the cops and the kid working Willie Lloyd's gang. He was the kind of kid who, if he grew up in a different environment, would have been going to college.' 'He was a good actor and thought fast on his feet. He remembered addresses and phone numbers and showed up on time,' says gang investigator Mike Cronin. As a reward for his valor and courage in knocking down a policeman that night on the stairs, the gang bought him a mink jacket and a matching fur hat. He returned to the street, meeting secretly at appointed hours with the police and beeping them from pay phones.Īs impressed with the informant as the police were, so too were his fellow gang members. He could lead us to the hierarchy of the gang and he did.'īecause he got into a tussle with the police that night coming down the stairs, because he wouldn't stop to be searched and, in defiance, knocked one officer down and tried to run away, he was arrested.Īfter a long talk with gang investigators, he agreed to become an informant. 'The kid was streetwise and he wasn't afraid of anything. 'He was the best informant I've ever seen and that includes my seven years working with the feds at the DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency),' Cline says. He could rip and run with the wildest of the gangbangers and he didn't much care for the police. He was young, he was cocky, he was smart, he was a child of the street. A good one who could lead us to the top leaders of the Unknown Vice Lord gang.'Ĭoming down a beat-up set of wooden stairs in a West Side apartment building, on a cold, icy winter night, they found one. 'What we needed,' Cline says, 'was an informant. 'It became an organized crime approach because that is what these gangs have become-organized criminal operations based on the money from drugs, with extortion, intimidation and murder all part of it.' 'We decided to make it a pro-active rather than reactive approach,' says Jack Hines, who heads the State's Attorney's Gang Prosecution office. And because of Lloyd's professed admiration for the character of Don Corleone in 'The Godfather,' the effort was dubbed Operation Don. Thus began a long-term police investigation.

He wanted to consolidate the drug traffic on the West Side, under his dominion, of course.' We knew he was planning on getting bigger and bigger once he got out. Phil Cline of the Gang Investigation Unit, 'we learned Willie Lloyd, when he got out, was planning on organizing all the factions of the Vice Lords under him. 'From our intelligence on the street,' says Lt. That's who the cops brought in on April 13th.' These are people who got up each day and thought they beat the system. They lied, they cheated, they extorted, they robbed, they murdered and they turned on each other. They claimed they were men but hid behind women. They had children, but they didn't support them.

'These are people who held a Chicago neighborhood hostage for a long time,' says Michael Smith, a prosecutor with the Cook County State's Attorney's Gang Crimes Unit. They made a fortune off drugs and invested it in nothing but themselves. They broke their legs when they didn't do as they were told. This was a man and his gang who thought they owned a small strip of land on the West Side and through muscle made it their fiefdom, police say.

The man who left prison wearing a full-length mink coat and then climbed into a stretch limousine and came home to his kingdom-the West Side of Chicago. This is a man who racked up $1,000-a-month bills from a pay phone in jail with no visible source of income to pay them.

Willie lloyd vice lord