The unlikeliest gangbanger

Venkatesh was also witness to a negotiation with a local preacher, who allowed the gang to use his church as a meeting place in exchange for a sizable "donation." When a drive-by shooting aimed at the Black Kings by another gang resulted in the death of a little girl, he sat in on a largely pointless community meeting (an "exercise in chaos") at which the police offered residents little more than "platitudes." Then, later that night, he attended a secret meeting with local clergymen, tenant leaders, a police officer and both gang leaders, at which a truce between the two sides was brokered.

He went to workshops offered by community-based organizations (or CBOs) intended "to persuade young gang members to reject the thug life and choose a more productive path," only to learn that gang leaders donated money to those organizations and required their junior members to attend. (J.T. mandated that his employees finish high school and stay off drugs as well.) One major CBO push involved a voter registration drive. "You will register to vote today," the outreach worked explained to the assembled Black Kings, "but then you must all go out and register the people in your buildings. And when elections come around, we'll tell you who to vote for and you'll tell them. That's an important duty you have when you belong to this organization."

Venkatesh hastens to explain that the gang leaders' motives in these cases "were by no means purely altruistic or educational: they knew that if their rank-and-file members had good relationships with local residents, the locals were less likely to call the police and disrupt the drug trade." Furthermore, the voting drives, combined with hefty donations, enabled them to buy off public officials. "$10,000 gets you an alderman for a year," J.T. explained to Venkatesh. "An alderman can take the heat off of us. An alderman can keep the police away." The gang could also use its pull with an alderman to keep low-level city officials from shaking down the "hustlers" -- a term encompassing anyone working off the books, from independent car repairmen and carpenters to prostitutes. The gang, naturally, charged the hustlers a "tax" for this service and for other forms of protection.

"Them niggers are wearing me out," one of the more energetic hustlers told Venkatesh when asked about the Black Kings. J.T. had this man beaten up for refusing to relocate his car-repair operation because the gang wanted to use the space for a basketball game. "But I ain't going to be the one to say nothing," the man went on, "because they keep things safe around here." Another hustler, pointing out the difference between Robert Taylor and the California suburb where Venkatesh grew up, asks, "When you got a problem, I bet you call the police, right? Well, we call the Kings. I call T-bone because I don't have anyone else to call ... Every hustler tries to have someone who offers them protection. I don't care if you're selling socks or selling your ass. You need someone to back you up."

Again and again, the people Venkatesh talks to explain that police and emergency medical personnel "don't come" when project residents call them about such "minor" matters as robberies and domestic violence. The Black Kings, by contrast, could sometimes even get stolen property back. None of Robert Taylor residents really liked the gang, but it evolved to serve a purpose: As is often the case when civil order breaks down -- whether it happens in Afghanistan, Somalia or the South Side of Chicago -- strongmen emerge to provide security, at a cost. On the other hand, at least the residents of Robert Taylor knew exactly what they were getting for their "taxes." Furthermore, J.T. wasn't the only one to levy such taxes; despite her efforts to pass herself off as a disinterested benefactor, Ms. Bailey, too, demanded a piece of any action that went down in her building.

Venkatesh soon realized that what he saw of J.T.'s work (or, for that matter, of Ms. Bailey's) had been "edited." Nevertheless, he was still present for several violent episodes, most of them beatings administered to anyone in the gang hierarchy who got out of line. When J.T. offered to let Venkatesh be "gang leader for a day" (hence, the book's title), the exercise was effectively meaningless because the grad student refused to get involved in any violence; the doling out of "mouthshots" and other, harsher penalties was a key part of J.T.'s job. "They need to see that you are the boss, which means that you hand out the beating," he explained in exasperation. "You have to make sure that they understand that they can't be stealing! Nigger, they need to fear you." Behind all J.T's talk of the Black Kings' role as a "community organization" lurked the stark fact that his authority was founded in the threat of violence.

"Gang Leader for a Day" illustrates a handy contemporary maxim: As soon as people start using the word "community," you can be pretty sure they're trying to put something over on you. In time, Venkatesh became just as disillusioned with Ms. Bailey, the neighborhood clergy, the director of the local Boys and Girls Clubs (inventor of the much-celebrated midnight basketball leagues of the 1990s) and the cops -- the ones with the "real power" in the ghetto, and in a few cases all too prone to abusing it. Everyone he met was jostling for influence, offering protection or resources, and distributing both to whoever had the most to offer them in return.

What the budding sociologist found, in the end, was not the depraved chaos that the political right imagines ghetto life to be, nor the left's tragic melodrama of a powerless, victimized population terrorized by its most hopeless members. (J.T., a gifted manager by Venkatesh's account, went to college on an athletic scholarship and gave up a job selling office supplies when he realized that white employees were receiving preferential treatment.) What he did find was an economy, and a rough social order that the residents had assembled out of the broken pieces left to them by society at large. Without meaningful police services, they cobbled together a security force of sorts. Without much in the way of social services, they figured out how to extract some of what they needed from the main economic engine in their environment: the gang. Within the borders of a major American city, they lived in the equivalent of a corrupt third-world nation.

At times, the creativity and ingenuity of the people Venkatesh meets are impressive, but they were still spent in getting what most of their fellow citizens take nearly for granted: a roof over their heads, food for their kids, protection from thieves and brutes. The Robert Taylor Homes have since been torn down, J.T. left the gang to manage a dry-cleaning business, and Venkatesh moved on to Harvard and to see his work featured in the bestselling book "Freakonomics." (He's currently writing a blog that gathers real-life gangsters' responses to the television series "The Wire.")

He writes that few of today's gangs are as extensive, stable and well organized as the Black Kings once were, and by the time you get to the end of "Gang Leader for a Day," it's hard not to wonder if that's such a good thing. Criminals though they were, the job they did wasn't always as dirty. And somebody's got to do it.