US Politics Mega-thread - Page 86

The Royals’ roots date to Chicago’s North Side in 1952, when two violent white “greaser” gangs – the Ashland Royals and Simon City – guarded Simon Park turf as Puerto Ricans moved in.

Early greasers were immigrants, often Italian, maligned by wealthier whites for greasing machines in blue-collar jobs. In 1968, the greasers united as the Simon City Royals, often rumbling with the nearby Latin Kings as well as the white supremacist Gaylords. (Their rhetoric is familiar: a Gaylords nostalgia website called Latino gangs “storage bins for illegal immigrants”.)

The Royals were one of the biggest and most violent street gangs in Chicago by the 1970s, when they joined the Folk Nation alliance with the Black Gangster Disciples, began admitting Hispanics and, later, women and black members.

But by the 1980s, the gang had weakened after its leadership got locked up or killed.

Strength shifted to prisons, and the brand spread to midwestern and southern states like Mississippi, where the Royals are now one of the largest and most violent gangs in the state.

Surveys of young Americans have shown that 40% identifying as gang members are white, but police tend to undercount them at 10% to 14% and overcount black and Hispanic members, says Babe Howell, a criminal law professor at City University of New York who focuses on crime and race.

“Police see groups of young white people as individuals, each responsible for his or her own conduct, and hold young people of color in street gangs criminally liable for the conduct of their peers,” she says.

How law enforcement labels specific gangs may also obscure white membership, a 2012 study published in the Michigan Journal of Race and Law posited.

Jordan Blair Woods researched how the feds had applied the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (Rico) to various gangs. Congress passed Rico in 1970 to target the mafia as organized “criminal enterprises”. In the early 1990s, the attorney general, Janet Reno, started using Rico to charge criminal street gangs.

Woods explains that law enforcement typically splits gang activity into three groups: white supremacist prison gangs, outlaw biker clubs and criminal street gangs. He concluded that systemic racism often keeps white gangs categorized as prison and biker groups instead of street gangs – the category drawing the toughest charges and sentences.

In 2004, Ivey was locked up for four years for manufacturing crystal meth. He ran his chapter via cellphone (“a little gangster would hold it for me”) and he sent missive “scrolls” to Royals on the outside.

In 2008, he returned to a trailer park where a mother of two called Spirit lived and assisted with operations. She helped Ivey administer the Royals’ fund; he required each of the 150 members to contribute $12 a month. They could borrow for a child support payment or to keep their lights on.

Thomasa ‘Spirit’ Massey was 'queen' of the Simon City Royals chapter Benny Ivey ran from her trailer in Rankin County, Mississippi. She helped administer the shared Royal 'poor box' fund and was in charge of other women who joined the gang. She also worked as a paralegal until she was arrested.

If they didn’t repay, or violated other rules, Ivey assigned Royals to beat them.

His members prided themselves on not being racist. Ivey’s members were all “100% fine” being allied with a black gang, but his Royals weren’t diverse. “It was an all-white organization,” he says. Still, he didn’t see much bigotry among his members. “I think everything depends on the person … Hell, a lot of the Royals acted more black culturally than white.”

By late 2008, Ivey’s organization started to unravel internally. His first lieutenant, Kruz, started squabbling with two young members called Smash and Street, whom he suspected were talking to the cops. Soon afterwards, police told Ivey that no Royal better touch their informants. “If anything happens to them boys, we coming for you,” a local lieutenant warned.

Spooked, Ivey left town for a few weeks, but a mob of Royals beat up Smash and Street while he was gone and were arrested on $1m bonds. When leaders get locked up is a prime time for violence – which is now more often intra-gang than between different gangs, Northwestern University sociologist and violence expert Andrew Papachristos reports.

Then 32, Ivey was sent to the private Delta correctional facility because of gang activity. There, he gathered the Royals in the yard.

“I have to retire because I’m a liability,” he said.

Nobody objected.

Law enforcement say the Royals started growing exponentially on the Gulf coast in 2008 – the year Ivey retired– and are now Mississippi’s third largest criminal street gang.

They now refer to themselves as “Chapter 13” and the Mississippi Combat Legion. Police say the gang traffics guns and narcotics, with some members participating in gruesome violence against snitches.

Over the last year, Ivey built a large deck for Sunday cookouts, positioned a flatscreen for Nascar viewing and turned his garage into a workout studio with a large Confederate flag over his weight set.

“I’m not racist, but I like the flag,” he says, calling it defiance of those who put rednecks down. “People up north like to make fun of us.”

Still, the flag was gone in December when the black photographer he had gotten to know for this article visited. “I didn’t want to hurt Imani,” he says later. “The flag is not about racism to me.”

Ivey’s brother Danny, who is now in rehab, had turned Aryan Brotherhood in prison, tattooing a swastika on to his chest. But Ivey says he has spent too much time around black people with similar struggles to think he’s superior to them.

He also doesn’t believe “white privilege” is a thing. “I think it’s wealth privilege. I don’t care what color you are, if you’re poor, you get treated like crap. Because I never had none of that white privilege,” he says.

“We have the same problems as all other races when it comes to money, social stature, living with nothing, drugs, addiction, poverty,” Ivey says. “All that is all too real for a lot of us.”

Ivey attends a church by the interstate with a few black members. He works on houses in formerly lily-white South Jackson, where race demographics have flipped since his family house-hopped there. But he passed on talking to kids at a Jackson YMCA about avoiding the gang life.

“It’s all black kids,” he says. “They’re not gonna listen to my cracker ass.”

Today, many locals are surprised to learn that white gang members ran drugs and kicked in doors for two decades between Jackson and its majority-white suburbs.

“We watch the news every morning,” Ivey says. “My little girl comes in here and says, ‘Why do black people commit so many crimes?’”

“Baby, because we have Jackson news, and there’s two-thirds black in Jackson,” he tells her. “White people do bad, too.”