armed robbery charges.
This is the man the gang members called “chief.” Who started his own religion called the “Amalgamated Order of Lordism” and made himself its supreme ruler. Who, police say, ran his gang from prison and spoke to his minions by speaker phone and, like the CEO of a company, issued orders, gave instructions and demanded “street taxes,” financial bonuses awarded to himself while he sat in a cell.
This is a man who racked up $1,000-a-month bills from a pay phone in jail with no visible source of income to pay them. The man who left prison wearing a full-length mink coat and then climbed into a stretch limousine and came home to his kingdom-the West Side of Chicago.
This was a man and his gang who thought they owned a small strip of land on the West Side and through muscle made it their fiefdom, police say. They scared people. They broke their legs when they didn’t do as they were told. They made a fortune off drugs and invested it in nothing but themselves.
“These are people who held a Chicago neighborhood hostage for a long time,” says Michael Smith, a prosecutor with the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Gang Crimes Unit. “They lived by none of society’s rules. They didn’t work. But they had money. They had children, but they didn’t support them. They claimed they were men but hid behind women. They lied, they cheated, they extorted, they robbed, they murdered and they turned on each other. These are people who got up each day and thought they beat the system. That’s who the cops brought in on April 13th.”
It took over a year to do it.
“From our intelligence on the street,” says Lt. Phil Cline of the Gang Investigation Unit, “we learned Willie Lloyd, when he got out, was planning on organizing all the factions of the Vice Lords under him. We knew he was planning on getting bigger and bigger once he got out. He wanted to consolidate the drug traffic on the West Side, under his dominion, of course.”
Thus began a long-term police investigation. And because of Lloyd’s professed admiration for the character of Don Corleone in “The Godfather,” the effort was dubbed Operation Don.
“We decided to make it a pro-active rather than reactive approach,” says Jack Hines, who heads the State’s Attorney’s Gang Prosecution office. “It became an organized crime approach because that is what these gangs have become-organized criminal operations based on the money from drugs, with extortion, intimidation and murder all part of it.”
The perfect informant
“What we needed,” Cline says, “was an informant. A good one who could lead us to the top leaders of the Unknown Vice Lord gang.”
Coming down a beat-up set of wooden stairs in a West Side apartment building, on a cold, icy winter night, they found one. He was young, he was co*cky, he was smart, he was a child of the street. He could rip and run with the wildest of the gangb*ngers and he didn’t much care for the police. He was perfect.
“He was the best informant I’ve ever seen and that includes my seven years working with the feds at the DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency),” Cline says. “The kid was streetwise and he wasn’t afraid of anything. He didn’t have a drug habit. He was fearless. He could lead us to the hierarchy of the gang and he did.”
Because he got into a tussle with the police that night coming down the stairs, because he wouldn’t stop to be searched and, in defiance, knocked one officer down and tried to run away, he was arrested.
After a long talk with gang investigators, he agreed to become an informant. He returned to the street, meeting secretly at appointed hours with the police and beeping them from pay phones.
As impressed with the informant as the police were, so too were his fellow gang members. As a reward for his valor and courage in knocking down a policeman that night on the stairs, the gang bought him a mink jacket and a matching fur hat.
“The kid was good. He remembered addresses and phone numbers and showed up on time,” says gang investigator Mike Cronin. “He was a good actor and thought fast on his feet. He was the kind of kid who, if he grew up in a different environment, would have been going to college.”
Thus began a year-long relationship . . . the cops and the kid working Willie Lloyd’s gang. It began before Lloyd was even released from prison. The informant was assigned a young-looking undercover officer, whose face was unfamiliar to the gang’s members. The informant made the introductions and the undercover officer made the drug buys. The majority of the drug conversations were taped-the informant wore a wire. A lot of the sales were recorded on video. The street kid and the cop worked well together.
“Step by step,” says Gang Unit Commander Donald Hilbring, “we were going up the ladder.”
Greed won over suspicion
There were some close calls-gang members who thought there was something suspicious about the undercover policeman-but greed always won out.
Willie Lloyd came out of state prison in December, 1992. It was not his first stay behind bars. Previously, he’d served 18 years for the murder in Iowa of a policeman. This second visit was the result of weapons charges.
Lloyd was not hesitant to show his disdain for the judicial process. After one court appearance, officer Cronin caught him half-naked having sex in the jurors’ bathroom with his girlfriend. At one sentencing for having been caught with a gun, Lloyd made an appeal to the judge who could have sentenced him to 10 years.
“I’m not crying, your honor, even though my soul withers in anguish,” he told the judge. “I’m only attempting to make the record straight . . . who is Willie Lloyd? Allow me to answer. He’s a victim of some horrendous circ*mstance. No, he’s not a saint but those who have glass houses shouldn’t throw stones . . . those lies was hurled forth with one purpose in mind. To get Willie! . . . I was framed and if I live to be a thousand and one, I go to my grave maintaining that truth.”
Then, Lloyd wiped a tear from his eye with a handkerchief and the judge gave him three years. Lloyd turned and looked at two gang investigators who were in the courtroom, smiled and winked.
“He figured,” says one of them, “that he had the system beat.”
He kept figuring that in prison, where his power seemed to grow and his legend expand. He was talked about on the street and written about in newspapers. He had few worries. His girlfriend, Renee, and his young baby, nicknamed Mookey-Mook, lived comfortably, supported by gang profits. He spent hours on the phone, giving orders.
According to police, from prison, he ran a snack shop and game room at 609 S. St. Louis. It was not a nice place. When a 23-year-old named Juan Moore was suspected of selling bad drugs in someone else’s territory, he was taken to the back room, stripped naked and then held down while a pitbull ripped away part of his face, his arm and his genitals.
The king returns home
When Lloyd left prison, it was with great bravado. His lieutenants were there to greet him, holding a mink coat for him to don and waiting with a stretch limousine and an entourage of cars.
Lloyd was going to return home the king. But soon everything started to fall apart.
The police were infiltrating his gang and his top lieutenants were starting to rebel. They were tired of paying him money.
“Willie was all take and no give,” Cronin says. “He was demanding a share of (his lieutenants’) drug profits and they didn’t want to pay him anymore. So they made a power play. His own people tried to kill him.”
Lloyd got tired of the police watching his two-flat on the West Side. Although he had invested $35,000 to fix it up, he packed up one day and moved secretly to a motel in Deerfield. When he ventured into the city, it was always with an entourage.
“Willie always had three or four cars with him when he’d swing in to the West Side,” says Cronin. “Always bodyguards and a tail car. One time we stopped him looking for guns and he didn’t have any. I said, `What’s up Willie? No guns?’ And he said, `It’s not what you have. It’s what they think you have.’ “
It was in March, 1993, that Lloyd allegedly ordered one of his own gang lieutenants, Cardell Williams, kidnapped and taken to a gang member’s house where he was held for $6,000 ransom-drug money Lloyd claimed he was owed. Police said he was paid off by the kidnapping victim’s brother-Tyrone Williams, also a top gang member-who gave Lloyd his Mercedes Benz as payment.
The next day, in retaliation, the Williams brothers and some followers tried to kill Lloyd. On March 26, four men in a van spotted Lloyd’s car leaving Deerfield. Thinking he was in it, they followed it and, on the Eisenhower Expressway at Wolf Road, opened fire. The driver, Victor Nichols, was shot in the leg. Lloyd’s 2-year-old son and the baby’s aunt were not injured. Lloyd was not in the car.
Lloyd was arrested and charged with abducting and robbing one of his top lieutenants. The four occupants of the van were charged with the expressway ambush. And the police kept working the gang-still making undercover buys and taping it all. But the gang was unraveling, its unity falling apart.
All-out war
The Lloyd faction and the Williams faction began robbing each others’ drug operations, police say. Within two days-from Sept. 12 to Sept. 14, 1993-the West Side neighborhood the Unknown Vice Lords claimed was theirs dripped with blood and resounded with gunshots. Four people were murdered and three more wounded. Two of the victims were young teen boys who were working a drug spot believed to be a Lloyd operation.
As a message to Lloyd, the two boys were thrown into a car by a crowd of thugs from the warring faction. A witness said the two boys started to cry. They were driven off to the railroad tracks at 2501 W. Roosevelt Rd., dragged through the weeds and, though they begged for life, were assassinated, police say.
Lloyd never bothered to go to their funeral. Nor did he contribute any money to their burial. He put the word out on the street that he was absent because there was an arrest warrant out for him. The police say there was no warrant. Willie Lloyd was just scared.
On Oct. 19, the warring faction tried to kill Lloyd again. This time, as he left court after a hearing on the Williams case. In broad daylight, while his car, his advance car and his tail car were stopped at a light at 19th Street and South Kedzie Avenue, two men climbed out of a Chevrolet. All four adults in the car, including Lloyd, were hit, though not seriously. Once again, Lloyd’s son was unscathed.
By now Lloyd was hiding. He no longer was wheeling around the West Side. Just in case Lloyd might not last long, his lawyer asked that he be paid for his legal services with Lloyd’s bond money. Gang leaders from both factions had been arrested for the murders and the shootings. One day they appeared in criminal court as victims, the next day as defendants.
“These guys have the best of both worlds,” says assistant state’s attorney Smith. “The only rule these gang members live by is to have no rules. They don’t respect the rules the rest of society lives by. Not one. But, when they get arrested, or get victimized by their own . . . suddenly they turn to the rules. They want their rights. Only rules give a person rights and they want the rights when they get caught breaking the rules.”
It was prosecutor Smith who tried Lloyd on the charges he unlawfully restrained Cardell Williams and robbed him of $6,000. To show his contempt, Lloyd threw pennies at the lawyer in the hall outside the courtroom.
In early April, Judge Ronald Himel found Lloyd not guilty of the charges, adding, almost apologetically, “I hate the defendants in this case. Don’t you ever thank me for what I did today.”
Caught with a gun
But already Lloyd had been arrested again-this time while hiding out in a second-floor West Side apartment where he, his girlfriend and Mookey-Mook occupied one room of a small crowded apartment belonging to a woman with her seven children.
Police caught Lloyd with a gun. He tried to hide it by breaking a window and throwing it out to the ground. Although police saw him do it, he claimed the gun belonged to one of the women. As a convicted felon caught with a gun, Lloyd went back to jail.
On that slate gray dawn of April 13, 150 police officers fanned out to 16 different houses and apartments and arrested 29 gang members, the rest of the Willie Lloyd gang who weren’t already in jail-all of them upper echelon gang members who’d sold drugs to the police.
After a year-long police investigation and much bloodshed, lives shattered, hundreds of thousands of tax dollars spent, bullets fired, cars smashed, citizens terrorized and years and years of a neighborhood being run by this gang, its corners dominated by their drugs, their kids being recruited and corrupted, the Unknown Vice Lords have finally disappeared off the street.
“The last time I saw Willie Lloyd on the street he was riding in a 3-year-old Honda,” says officer Cronin. “No advance car. No tail car. No bodyguards. A girl was driving. And the last time I saw him at all he wasn’t wearing no fancy clothes. He had on khaki pants and a matching khaki shirt that said DOC (Department of Corrections) on the back. He wasn’t being driven down the street. He was walking slow toward the lockup.”
“Will the Unknown Vice Lords live up to their name and become what we want them to be-unknown, unseen and unheard from ever again? Your guess is as good as mine,” says one veteran policeman. “But we tried. We tried real hard.”
“At least we got this group dead to rights this time,” says prosecutor Hines. “We are in a position of strength. Now we go to court. And so it’s not over. It’s only the beginning.”
