Gang Leader for a Day

When Sudhir Venkatesh, a first-year graduate student, walked into an abandoned building in one of Chicago’s most notorious housing projects in the early 1990s to interview people about poverty, he hoped to impress his professors with his boldness. He never imagined that as a result of this assignment he would befriend a gang leader named JT and spend the better part of a decade embedded inside the projects under JT’s protection. From a privileged position of unprecedented access, Venkatesh observed JT and the rest of his gang as they operated their crack-selling business, made peace with their neighbors, evaded the law, and rose up or fell within the ranks of the gang’s complex hierarchical structure.