第 14 页

leader of another crack gang once told Venkatesh that he could easily afford to

pay his foot soldiers more, but it wouldn’t be prudent. “You got all these niggers

below you who want your job, you dig?” he said. “So, you know, you try to take

care of them, but you know, you also have to show them you the boss. You

always have to get yours first, or else you really ain’t no leader. If you start

taking losses, they see you as weak and shit.”

Along with the bad pay, the foot soldiers faced terrible job conditions. For

starters, they had to stand on a street corner all day and do business with

crackheads. (The gang members were strongly advised against using the product

themselves, advice that was enforced by beatings if necessary.) Foot soldiers also

risked arrest and, more worri-some, violence. Using the gang’s financial

documents and the rest of Venkatesh’s research, it is possible to construct an

adverse-events index of J. T.’s gang during the four years in question. The results

are astonishingly bleak. If you were a member of J. T.’s gang for all four years,

here is the typical fate you would have faced during that period:

Number of times arrested

5.9

Number of nonfatal wounds or injuries

(not including injuries meted out by the gang itself for rules violations)

2.4

Chance of being killed

1 in 4

A 1-in-4 chance of being killed! Compare these odds to being a timber cutter,

which the Bureau of Labor Statistics calls the most dangerous job in the United

States. Over four years’ time, a timber cutter would stand only a 1-in-200 chance

of being killed. Or compare the crack dealer’s odds to those of a death row

inmate in Texas, which executes more prisoners than any other state. In 2003,

Texas put to death twenty-four inmates—or just 5 percent of the nearly 500

inmates on its death row during that time. Which means that you stand a greater

chance of dying while dealing crack in a Chicago housing project than you do

while sitting on death row in Texas.

So if crack dealing is the most dangerous job in America, and if the salary is only

$3.30 an hour, why on earth would anyone take such a job?

Well, for the same reason that a pretty Wisconsin farm girl moves to Hollywood.

For the same reason that a high-school quarterback wakes up at 5 a.m. to lift

weights. They all want to succeed in an extremely competitive field in which, if

you reach the top, you are paid a fortune (to say nothing of the attendant glory

and power).

To the kids growing up in a housing project on Chicago’s south side, crack

dealing was a glamour profession. For many of them, the job of gang boss—

highly visible and highly lucrative—was easily the best job they thought they

had access to. Had they grown up under different circumstances, they might

have thought about becoming economists or writers. But in the neighborhood

where J. T.’s gang operated, the path to a decent legitimate job was practically

invisible. Fifty-six percent of the neighborhood’s children lived below the

poverty line (compared to a national average of 18 percent). Seventy-eight

percent came from single-parent homes. Fewer than 5 percent of the

neighborhood’s adults had a college degree; barely one in three adult men

worked at all. The neighborhood’s median income was about $15,000 a year, well

less than half the U.S. average. During the years that Venkatesh lived with J. T.’s

gang, foot soldiers often asked his help in landing what they called “a good job”:

working as a janitor at the University of Chicago.

The problem with crack dealing is the same as in every other glamour profession:

a lot of people are competing for a very few prizes. Earning big money in the

crack gang wasn’t much more likely than the Wisconsin farm girl becoming a

movie star or the high-school quarterback playing in the NFL. But criminals, like

everyone else, respond to incentives. So if the prize is big enough, they will form

a line down the block just hoping for a chance. On the south side of Chicago,

people wanting to sell crack vastly outnumbered the available street corners.

These budding drug lords bumped up against an immutable law of labor: when

there are a lot of people willing and able to do a job, that job generally doesn’t

pay well. This is one of four meaningful factors that determine a wage. The

others are the specialized skills a job requires, the unpleasantness of a job, and

the demand for services that the job fulfills.

The delicate balance between these factors helps explain why, for instance, the

typical prostitute earns more than the typical architect. It may not seem as

though she should. The architect would appear to be more skilled (as the word is

usually defined) and better educated (again, as usually defined). But little girls

don’t grow up dreaming of becoming prostitutes, so the supply of potential

prostitutes is relatively small. Their skills, while not necessarily “specialized,” are

practiced in a very specialized context. The job is unpleasant and forbidding in at

least two significant ways: the likelihood of violence and the lost opportunity of

having a stable family life. As for demand? Let’s just say that an architect is more

likely to hire a prostitute than vice versa.

In the glamour professions—movies, sports, music, fashion—there is a different

dynamic at play. Even in second-tier glamour industries like publishing,

advertising, and media, swarms of bright young people throw themselves at

grunt jobs that pay poorly and demand unstinting devotion. An editorial

assistant earning $22,000 at a Manhattan publishing house, an unpaid high-

school quarterback, and a teenage crack dealer earning $3.30 an hour are all

playing the same game, a game that is best viewed as a tournament.

The rules of a tournament are straightforward. You must start at the bottom to

have a shot at the top. (Just as a Major League shortstop probably played Little

League and just as a Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan probably started out as a

lowly spear-carrier, a drug lord typically began by selling drugs on a street

corner.) You must be willing to work long and hard at substandard wages. In

order to advance in the tournament, you must prove yourself not merely above

average but spectacular. (The way to distinguish yourself differs from profession

to profession, of course; while J. T. certainly monitored his foot soldiers’ sales

performance, it was their force of personality that really counted—more than it

would for, say, a shortstop.) And finally, once you come to the sad realization

that you will never make it to the top, you will quit the tournament. (Some

people hang on longer than others—witness the graying “actors” who wait tables

in New York—but people generally get the message quite early.)

Most of J. T.’s foot soldiers were unwilling to stay foot soldiers for long after they

realized they weren’t advancing. Especially once the shooting started. After

several relatively peaceful years, J. T.’s gang got involved in a turf war with a

neighboring gang. Drive-by shootings became a daily event. For a foot soldier—

the gang’s man on the street—this development was particularly dangerous. The

nature of the business demanded that customers be able to find him easily and

quickly; if he hid from the other gang, he couldn’t sell his crack.

Until the gang war, J. T.’s foot soldiers had been willing to balance the risky, low-

paying job with the reward of advancement. But as one foot soldier told

Venkatesh, he now wanted to be compensated for the added risk: “Would you

stand around here when all this shit is going on? No, right? So if I gonna be

asked to put my life on the line, then front me the cash, man. Pay me more ’cause

it ain’t worth my time to be here when they’re warring.”

J. T. hadn’t wanted this war. For one thing, he was forced to pay his foot soldiers

higher wages because of the added risk. Far worse, gang warfare was bad for

business. If Burger King and McDonald’s launch a price war to gain market

share, they partly make up in volume what they lose in price. (Nor is anyone

getting shot.) But with a gang war, sales plummet because customers are so

scared of the violence that they won’t come out in the open to buy their crack. In

every way, war was expensive for J. T.

So why did he start the war? As a matter of fact, he didn’t. It was his foot soldiers

who started it. It turns out that a crack boss didn’t have as much control over his

subordinates as he would have liked. That’s because they had different

incentives.

For J. T., violence was a distraction from the business at hand; he would have

preferred that his members never fired a single gunshot. For a foot soldier,

however, violence served a purpose. One of the few ways that a foot soldier

could distinguish himself—and advance in the tournament—was by proving his

mettle for violence. A killer was respected, feared, talked about. A foot soldier’s

incentive was to make a name for himself; J. T.’s incentive was, in effect, to keep

the foot soldiers from doing so. “We try to tell these shorties that they belong to a

serious organization,” he once told Venkatesh. “It ain’t all about killing. They see

these movies and shit, they think it’s all about running around tearing shit up.

But it’s not. You’ve got to learn to be part of an organization; you can’t be

fighting all the time. It’s bad for business.”

In the end, J. T. prevailed. He oversaw the gang’s expansion and ushered in a

new era of prosperity and relative peace. J. T. was a winner. He was paid well

because so few people could do what he did. He was a tall, good-looking, smart,

tough man who knew how to motivate people. He was shrewd too, never

tempting arrest by carrying guns or cash. While the rest of his gang lived in

poverty with their mothers, J. T. had several homes, several women, several cars.

He also had his business education, of course. He constantly worked to extend

this advantage. That was why he ordered the corporate-style bookkeeping that

eventually found its way into Sudhir Venkatesh’s hands. No other franchise

leader had ever done such a thing. J. T. once showed his ledgers to the board of

directors to prove, as if proof were needed, the extent of his business acumen.

And it worked. After six years running his local gang, J. T. was promoted to the

board of directors. He was now thirty-four years old. He had won the

tournament. But this tournament had a catch that publishing and pro sports and

even Hollywood don’t have. Selling drugs, after all, is illegal. Not long after he

made the board of directors, the Black Disciples were essentially shut down by a

federal indictment—the same indictment that led the gangster named Booty to

turn over his notebooks to Venkatesh—and J. T. was sent to prison.

Now for another unlikely question: what did crack cocaine have in common with

nylon stockings?

In 1939, when DuPont introduced nylons, countless American women felt as if a

miracle had been performed in their honor. Until then, stockings were made of

silk, and silk was delicate, expensive, and in ever shorter supply. By 1941, some

sixty-four million pairs of nylon stockings had been sold—more stockings than

there were adult women in the United States. They were easily affordable,

immensely appealing, practically addictive.

DuPont had pulled off the feat that every marketer dreams of: it brought class to

the masses. In this regard, the invention of nylon stockings was markedly similar

to the invention of crack cocaine.

In the 1970s, if you were the sort of person who did drugs, there was no classier

drug than cocaine. Beloved by rock stars and movie stars, ballplayers and even

the occasional politician, cocaine was a drug of power and panache. It was clean,

it was white, it was pretty. Heroin was droopy and pot was foggy but cocaine

provided a beautiful high.

Alas, it was also very expensive. Nor did the high last long. This led cocaine

users to try jacking up the drug’s potency. They did this primarily by

freebasing—adding ammonia and ethyl ether to cocaine hydrochloride, or

powdered cocaine, and burning it to free up the “base” cocaine. But this could be

dangerous. As Richard Pryor famously proved—he nearly killed himself while

freebasing—chemistry is best left to chemists.

Meanwhile, cocaine dealers and aficionados across the country, and perhaps also

in the Caribbean and South America, were working on a safer version of distilled

cocaine. They found that mixing powdered cocaine in a saucepan with baking

soda and water, and then cooking off the liquid, produced tiny rocks of

smokeable cocaine. It came to be called crack for the crackling sound the baking

soda made when it was burned. More affectionate nicknames would soon follow:

Rock, Kryptonite, Kibbles ’n Bits, Scrabble, and Love. By the early 1980s, the class

drug was ready for the masses. Now only two things were needed to turn crack

into a phenomenon: an abundant supply of raw cocaine and a way to get the

new product to a mass market.

The cocaine was easy to come by, for the invention of crack coincided with a

Colombian cocaine glut. During the late 1970s, the wholesale price of cocaine in

the United States fell dramatically, even as its purity was rising. One man, a

Nicaraguan émigré named Oscar Danilo Blandon, was suspected of importing

far more Colombian cocaine than anyone else. Blandon did so much business

with the budding crack dealers of South Central Los Angeles that he came to be

known as the Johnny Appleseed of Crack. Blandon would later claim that he was

selling the cocaine to raise money for the CIA-sponsored Contras back home in

Nicaragua. He liked to say that the CIA was in turn watching his back in the

United States, allowing him to sell cocaine with impunity. This claim would

spark a belief that still seethes to this day, especially among urban blacks, that

the CIA itself was the chief sponsor of the American crack trade.

Verifying that claim is beyond the purview of this book. What is demonstrably