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By Root 796 0

out on Taylor Street—Chicago’s Little Italy. Unlike his own neighborhood, Taylor Street was solidly middle class, a world of cafés, bakeries, pizza places, Italian-ice shops, and some of the best restaurants in the city. At the same time, it had its own criminal sect, which was much less visible but by far the most successful in the city. The Outfit had ruled the neighborhood since the turn of the century, when its predecessors, known by the old Sicilian moniker La Mano Nera, or “Black Hand,” carved the names of their enemies on a poplar tree that stood at the intersection of Taylor and Loomis. “Dead Man’s Tree” was long gone by the time Art started hanging out in Little Italy, replaced by progress and more subtle methods of influence, but the Mafia itself was still firmly and quietly rooted there. It was a street where kids hanging out in front of a coffee shop might suddenly be hailed by a man driving a black Crown Vic, handed two hundred bucks and a gas can, and told to drive the car somewhere out of the way and burn it to the ground—something that Art himself did on one occasion.

Unlike the boys from the projects, the crime-oriented kids he knew from Taylor Street were making good money as bookmakers, debt collectors, or by selling stolen merchandise. Art wanted to make his own fast bucks, too, and since he was no longer interested in the classic Bridgeport routes of stealing or selling drugs, he opted for a combination of both: robbing drug dealers.

Like everywhere else in the late eighties and early nineties, in Chicago cocaine and marijuana were rampant. Spotting the dealers was easy; they carried beepers, tended to drive flashy vehicles with gaudy accessories like blinding rims, and of course everyone knew who they were anyway, because just about everybody Art’s age in Bridgeport did drugs.

His favorite technique was to either buy or steal a Chevrolet Caprice, preferably black or white, and outfit it with a long, squiggly police antenna and a cherry dashboard strobe. He and two other crew members would tail a dealer all night, until his stash box was full of cash and, hopefully, more drugs. They’d wait until he was on a side street, then flip on the cherry and pull him over. They’d rush out of the Caprice wearing black nylon Windbreakers, brandishing pistols and Maglites, and “basically scare the living shit out of the dealer.” They’d go through the whole routine, screaming profanities, pegging the dealer to the asphalt, cuffing him, then searching his vehicle until they found the cash and the stash. When they were finished, they’d knock the dealer upside the head, walk back to the Caprice, and speed off, screaming and laughing and floating on adrenaline.

A good drug-dealer hit could earn Art up to fifteen thousand dollars, and it appealed to his sense of justice and his flair for drama. He felt, in his own words, “like a bad motherfucker.” Over the years it would be a crime he’d have a hard time resisting, even when times were good.

With Art’s resurgence as a street criminal, he was once again on the fast track to either prison or death—fates that by now were visiting his friends with morbid regularity. His first, horrifying taste of the perplexing speed with which the projects can snuff out a life had come one day in the summer of ’89. That afternoon, he was doing nothing more than standing next to a brick wall and chatting with his friend and fellow gang member Peter Friegel. He was looking his buddy right in the face when a bullet ripped into the left side of Peter’s head. He was killed instantly.

The police attributed Friegel’s murder to a gang hit. Art, who never saw the shooter, assumed it was the Latin Kings, but gangs weren’t the only the killers. On another occasion, his friend Darren Frandelo walked into a Dunkin’ Donuts on Thirty-first and Halsted—after just having attended the funeral of yet another friend—and got into a minor argument with a man inside. After picking up his crullers and coffee, Frandelo walked back to his car, where his young wife and daughter were waiting. Moments later, the