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Gang Leader for a Day
Gang Leader for a Day
Gang Leader for a Day
Audiobook8 hours

Gang Leader for a Day

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

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About this audiobook

The story of the young sociologist who studied a Chicago crack-dealing gang from the inside captured the world's attention when it was first described in Freakonomics. Gang Leader for a Day is the fascinating full story of how Sudhir Venkatesh managed to gain entrée into the gang, what he learned, and how his method revolutionized the academic establishment.

When Venkatesh walked into an abandoned building in one of Chicago's most notorious housing projects, he was looking for people to take a multiple-choice survey on urban poverty. A first-year grad student, he would befriend a gang leader named JT and spend the better part of the next decade inside the projects under JT's protection, documenting what he saw there.

Over the next seven years, Venkatesh observed JT and the rest of the gang as they operated their crack selling business, conducted PR within their community, and rose up or fell within the ranks of the gang's complex organizational structure.

Gang Leader for a Day is an inside view into the morally ambiguous, highly intricate, often corrupt struggle to survive in an urban war zone. It is also the story of a complicated friendship between two young and ambitious men, a universe apart.

LanguageEnglish
PublisherHarperAudio
Release dateJan 10, 2008
ISBN9780061629235
Gang Leader for a Day
Author

Sudhir Venkatesh

Sudhir Venkatesh is professor of sociology at Columbia University. He has written extensively about American poverty. He is currently working on a project comparing the urban poor in France and the United states. His writings, stories, and documentaries have appeared in The American Prospect, This American Life, the Source, and on PBS and national Public Radio.

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Reviews for Gang Leader for a Day

Rating: 3.9888889324444445 out of 5 stars
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  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    What strikes me about the book is the honesty with which the author has reproduced his account of hanging around with a crack-dealing gang in Chicago and the poor black neighborhood where they conduct their operations. There does not seem to be even a hint of exaggeration or melodrama.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Fantastic book. A real eye opening book about poverty, violence, family values , and community.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Phenomenal, I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in a more “in depth” perception of what city life is really like.



  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    A great book, very interesting and the narrator did a great job really enjoyed it tremendously
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Almost a fiction, not because it is but because it takes you into the world rarely seen by outsiders. Riveting read!
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Great book 10/10 would recommend. Good insight to poverty
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Loved it. I drove in that Malibu, ducked the bullets and ate JT's mom's food. For the first time I understand poverty in rich nations. Looking forward to other offerings by you.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Suhdir offers an intimate view of the lives of poor people in Chicago. It is amazing the amount of detail and vivid experiences that he shares in his book, especially because of the risks involved. I hope this serves the purpose of finally helping families living in such conditions, by changing our opinions and behaviours towards those in need. They are not different to those reading the book, they are just doing the best they can given their circumstances. It is up to us, living in better conditions, to find ways to enable them improve their own situation but at the same time respecting them, looking at them as equals under different circumstances. Thanks Suhdir for such a great book!
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Super easy read, but riveting in content. Nonfiction that reads like a novel with serendipitous moments throughout. I really enjoyed the gratuitous Nbombs. Narrator stuck the landing each time.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Venkatesh got quasi-famous when he was featured in the book Freakonomics. I’m a third of the way through it, and I’m not really liking it. Venkatesh is too "golly gee whiz, I’m hanging out with GANGSTAS!" I imagine the second third of the book will be him realizing shit is real, yo, and the last third will be about what lessons he’s learned. It will end with his heartfelt plea for politicians and the white majority to help people get out of the projects. Maybe I’m wrong. It would be nice to be wrong. But I think I’m right.

    I applaud Venkatesh’s goals — to change how (white) academia sees the poor — but the book is a little too… I dunno. Naive, maybe. Venkatesh never mentions being afraid in dangerous situations, and it makes him seem less human. The most realistic he’s seemed in all 133 pages I’ve read so far is when he’s shocked by a beating he witnessed. But he never writes about being afraid. I appreciate the fact that he was playing curious scientist, but I’m sorry, when you see someone flash a gun for the first time, it’s scary. I’m not asking that he wet his pants or anything, but he had to have been more than just a little nervous.

    I think I’m going to leave this one unfinished. I’m too annoyed to keep reading it.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Adult nonfiction; sociology/gang culture. I liked "freakonomics" better but this was a very readable and interesting book (another friend commented that she couldn't stop reading it and finished it in 2 days/nights).
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I learned about Dr. Sudhir Venkatesh through Freakonomics and the chapter on why gang members still live with their moms. "Gang Leader for a Day" takes that one small chapter and shows the decade of the work and research that originally went into it.

    When Sudhir Venkatesh arrives at the University of Chicago to work on a PhD in sociology, he decides to leave Hyde Park and "go exploring" in the Projects. He ends up pulled into studying in very close detail the lives of gang members, hustlers, prostitutes, squatters, and people just trying to get by in the Robert Taylor Projects in South Side Chicago. From there he gets a ring-side seat to the politics of gangs, police, tenant associations, Chicago Housing Authority, single mothers, and families trying to survive on welfare or less. His view is revealing -- he sees how crack cocaine makes essentially no one money except the cocaine suppliers, how people rely on each other to survive, how families will pull together in entire floors to give each other essential services so they can survive. He learns the economics of pimps and prostitutes, watches how people struggle, and makes some rather nasty interpersonal mistakes.

    It all ends when Chicago decides, in 1995-1998, to tear down the Projects and replace them with very expensive upper class townhouses.

    This book is utterly fantastic. While it's written in a colloquial style, it illuminates a huge swath of modern urban America. Highly recommended read.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This started out as a rip-roaring read for me. Venkatesh's moxy (or naivete) certainly sets out for a sensational premise, in every sense of the word. I began to falter about halfway through when I felt like it was more anecdotal than anything, and I found myself craving more synthesis on his part. I also became really frustrated about just how naive he was...I suppose he couldn't have gotten himself into his position had he not been, but man, you can see him screwing with the tenants' lives from a mile away.

    All in all? Looking past my qualms, it's a good read and especially eye-opening for people who aren't as familiar with the social structures of urban poverty. I'd recommend steering clear of the audiobook--I started with it, but the reader was really one-note and, consequently, incredibly condescending.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Author Sudhir Venkatesh exhibited breathtaking naiveté when he chose public housing as a topic for his PhD research at the University of Chicago. Venkatesh had grown up in southern California, in an upper middle class neighborhood; his family was East Indian. It wasn’t so much as fish out of water when he walked up to a housing project and tried to interview people; it was fish on Mars. Fortunately he encountered “J.T.”, the local gang leader for the Black Kings, who was able to offer protection. (Venkatesh was never offered any overt violence during his research, although he saw a lot of it and actually participated once; he makes the points that the gangs didn’t want violence because it was bad for business – which was selling crack cocaine).
    Gang Leader for a Day is both inspiring and tragic; being a middle class white from the Chicago suburbs myself I share some of Venkatesh’s surprise with conditions in the Robert Taylor Homes. I used to see the Robert Taylor homes frequently on trips to and from the University of Chicago (I usually used the longer but less threatening Lake Shore Drive route rather than the Dan Ryan Expressway). The Robert Taylor Homes were a set of twenty-six 16-story buildings stretched out along the Dan Ryan (which conveniently acted as a barrier to keep the inhabitants from the white neighborhoods to the west). Venkatesh was amazed to find that residents of the RTH didn’t even consider calling police or ambulance services (Venkatesh had to loan his car once to medevac a gang member who’d been shot in the leg in a drive-by; the act got him more street cred). He was confounded to find that many of the “how can people live like that” FAQs actually had understandable answers (for example, RHT residents urinated in the stairwells to keep drug users and prostitutes from using them; in Venkatesh’s first encounter with gang members they keep him in a stairwell for a day. He eventually realizes that the liquid slowly dripping from above isn’t water).
    Being a sociologist Venkatesh gradually puts together the economics of the Robert Tailor Homes (actually just one building, which was enough). There’s a Chicago Housing Authority representative in the building, Ms. Bailey, who’s supposed to act as sort of an ombudsman for the tenants. Instead, Ms. Bailey collects “taxes”; if your window is broken and you want the CHA to fix it, you need to pay Ms. Bailey. If you want to operate an illegal business (all business is illegal in the Robert Taylor Homes) you need to pay Ms. Bailey varying amounts; your illegal business can be car repair in the parking lot, selling candy from your apartment living room, cutting hair, squatting in the building, or being a prostitute. The Black Kings provide Ms. Bailey with an enforcement mechanism, and the payment can be in kind; Venkatesh discovers that one of Ms. Bailey’s agreements with the Black Kings is that they provide her with a young gang member as a lover (Venkatesh notes that Ms. Bailey is 50ish and heavyset). Venkatesh, again exhibiting tragic naiveté, causes an enforcement incident himself; as part of his research he interviews a number of the “hustlers” in the building – the car repair guy, the handyman – and takes notes on their economics. He then, with the enthusiasm of researchers everywhere, reveals these numbers to J.T. and Ms. Bailey – who promptly raise the “taxes” of the affected parties, getting Venkatesh in trouble with his informants.
    Venkatesh has some difficulties with other women in the Robert Taylor Homes; the prostitutes recognize him for a naïve suburban boy and are able to hustle him. He doesn’t admit to sex with any of them and it seems unlikely that any occurred, but he is hustled by one to provide food for her children even though Ms. Bailey had warned him about her. He describes how the apparently high and/or drunk and disorderly dressed prostitute moans that her children haven’t had anything to eat – so Venkatesh goes to a local store and buys them food. Latter Ms. Bailey smirks at him and says she fed those kids that very morning. Ms. Bailey’s secretary is an attractive young woman with writing talent; Venkatesh reads her essays and coaches her. She’s latter shot to death by her father. Another woman has a potential career as a model; her boyfriend seizes her earnings and beats her up when she complains. This becomes a Black Kings enforcement case; they grab the boyfriend to “discipline” him and Venkatesh kicks him in the stomach when it looks like he’s going to escape.
    The “gang leader for a day” episode is relatively subdued. J.T. doesn’t actually let Venkatesh do anything important and overrules him (for example, Venkatesh is asked to decide discipline for a pair of drug dealers; one has kept back some money when another failed to pay him. Venkatesh goes for “offsetting penalties” but J.T. notes that keeping back money has to be punished; the offender gets two “mouth shots” and a week’s suspension).
    Venkatesh notes the Black Kings are pretty disciplined. Dealers are not allowed to use drugs themselves. They are required to finish high school (leading to an incident where Venkatesh tries to teach during a teacher’s strike. He is unable to maintain classroom discipline; although as near as I can tell Chicago school teachers can’t either). They are not allowed to sell (“work”, in gang parlance) when children are around. They sponsor basketball and baseball tournaments. They see themselves as “community activists” rather than drug dealers – and, to a certain extent, they do provide services that the City of Chicago is unable or unwilling to provide.
    It all eventually comes to an end; the Robert Taylor Homes are demolished and the residents are spread throughout the city (by giving them vouchers for apartments). Both J.T. and Ms. Bailey “retire” (at one point, Venkatesh half-jokingly suggests J.T. become his research assistant. Venkatesh, now at Columbia, apparently keeps in touch with J.T. and still considers him a friend.
    At one point, the gang’s accountant (T-Bone) gave Venkatesh the gang’s financial records (T-Bone later died in prison). Venkatesh developed this to contribute to Levitt and Dubner’s Freakonomics. It turns out that low level drug dealers have very small incomes; what keeps them working is the chance to move up in the hierarchy (I’ve heard much the same about American management in general).Venkatesh’s writing is understated but gripping; an easy one-day read. This is not a scholarly work (although Venlatesh has published such an account, American Project; I’ll have to read it). Venkatesh provides no answers; he doesn’t suggest what should have been done or what could have been done at the Robert Taylor Homes, just what was done.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Sudhir was a sociology student at University of Chicago in 1989 when he decided he wanted to study urban poverty. One of the poorest areas in the city was the Robert Taylor Homes, the “projects”, which was pretty much run by the Black Kings gang. Sudhir wandered over one day and somehow managed to get into the good graces of the local BK leader, J.T. They started up a kind of “friendship” - at least Sudhir seemed mostly welcome to come and often “shadow” J.T. to find out how things worked there, how the people felt about living there, etc. Although the project (at least initially) seemed more like studying gang structure than the poor people who lived there. Either way, over a number of years, Sudhir got an inside view of the BK gang – a rare opportunity for an outsider. This was interesting, and somewhat scary at times, with the violence, drugs and crime that (occasionally) happened - well, more often than most of us are used to. The crime and drugs were a daily occurrence, but the BK really tried to keep the violence at bay (it scared potential drug customers away, so from a business standpoint, a lack of violence was much more amenable). Overall, very interesting...
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I really enjoyed this book at the start, but by the end I found it to be quite repetitive. I heard the author on This American Life, and got the book, not realizing that he was also featured in Freakonomics until I started reading.

    The author wrote this book about his experiences with the Black Kings gang of Chicago as he was conducting research for his dissertation. The life he described in the Robert Taylor projects of Chicago was pretty horrifying. I mean I knew it wasn't good, but there was just a lot that surprised me about the survival skills neccesary for the urban poor.

    The inner workings of the gang were really interesting to learn about, I guess I never knew how organized gangs are. It was an interesting read about something I know very little about.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I was surprised by how much a enjoyed reading this book.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This is a remarkable book, and i am glad that I picked it up. To start with, I am amazed by his courage, and his gumption. In breaking the rules, I think that he earned a lot. He also learned a lot from the gang leaders he hung around with, though he does not explicitly acknowledge this.The revelations of different aspects of their lives, as well as their abilities as business men is something that he brings out very well. He does not approve of their life, and this is something that he expresses. I am not sure if he fully appreciated or sympathised with the conditions that brought them to the gangster life.In the end, he moves on, and they do not. There is a bit of sadness in this, and this comes through at the end.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Non-fiction. I can't remember why I had this story on my "to-read" list in the first place, besides that maybe it was an intriguing idea. A sociologist entrenches himself in a Chicago gang and learns all the ins-and-outs, how they function, what they do to survive, make money, adapt. How do you live as a criminal? Gangs are one of the greatest cultural unknowns, perpetuated by TV and movie myths gorged with gangsta flavor and overhyped drama. They don't come close to telling the real story. Day-to-day life is different -- punishment for breaking rules is meted out with punches and prevention from selling crack. Rewards are small. There are efforts to bring together gangs in midnight basketball tournaments. Drive-bys tend to be back-and-forth scuffles until two gang members negotiate for peace. Most families work communally to provide (one apartment in the projects might have a working oven, another a working refrigerator, another a TV). Wheels are greased with bribes and favors. Families blend together and gang ties determine what you can and can't do. This book does a really good job of showing how gangs work. The problem is at this point, it's a little dated. The research is taken from the early 90's. There's no mention of cell phones or Internet. So sadly, everything might have changed.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I liked this memoir quite a bit, with its aim of bringing the reader in to the alien world of the Chicago ghetto at the height of the crack trade. Though the largest portion of the book is concerned with the workings of the individuals making up the gang, the sections devoted to the other power players on the scene - the building president, the community organizer, and the local cop - are equally fascinating. Some of his encounters show him right on the edge of something about to go violently wrong, yet the idea that the gang leader's promise of protection was enough to keep him out of the the worst situations seems to be plausible in the end. He goes a little bit out of his way describing how his own comfortable background posed an obstacle to understanding how the impoverished tenants made the hard choices they did, which I think is partly there as a bridge for the reader to make his or her own connection with the realities he's depicting.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I decided to read this book because I was intrigued by the idea of someone seeing the inside workings of a gang; being so involved that they could become the gang leader for a day. I also wondered how that would work without the author implicating himself in illegal activities.

    It takes a long time for Sudhir Venkatesh to reach a level of trust with the gang though, and becoming a gang leader for a day certainly wasn't what he had in mind when he set out to do his research. What he wanted to do was study the social structure of life in the projects. What he found though, was that the only way to understand the people who were living there was by gaining access via the local gang. Only then would members of the community open up to him, and at that point he starts to learn about the business-like social and political workings of the gang and the building leaders.

    The world that the author reveals to the reader was almost incomprehensible to me, and I'm sure it would be to most people who have not lived in a similar environment. Also, the author does things in the name of research that most of us would avoid at all costs. Some of these include: hanging out with crack addicts, interviewing prostitutes, and going to gang leader meetings.

    This book is a fascinating read, and one that I felt was a great tool for helping middle-class America see what life is like in inner-city gangs and the projects (or at least what it was like in the 80's and 90's). The projects that the author visited were subsequently torn down, but I am sure there are many aspects of poverty and desperation that remain the same regardless of location, and this book does an excellent job of highlighting them.

    Gang Leader For a Day is a quick read, and Sudhir Venkatesh relates his experiences so skillfully that it could just as easily have been a novel that I was reading. There were some tense moments between the author and the gang members, and some scenes had me on the edge of my seat. There is a lot of swearing (the author reconstructs conversations to the best of his knowledge), and much usage of the "N" word by the gang members. Although the book does cover some heavy topics, it is balanced out with stories of friendship and a bit of humor. The author does a great job of helping the reader to see the real people behind the poverty and gang statistics, and that was what I appreciated the most about this book.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I neglected to add this to my Goodreads sooner as I read it some time ago on audio book. To this day, it is one of the BEST audio books I have ever heard. There are two voices, one for the author and one for the gang leader. The book is highly entertaining, fascinating, true, funny, and says a lot about race and class in Chicago. A rare inside look into gang culture from an outsider who became one of their own while being true to himself. Highly recommended! I may even read it again!
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Don't think of Gang Cultures as nessasarily bad, this book will show you otherwise, despite the crimes they do a lot of good.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    As a first-year sociology grad student at the University of Chicago, Sudhir Venkatish took his research on life in inner-city gangs to extremes when he befriended JT, the leader of a division of the Black Kings in Chicago’s notorious Robert Taylor projects. Venkatish ended up spending 7 years (!!) observing the intricacies of gang life and the lives of the urban poor, and this book documents that experience. I imagine that Venkatish went far beyond what was required for his thesis, and the line between sociologist and friend often blurred. The result is a fascinating look at a world that many of us probably know nothing about. I admire Venkatish’s work, which shines a light on the contradictory life and strange interdependence of gangs and the communities they live in.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A very interesting piece of urban sociology / anthropology (although ignore the "Rogue Sociologist" nonsense in the title) , which brings to life a hidden, closed community in the Chicago projects, largely ignored by the outside world and run on a basis of fear, petty corruption and intimidation by the local gang, local police, and local power brokers. The comparison with "Gomorrah" for any who have read that, is striking. Reading this there are a couple of points that struck me; firstly in a distorted way in the absence of any other form of authority its not surprising that the gangs fill the vacuum and act as some form of community organisation even if the principle source of income is in selling crack to its own community. Secondly how poor communities will always prey on each other. Thirdly how all of this could be solved or at least made better, by a sensible drug policy (rather than head in sand prohibition) that took away the gang's profit motive - for, as stated in the book, revenues from prostitution, extortion and other illegal activities are relatively small beer and not enough to attract many to "thug life". And fourthly, how the richest country in the world can effectively abandon some of its most vulnerable citizens to their fate But this is highly recommended as a light on what for me anyway was a dark and hidden world
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    When finally picking up this book to read it, I looked at the cover and said eh....I don't think that I will read this. I thought it would be dry, I thought it would take a fascinating topic and turn it into statistics. Well, I can always start it and put it down, it would certainly not be the first time that I have put a book down. Once I started, I could not stop. Not a dry, statistical sociological word in the whole book. This man took an amazing risk (kind of by accident) and ended up studying a subculture and inner city life itself. Just amazing. Scary, enlightening, and truthful. Great book!
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I read this for my Gangs class for my undergrad. It was a great book about how the gang was run by this guy who could be so cold hearted one minute then the next be a community leader. It gave me a better understanding of the hierarchy of gangs.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I really expected more from Gang Leader for a Day. It reads more like a novel than an academic piece. Plus it's hard to believe that he was in graduate school at the time that he started working on it and that he was unaware that his activities with a gang were not protected by the First Amendment, that he could be held legally liable for watching/encouraging criminal activities even if they were ultimately being studied for research purposes, nor how entirely unethical it was for him to lie in order to ingratiate himself with his research subjects and to get closer to the gang's leader. I expected a lot of the piece because I really liked Freakonomics and it's authors spoke very highly of Sudhir Venkatesh. I didn't find his conclusions to be all that interesting or new, nor did I find his final opinions/arguments to be all that irresistible. He appeared to be far to close to his research subjects, failing at many points to ask what would have been more interesting questions.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Venkatesh became famous as one of the meaty parts in the shallow Freakonomics book. A researcher who in the classic mold of Marie Jahoda or, closer, the old Chicago school of sociology leaves the ivory tower and its object-subject abstraction to observe in situ and participate in the social life of his subjects. Venkatesh spent many years exploring the strange world of a gang and the social net of a Chicago housing project. In this popular account he takes the readers along on a journey through a poor housing project, a world of pimps and prostitutes, hustlers and handymen, shop owners and landlords.What is both surprising and, on reflection, isn't. is how the absence of governmental control is filled by overlapping sets of private rulers. This both traps the oppressed, mostly women, and offers them limited protection. For a certain cut, the pimps reduce the risk of beatings of their prostitutes from a monthly to a bi-annual event. Humans are able to adapt and survive even in the most unkind surroundings. A fact the higher-ups exploit to the maximum. It is puzzling how much the black world of the ghettos resembles the white corporate world with fat cat CEOs and subsistence minimum wage workers. At the top, both world's tend to blend, as Venkatesh and the viewers of The Wire discovered.Another shocking element is the widespread culture of corruption. While Venkatesh's account sounds too naive, the unchecked misuse of public funds is glaring and frustrating. Overall, a highly enjoyable and informative read. If you haven't seen it, run and watch The Wire or read the mother of all social observation studies, Marienthal: the sociography of an unemployed community.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    An interesting read about a socoiologist who sets out to study poverty in inner cities and learns about the ins and out of the projects. Well enough written to keep me interested and not too "I am above you all and thus have the answers".