The Hit

January 27, 1995

Joey Bags didn't like giving me bad news. He seemed nervous as he walked into the Aberdeen Club. This was my favorite joint in "Little Italy" and I hung out there with my crew. I sat at my regular table by the window listening to the trains rumbling a block away. I was killing time, staring out at Hubbard Street hoping some pretty gal would walk by.

I liked Joey but wondered if he was ready for bigger and better things. I was always on the lookout for C-Note$ who might move up to be a made guy or an associate. Joey had what it took, though as a Puerto Rican, he could never be one of us. His Spanish background, I had realized long ago, made him useful in dealing with the Latino gangs, but I questioned his temperament.

Joey was a leader of the C-Note$, which had been around since I was a kid. If you were associated with them all sorts of people looked up to you, and the kids in the neighborhood envied you. Joey was tall for a Hispanic, say six foot, and slender. He said his dad was a founder of the Spanish Lords, a nearby gang, who had died in his early forties from liver disease.

Joey was a man of his word, though he had both a woman and a drinking problem. I always said he brushed his teeth every morning with Miller Lite. His girlfriends brought him and the Note$ nothin' but trouble. On the streets he flaunted his connections to us and got respect from his soldiers. He was street smart and had a temper, but then again so did I. For me the bottom line was he was a good earner.

On this day he told me about a hit. So, no big deal, these things happen all the time and are part of the business. But this one was on a member of the Maniac Latin Disciples, one of the crazier gangs out there and one of the richest.

Joey said this guy Robert Detres, a MLD soldier, was walking down an alley last night on Maplewood. A punk, who Joey knew to be a Latin Lover but also a snitch — "Baby Face" Nelson Padilla — jumped out from behind a garage and popped Detres in the head. It was payback for a MLD killing of a Lover last year.

Joey was afraid that this time things were going to get out of control. I felt a twitch in my neck that always acted up when something was wrong. I sensed trouble, but I also thought that Joey was showing more stress than usual. You know you gotta learn to control your emotions to be one of us.

Sal Martino described these events to me as part of our nearly three years of interviews which revealed the story behind the origins and collapse of Spanish Growth and Development (SGD), Chicago's Latino successor to the mafia. The events I describe are complicated, and you will see as the chapter progresses how the threads weave together to produce the cloth of the overall story. This chapter intends to give you a glimpse of what was at stake in what appeared to outsiders as just one more gangland murder, and it previews the story to follow.

Baby Face Nelson Padilla, the shooter, had been a member of the Latin Lovers. The Lovers had been one of the Maniac Family of gangs, a grouping of what are called Latin Folks gangs, whom you will hear much about. The murder of one of the Lovers, "Cook Dog," the year before by the Maniac Latin Disciples (MLDs), had never been settled. The MLDs had first agreed to turn over Cook Dog's shooter to the Lovers for punishment but reneged. Instead the MLDs shot at the houses of several Latin Lovers, and that broke the rules. Tensions between the two gangs had been rising ever since. Joey and Sal both thought Padilla's hit would bring an inevitable war that would interrupt drug sales, costing everyone lots of money.

On the surface, the problems caused by Baby Face's hit were because of the power and arrogance of the MLDs. In the 1990s this Humboldt Park gang was riding high partly due to their superior drug connections. One of their members, Hugo "Juice" Herrera, had family ties to a Mexican drug cartel, and the MLDs exacted a street tax on smaller gangs buying their product. Their drug monopoly and the profits that flowed from it made them popular on the streets as young kids flocked to the biggest and baddest gang in the hood. Everyone knew the Detres hit by Padilla was overdue retaliation by the Lovers. That didn't matter. The MLDs were determined to be the lords of the streets, were bound by no honor, and flaunted their power while violating even their own rules.

A Police–Gang Drug Consortium

For Sal and Joey Bags the problems with MLD arrogance were only the beginning. The hit threatened to unravel gang dealings with a Chicago cop, Joseph Miedzianowski. The Outfit had long relied on dirty cops to protect their vice businesses. So for Sal, buying drugs from Miedzianowski, a decorated gang- squad cop, was in some ways business as usual. Cheaper is almost always better, and buying from a cop meant the C-Note$ could avoid the MLDs' onerous street tax and have a degree of protection.

Baby Face Nelson Padilla, the shooter of the MLDs' Detres, had long worked as a snitch for Miedzianowski. Padilla, five foot eight inches and an unimposing 125 pounds, struck up a friendship with Joe the cop in the 1980s when he was sixteen years old. The first time Padilla got arrested, Joe helped him beat the rap and one thing led to another. By the end of the eighties, Baby Face had become a "prince" in the Latin Lovers and was making big money covertly working as Joe's business partner.

Joseph Miedzianowski was a tough cop and was publicly praised by Chicago police brass for how many guns he turned in and how many drug dealers he busted. He received fifty-nine CPD citations for valor and arrests. He would ride into a neighborhood and do his Dirty Harry act, intimidating young gangbangers. He was "the Man" and he lived and loved his role in the drama of the streets. Baby Face said Joe was definitely not a "Dunkin' Donut cop" or "one of those fat asses." But Joe the cop was no Dirty Harry. He was just plain dirty.

Joe went into business with Baby Face and with Juan "Casper" Martir, second in command of the Imperial Gangsters, another Latin Folks gang. To the CPD high command, Miedzianowski's many drug busts were an impressive score, but they also had the calculated effect of eliminating Baby Face and Casper's competition. Some of the drugs Joe confiscated in raids were recycled by selling at a discount back to Baby Face, Casper, and other allied gangs, like the C-Note$. We will hear more later about Miedzianowski's main intermediary, his girlfriend, Alina Lis, who was also sleeping with the C-Note$ Joey Bags. Just like in the movies, sex screws everything up.

Joe the cop and Baby Face brazenly collaborated in over a dozen guisos. A guiso is Spanish for "stew," and on the streets it means "a straight-up robbery of drug dealers" — in this case, Sal said, by "a mixture of lowlifes like Joe and his friends." Miedzianowski would sometimes stage fake arrests of his snitches to give his allies cover. The upshot of all this was that Joe got decorated, Baby Face and Casper got protected, and they all got rich.

When Baby Face killed Robert Detres he asked the guy he called his "mentor" and "guardian angel," Joseph Miedzianowski, to hide him from police and the MLD. Joe and his partner, John Galligan, made twice-a-week visits to Baby Face's hideout in Casper's apartment. They brought him a gun for protection, food, updates on the investigation, and even lists of witnesses. Joe was one ambitious, if greedy, bastard, but he wanted to protect his investment in Baby Face.

Joe's "bite" for the eight or so participating gangs in his operation was $10,000 per month over and above the price of the drugs. That amount alone should tell you how much money was being made on the streets. Neither Sal nor Joey Bags realized it then, but Joe's drug business would expand enormously before it came crashing down. If this story is a familiar tale of cops and robbers, you will see that sometimes the cops — and not just Joseph Miedzianowski — were also the robbers.

Spanish Growth and Development

But the plot is thicker, and the hit exposed even deeper, more serious problems. Joey and Sal were most worried that the hit threatened the stability of Spanish Growth and Development (SGD), a mafia-style commission that Sal had enthusiastically, if quietly, encouraged. SGD was a closely kept secret from police and even from the rank and file of the gangs. The conceptual origins of SGD lie in the lessons the Outfit had learned about how best to organize crime and the proper uses of violence. Here is how Sal first told me about SGD:

Sal:It started as a prison thing for protection because a lot of these organizations were not big, so strength comes in numbers: "You got my back, I got your back." And a lot of these people, even though they belonged to different gangs, came from the same neighborhood — grew up in the same neighborhoods, attended the same schools, whether it was elementary or high school, they were both from the same neighborhood — some of them were even related. So, by putting their resources together — strength, as I mentioned, comes in numbers. In the late seventies, the Folks coalition came into play. There was still some infighting going on amongst the Folks coalition, which still exists behind the walls today.

JMH: Didn't it start as mainly black groups? Wasn't it Hoover [Larry Hoover, head of the Gangster Disciples] that was the key person to push that when he was in Stateville penitentiary?

Sal:That's what is allegedly said — that it was Hoover who brought the concept of Folks together. What I was told was that they were the main leaders of it and they brought the Hispanics into the fold. And the whites, at that time the Simon City Royals from Logan Square were the main group. In turn, the Royals brought in the Insane Popes — another white gang — and they later joined under the Latin Folks umbrella.

In 1989, as I mentioned, a call went out from the White House — Stateville — to all families that deemed themselves to be Folks, that they needed to register. So, there was over forty gangs that were out there that were affiliated with the Folks coalition. And out of those organizations, only seventeen became registered, at the time.

JMH: And what does that mean, to register?

Sal:That means that they were voted on, they submitted their paperwork — part of their paperwork they had to submit was to have a structure. When you saw the OCG concept — "Our Continuous Growth and Development" — in order to be a part of it, your house had to be cleaned. You had to have a leadership structure with prayers, laws, by-laws, all of the above. You couldn't have no infighting going on; all these things. Because if there was, you weren't accepted. So, seventeen got registered in the beginning ...

The leaders of individual gangs sat on La Tabla, the SGD executive body that met behind the walls. They made decisions to regulate disputes and facilitate drug sales. The idea was to stop the killing, both because no one wants to be killed, and because it also is not good for business. But there was trouble almost from the start. Rather than working together for profits, the two largest gangs, the MLDs and the Insane Spanish Cobras (ISC), were recruiting fellow gangs to join their factions, called "families," and engaged in a violent power struggle. The C-Note$ eventually joined the Insane Family and in 1995 applied to register with SGD. In a nutshell, the Padilla hit threatened to rip apart the Latin Folks Alliance. And it eventually did.

Seeds of Destruction

Sal, from his Outfit perch, had a long-term perspective. The Padilla hit had been very bad news, and Sal told me it was then he first began fearing the worst for SGD.

The worst is what happened. What the hit had done was give the MLDs an excuse to "eradicate" the Latin Lovers, meaning to "unregister" them from SGD. While on the streets it looked like simple revenge, what was at stake was votes and influence on the SGD board. The Latin Lovers had broken away from the Maniac Family and the MLDs wanted to deny them a vote. Sal, who followed SGD developments closely from Joey's reports, explained it like this:

The Latin Lovers at one time were under the Maniac umbrella — now they broke away and they want to be sponsored by the Spanish Cobras under the Insane coalition to be a registered organization. Well, the Maniacs are upset because they used to pay taxes to them, so they're losing money. So they influence other registered families by giving them narcotics and weapons and whatever they needed to vote their way ... They bought David Ayala's [2-6 leader and a top dog on SGD] vote. Because, "What can you do for me?" — just like the politicians do out here!

Gang warfare in 1990s Chicago was about politics as much as revenge or economics. Boiled down, the MLDs wanted the majority vote on La Tabla, and keeping the Latin Lovers out got them closer.

After the hit by Padilla, things began to unravel quickly as members of the Insane and Maniac Families became victims of gunfire. The top leadership of SGD were incarcerated at Stateville penitentiary, known as the "White House" because that is where major decisions were made. Stateville royalty Prince Fernie Zayas of the MLDs and Jefe David Ayala of the 2-6ers called a "junta," or a meeting of gang representatives, to stop the violence. Agreements were made to call a temporary ceasefire, but eventually those agreements were broken and the war raged on.

SGD had created a formal process for mediation. Accordingly, the MLDs filed formal charges with SGD against the Latin Lovers, claiming they had allowed a known confidential informant — our shooter Nelson Padilla — to be a member. It is a direct violation of SGD rules to talk to law enforcement, and the MLDs wanted the Latin Lovers punished. Rambo, the Lovers' leader, said everyone knew that they had already expelled Padilla for being Miedzianowski's snitch. In a formal written grievance to the SGD board, the Lovers objected to the MLD power play. Document 1.1 is taken verbatim from the Lovers' grievance and the MLD response.

To Sal, listening carefully to Joey's words, the whole scene foretold nothing but disaster. The Padilla hit revealed the deeper meaning of what seemed to outsiders like senseless violence. Control of SGD was what was behind the 1990s war of the families and for Sal, this kind of power struggle was pointless. SGD had been founded, Sal believed, in order to make money and gain power in the city. He told me that when the gangs decided to move from fighting over turf to becoming more criminal enterprises they should have put their organizations in order, like the Outfit did after the beer wars of the 1920s.

Killing people and doing drive-by shootings is bad for business. All it does is bring the attention of law enforcement. When law enforcement has all eyes on you, no one can make any money. You get state's attorneys involved and all these different task forces that come in, from the FBI on down, from local authorities and they come in from all angles — and nobody's making money. And there is billions and billions of dollars out there to be made. If you're into the narcotics end of the business, why are you fighting for a street corner when you can just walk down a block and make just as much if not more? But if you start killing each other over a corner, it makes no sense.

Indeed Padilla's hit proved to be the beginning of the end for the ambitious attempts of Latino gangs, with the covert blessings of the Outfit, to organize crime in Chicago. Sal understood that the Italians had had their day and he saw SGD as potentially the seeds of a new Outfit. He and I discussed the increasing number of Hispanics in Chicago.

Sal:Well, with numbers comes power, but it takes money to make money, and you gotta get everyone together and on the same bandwagon to sell them the dream. You have individuals that are like, "Look, we've been killing each other over colors for thirty years and nobody's winning." But there's money to be made here, whether you make it illegally, and you take those illegal funds and now take them and convert it over, just like the Kennedys. And the Hispanics are doing that. They're opening up restaurants; they're opening up grocery stores. They're taking their money and turning it over. So sooner or later, they no longer have to do the illegal stuff and the legit stuff is taking them over.

JMH: Like the Italians.

Sal:Absolutely, just like the Italians, just like the Greeks. The Greeks, they come in from the old country, they bring in relatives, they work at the little hot dog stand, they save enough money and buy their own greasy spoon and then Greek lightning [arson] hits it and boom they get a fully rehabbed restaurant, then they bring more relatives over and the cycle starts all over again. The Orientals are doing the same thing — you come in, and you work and work, and go to the next one, now you sponsor somebody else.