BY THE STANDARDS of the era - the 1980s, that doughy Sobaka Dossier time when terrorist targets were limited to Marine barracks in unpronounceable countries - the story was sensational. A Chicago street gang was accused of planning to bomb police stations, government buildings - even down an airliner - on behalf of their "Muslim brother," Libyan dictator Moammar Kaddafi.A little digging and the plot thickened. The gang - a would-be Islamic sect called the El Rukns - was led by none other than Jeff Fort, a legend on Chicago's South Side, whose career as an urban warlord stretched back to the early 1960s. In the relatively brief period he spent out of jail in the ensuing decades, Fort had built the most powerful street gang in Chicago and possibly the entire United States.That wasn't all. Fort had rubbed shoulders with notables ranging from Jesse Jackson to Sammy Davis, Jr. to jazz guru Oscar Brown, Jr. Before went to war against the United States for Kaddafi, Fort went to war for the Feds against the Black Panthers. His status in the community was such that he'd even been invited to Richard Nixon's inauguration, though he graciously passed his comp tickets to two of his subordinates.But Jeff Fort's most important legacy wasn't his scrapbook but his style. Before Jeff Fort, the black gangster was a hustler, a pimp, a leg-breaker with greasy hair and banana-colored zoot suit. Fort was the first to submit his soldiers to a political indoctrination of the kind now employed by nearly all semi-organized gangs in the United States. Fort's gangsters were governed by laws and a constitution; they formed not a pack of thugs but a "nation." He married the notion of Black Power and a revolutionary rage to petty crime. His business may have been drugs, extortion and murder-for-hire, but it was applied to a higher purpose. His hoodlums were preacher pimps, his lieutenants and warlords were ministers of a mystical criminality. "My brothers and sisters," he cried to his troops, "it takes finance to uplift the nation.""We are in no way a gang," he said. "We are the vanguard of our people." As the Europeans once said of Caesar: "If you seek his monument, look around."64TH AND BLACKSTONEJeff Fort was born on February 20, 1947 in Aberdeen, Mississippi. When he was still young, his parents took his ten siblings and moved the whole family up to Chicago - stragglers in the Great Migration that brought tens of thousands of blacks from the South to the "promised land" in the urban cities of the North between the two world wars. Jeff's father, John Lee Fort, took a job working at one of the hulking US Steel plants on the city's South Side.The family settled in an apartment building at 6536 (South) Blackstone with other newly-arrived black families. Woodlawn was then a predominantly white neighborhood, though not for long. Thousands of ethnic whites were moving out to the suburbs - precursors of the phenomenon known as "white flight."Fort attended Hyde Park High School, though he dropped out long before he received a degree. By the age of 13 he was already running with a group from Blackstone Avenue. Exclusively black, Jeff's gang were fighting a kind of primitive race war against gangs of white youths from neighboring streets. It was Lord of the Flies, only the boat never rescued the boys and the island was about as scenic as Alcatraz.In less than a year, Fort's group had joined with that of an older roughneck, Eugene "Bull" Hairston. They called themselves the "Blackstone Raiders," though Hairston changed the name to the "Blackstone Rangers."The Rangers were one of probably hundreds of gangs in tough neighborhoods all over Chicago, involved in petty theft, assault, and strong-armed robbery. According to R.T. Sale, a journalist that published an account of his time spent following the Rangers, the group was purely small-time throughout the early 1960s. Despite the fact that he was only in his early teens, Fort was already an acknowledged leader (some say he co-founded the group with Hairston). The gang's propaganda today names him as "Vice President" under Hairston. Other leaders included Lamar "Bop" Bell, who injected a proto-Black Power creed into the Rangers, and William "Sweet" Throop and George "Watusi" Rose, who acted as Hairston's chief lieutenants or "warlords."The political indoctrination wasn't the only thing that set the Rangers apart from the pack. From the beginning, the Rangers were structured less like a pool of future pinstripe models than a thriving corporation. According to a former El Rukn officer whose father was also a Ranger, Bull Hairston and Jeff Fort (then known by the unlikely moniker of "Angel") acted as a perfect team. "Bull was like a hammer," he said in an interview with the author. "Angel was like butter, smoothing it all over. You didn't want to cross Angel but that was because you'd have Bull coming after you. Jeff gave nobody no problems in those days so long as you knew who was number one - him."The "good crook/bad crook" tandem accomplished what every gangster dreams of but few accomplish: uniting an array of warring cliques into one mean army. In 1966 or '67, Fort and Hairston presided over the first meeting of a body that would be called the "Main 21" - the 21 leaders of gangs who had agreed to merge, to a greater or lesser extent, with the Blackstone Rangers. Amalgamated gangs added the word "Stone" to their name, but were usually wholly absorbed into the Rangers in a couple of years' time. The Main 21 became the Rangers' executive council, much like the steering committee of a political party or the board of directors of a corporation. The Rangers illustrated the role of the Main 21 in their iconography: a pyramid with twenty-one bricks, each representing one of the foundation stones.The top stone - and "Stone" - was Hairston, but not for long. On June 6, 1966, Bull was arrested and sent to prison. In those days, there was never a thought that a gang leader could watch over the streets from a cellblock. Hairston's forced departure left the 20 year old Jeff Fort in charge - a role he was none too eager to relinquish when Hairston was released two years later. The founder of the meanest, most sophisticated gang in Chicago was essentially kicked to the curb. Without the Stones, Hairston became a pathetic shadow of himself - a small-time drug dealer too fond of his own product. He was eventually murdered in the Ida B. Wells housing project in the early 1980s.BLACK(STONE) POWERUrban gangs are never too proud to steal, and the prospect of the Blackstone Rangers - now the largest gang in Chicago - picking off their remaining rivals one by one and dominating the city's slums led other gangs to begin consolidating as well. The Rangers' greatest rivals were the Disciples, another amalgamation of a dozen smaller gangs pulled together by blood and money by "King" David Barksdale, a precocious warrior like Fort that was still in his late teens or early twenties. The Disciples and the Rangers spent most of the last half of the 1960s in protracted warfare for block-by-block control of the city's South Side. To differentiate one another, they adopted a simple uniform: the Rangers wore red berets like Che Guevara; the Disciples black."King" Barksdale would later die of wounds he received in a shooting during the war with the Rangers and is practically deified by two of the gangs that emerged from his army, the Gangster Disciples and the Black Disciples. Oddly, these gangs and their allies use the six-pointed Jewish Star of David in their iconography to honor their own black King David, while their enemies (including the Rangers) use the five-pointed star of Islam.Fort had other enemies to deal with in the late 1960s, however. The Black Panthers had been formed out in California; chapters spread like wildfires sweeping through America's black ghettoes. The Panthers preached armed "self-defense," and walked the same neighborhoods that were "owned" by gangs like the Blackstone Rangers.According to the former El Rukn interviewed for this story, the Panthers had first established contact with Blackstone rivals among the Disciples and the Vice Lords. "Angel saw these guys in leather jackets struttin' around in black berets," he says. "You know what he thought when he saw some old Disciples talking about black folks defending themselves from the police."In December 1968, the tension between the two groups - one that preached Black Power and one that practiced it - came to a head. A Ranger had shot a member of the Panthers. Twelve Panthers and five Rangers were apprehended by police later that day in a fight.That night, Chicago Panther leader Fred Hampton, "information minister" Bobby Rush and other Panther leaders showed up at Fort's headquarters. Fort brought the men inside and told them that if the Panthers wanted to demonstrate their "power," he'd show them his. After a signal from Fort, some 100 Rangers filed into the room, two or three at a time, brandishing sawed-off shotguns, machine guns and a whole array of firearms.Fort then met privately with Hampton and Rush and a couple of members of the Main 21. After (unsuccessfully) trying to scare the crap out of the Panthers, Fort now talked earnestly about the two groups joining forces.Another meeting between the two leaders followed on December 26, 1968, but neither was willing to absorb his group into the other. They had in effect worked out a "truce" - the Rangers would leave the Panthers alone, and the Panthers would stay out of Jeff Fort's turf - but it was shaky at best. Hampton - later to die in a hail of hundreds of bullets from the Chicago police while he was, in all likelihood, sleeping in bed - told a radio show that he was "educating" the Rangers. Fort, probably not wanting to be upstaged in his own schtick, called in the same show and said it was the Rangers that were "educating" the Panthers. Three days later, Hampton told an audience that Fort had threatened to "blow his head off" if he ever appeared in Ranger territory again.GUNS FOR HIRELittle did the two adversaries - who probably would have come to blows anyway, as the Black Panthers' anti-drug program was a major point of friction with the dope-peddlers on the Ranger side - know that a hidden hand was directing these events. It wasn't until the Church Committee report on the abuses of the FBI's Counterintelligence Program, or COINTELPRO, was released nearly a decade later that the evidence came out that the FBI's Chicago field office - and J. Edgar Hoover personally - had stoked the tension between the two groups, hoping that the hair-trigger Fort would embroil the Panthers in an endless blood feud of retaliatory killings.The FBI office in Chicago suggested sending an anonymous letter to Fort in December 1968 - following the first armed violence between the Panthers and the Rangers - to exacerbate the hostility and, if everything went smashingly, get a few Panthers killed. They proposed a few death threats attributed to Chicago Panther leaders:Chicago... recommends that Fort be made aware that [names redacted - probably Hampton and Rush] together with other BPP members locally, are responsible for circulating these remarks concerning him. It is felt that if Fort were to be aware that the BPP were responsible, it would lend impetus to his refusal to accept any BPP overtures to the Rangers and additionally might result in Fort having active steps to exact some form of retribution toward the leadership of the BPP.Another memo added:It is believed the above may intensify the degree of animosity between the two groups and occasion Forte [sic] to take retaliatory action which could disrupt the BPP or lead to reprisals against its leadership.Consideration has been given to a similar letter to the BPP alleging a Ranger plot against the BPP leadership; however, it is not felt this would be productive principally because the BPP at present is not believed as violence prone as the Rangers to whom violent type activity - shooting and the like - is second nature.These memos and the text of the proposed letter to Jeff Fort went to Washington. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover approved them personally. The text read as follows:Brother Jeff :I've spent some time with some Panther friends on the west side lately and I know what's been going on. The brothers that run the Panthers blame you for blocking their thing and there's supposed to be a hit out for you. I'm not a Panther, or a Ranger, just black. From what I see these Panthers are out for themselves not black people. I think you ought to know what they're up to, I know what I'd do if I was you. You might hear from me again.A black brother you don't knowA few months later, the FBI reconsidered its earlier reluctance to bait the Panthers - they weren't "as violence prone," remember - when they learned that a Panther feared that Rush and Hampton were "out to get" him. The following letter invoking the Stones was approved and sent:Brother Hampton:Just a word of warning. A [Black]Stone friend tells me [name deleted] wants the Panthers and is looking for somebody to get you out of the way. Brother Jeff is supposed to be interested. I'm just a black man looking for blacks working together, not more of this gang banging.With the Director of the FBI himself ghoulishly glorying in the prospect of a massive war between the Black Panthers and Chicago's most ruthless street gang, no method was declared out of bounds. According to Rush - now a member of Congress representing much of Chicago's South Side - FBI informants went even beyond anonymous death threats to trigger the conflict. William O'Neal, a member of the Panthers on the FBI's payroll, burst into Panther headquarters and announced that a Panther had been shot by several Rangers, and encouraged them to grab their guns and find the guy that did it. Shooting between Rangers and Panthers followed. No Panther had been shot by the Rangers; the initial altercation was entirely fictitious.PEOPLE OF THE NATIONAllegations later spread that Fort had hired out his Rangers to some unknown third party - probably the FBI, if not Mayor Richard J. Daley - to take out the Panthers. The claims have never been substantiated. They appear based on the powerful but entirely circumstantial evidence that followed the decimation of the Black Panther leadership in Chicago, when Fort and the Stones more or less took over as the main Black Power advocates in Chicago's ghettoes. A revolutionary movement had been replaced by a criminal one.It was during the wars with the Panthers that Fort and the Main 21 changed the name of their outfit from the Blackstone Rangers - which was far too evocative of urban hoodlums - to the Black P. Stone Nation.Fort's new gang - though still ruled by the same leader, and the same Main 21 committee - fashioned itself as every bit the political movement as the Panthers had been. They took part in demonstrations through the increasingly bombed-out ghettoes of Woodlawn, Englewood and Jackson Park. Fort rubbed shoulders with Reverend Jesse Jackson during the latter's "Operation Breadbasket and allied with another influential minister, Reverend John Fry.The Black P. Stone Nation was still pimping, still shaking down increasingly scarce neighborhood merchants, still selling drugs and gunning down rivals. But by kowtowing to the Stones and giving their "neighborhood initiatives" their seal of approval, community activists on the South Side were merely acknowledging an accomplished fact: in vast swathes of the inner city, the Stones were the law, and far more powerful than the city government, as law enforcement acknowledged.In fact, beleaguered ministers and anti-litterbugs weren't the only people to acknowledge the power of Fort and his cronies. In 1969, Jeff Fort received a personal invitation to Washington to attend the first inauguration of Richard Nixon as president of the United States. There has never been any explanation as to why, and even Fort appeared to be baffled about that one. Was it pay-off for doing his part to crush the Black Panthers in Chicago? Whatever the case, Fort uncharacteristically passed the invitation on to two of his deputies and shunned the limelight. Both Stones attended the inauguration gala without incident.Another official acknowledgment of the Stones' power in Chicago was shown when the Federal government granted the Stones a "job training" grant. The amount of the grant was variously stated in pre-trial and court records as some $900,000 to $1.4 million.Not surprisingly, the Stones had little to show government auditors when the funds ran out. Fort had treated the money as a windfall and poured it into the Stones' basic operating fund - in other words, government money went into hustling. Nor were the Stones the only gang in Chicago to receive Federal money for inner city programs. Their on again/off again allies on the West Side, the Vice Lords, were also recipients of a grant from the Office of Economic Opportunity, led by Kennedy scion Sargent Shriver. Vice Lord chieftain Bobby Gore, however, wasn't invited to a Republican president's inauguration.In 1968, Arkansas Democratic Senator John McClellan got wind of the grant to the Stones and convened hearings to investigate (and give publicity to) the incident. Fort himself was called before the committee. Wearing wrap-around sunglasses, a tall afro and a jumpsuit adorned with the Blackstone pyramid with its 21 foundation stones, he answered contemptuously before giving the clenched-fist Black Power salute and storming out. The charges simmered until 1972, when Fort and a couple of accomplices were charged, convicted and sent to prison for making false statements to government agents.THE MAHDI OF CHICAGOJeff Fort's four years in the maximum security Federal prison in Leavenworth were no sterile exile for the king of the slums. While he was prevented from overseeing the day-to-day operations of the Stones, he recognized that the era of Black Power had passed and began to plan for the future.Leadership of the Stones while Fort was away passed to one Henry "Mickey Cobb" Cogwell. A sitting member of the Main 21, Mickey was long seen as Fort's heir apparent, at least outside of his own family (Fort, the empire builder, packed his organizations with relatives more loyal to him personally than the other hustlers on the Main 21 - more loyal, in fact, than he himself been during Bull Hairston's imprisonment).Mickey Cobb was babyfaced, charismatic, and often presented as the public face of the Stones in the community and in the media (Mickey and Bobby Jennings were the Stones who had attended Nixon's inauguration in Fort's stead). Unlike most other Main 21 leaders, his original gang, the Cobras, also maintained a distinct identity within the Stones. Originally formed by his older brother, the Cobras merely adopted the suffix "Stones" to their name when they joined with the Rangers. They formed a potent state-within-a-state in the Stone Nation hierarchy, with their own recognized turf upon which other crews (or "sets") commanded by members of the Main 21 were forbidden to infringe.Upon his release from jail in 1976, Jeff Fort did not immediately return to Chicago. Instead, he settled in Milwaukee, bringing a number of his old lieutenants from Chicago with him. Nobody's entirely sure what his real purpose was, but reports surfaced in the papers that he had attempted to join the Moorish Science Temple, an Islamic sect patronized primarily by blacks in the United States. They refused to have him, and as a result Fort founded his own mosque: The Moorish Temple of America.Fort had converted to Islam in prison. He took to it as he had to Black Power - which is to say that he perverted it. Contrary to speculation that surfaced in the 1990s, he had nothing to do with Louis Farrakhan's revamped Nation of Islam. According to the former El Rukn interviewed by the author, Fort practiced just about all of the strictures of Islam - "prayin' four times a day, refusing to eat the 'filthy swine,' as he called it" - but for one notable departure."Jeff didn't learn a damn thing about religion. He looked at God, church, all the things that people see in church and ignored all that. He ignored it. Morals? The commandments that Moses brought to the people? I don't think he ever understood it. He still doesn't get that part of it. I knew Jeff Fort. He didn't make excuses like some gangbangers and jivers do. 'Oh, we got to do this stuff that's wrong because the white man has all of the power.'"Jeff sees little men in robes - weak men, okay, people that don't carry guns, don't even own guns, which someone who was brought up in the ghetto thinks is crazy. So he sees these unarmed men, all skinny and small. But they have so much power! They tell people what to do and they do it! They don't need guns or their posse to beat on people. Jeff liked to see that. His religion is all about 'follow the leader,' obedience. It's like church, only they don't talk about the do's and the don'ts and what's holy. It's just authority. 'Do this because God says so, and God speaks through me.'"In April 1976, Fort returned to Chicago and called a meeting of the Main 21. The basic agenda for convening his underworld cabinet was known by some in attendance - or at least those who had to know. Fort announced that the Black P. Stone Nation - or at least the name of the organization - was finished. The gang was now to be known as "El Rukn," a tag Fort had picked from a book describing inscriptions on shrines in Mecca. Islam, not Black Power, was the welding jelly of the 1970s and beyond.In essence, the Main 21 had been deposed in a palace coup. Only five members would continue in a much more compact (and more manageable) leadership clique. The reactions of the rest of the Main 21 is not known, though Mickey Cogwell, who had led the Stones when Fort was in Leavenworth, reportedly objected to the new Islamic facade. When Jeff was in prison, Mickey had opened a whole new front in the gang's war for legitimacy, serving as an "organizer" in one of Chicago's notoriously corrupt unions. Cogwell for years had reportedly been Fort's liaison with the Outfit, as the Italian mafia in Chicago calls itself. He had no intention of donning the distinctive red fez of the El Rukns worn in recognition of their "Moorish heritage" (actually, it looked more like the Shriner's cap worn by Howard Cunningham on Happy Days).On February 25, 1977, Mickey was gunned down. Fort had reportedly threatened to wipe out anyone who spoke up in the April 1976 meeting, and Cogwell's assassination was largely seen as Fort's handiwork (others blamed the Outfit; the crime is, to the best that we could find out, still officially unsolved). The nucleus of Cogwell's Cobra Stones continued, however. After breaking away from the El Rukns (going "renegade" it's called), they rebaptised themselves in honor of their slain leader as the "Mickey Cobras" and carved out a piece of the South Side for themselves. The Mickey Cobras are still around, and controled a segment of the Robert Taylor Homes housing project called "The Hole" until the buildings were demolished and the Cobra drug lines forced out into the street.The El Rukns represented, basically, only the top echelon of the old Black P. Stone Nation - the officers of "rank" down to the leaders of the street crews, or "sets." The Stones below pretty much continued as they were. They adopted vaguely Islamic names and titles - Fort himself took his next nom de crim as "Chief Malik" - but business was more or less the same. In fact, with the explosion of cocaine use in the United States in the late 1970s, the Stones' drug business was positively booming, killing the bodies of their "unredeemed brothers" with poison even as they claimed to be fighting for their minds.The El Rukns formed a corporation to launder drug proceeds through legitimate businesses - most of all, real estate. Among Fort's most grandiose purchases was an old theater at 3947 S. Drexel. It was officially known as "the Temple"; unofficially, in honor of their leader, as "the Fort"; and in reality was just a highly fortified gang hang-out and fortress.The former El Rukn officer told us in his interview that drugs were off-limits within the Temple, but Fort, who had always been prone to sudden disappearing acts, often wasn't around to enforce his edicts."You'd walk in and the smell of reefer was so strong it'd get you high without taking a toke. Jeff just didn't want that around a place that was supposed to be for services. When they had services, he wanted us in our hats [the red fez], the robes, all of that, standin' around in front."Did any of the El Rukns take Islam seriously?"Yeah, one or two brothers I knew, but they split. Jeff and Charles [Knox, one of Fort's lieutenants] called them renegade and wanted to get them. But they had gone off to mosques somewhere else and they couldn't find them. Outside of Illinois. Maybe they left the country. Anyway, we never seen them again."You couldn't be a Muslim, with everything about Islam sayin' you can't do this, you can't do that. Most of the brothers never read the Koran, just listened to the services. I didn't know a lot about Islam until I went to prison and had nothing to do so I read it. They just heard what the leaders said and said, 'Yeah, I'm down with that.'"The El Rukns in the late 1970s embarked on a period of unprecedented expansion. Many who knew nothing about the origins of the group thought they were an off-shoot of the Farrakhan's Nation of Islam. Fort, in his patented fashion, kept them confused with a number of legitimate political fronts. One, the Martin Luther King Movement, was formed to confront an aggressive neo-Nazi group (which itself turned out to have a Jewish "fuerher"). Another, the "Grassroots Independent Voters of Illinois," tried to play kingmaker with various aldermanic candidates for Chicago's City Council. And largely succeeded.THE JAILED PROPHETThe beginning of the end for the El Rukns came when Jeff Fort was arrested in 1983 in connection with a huge drug shipment interdicted by the Feds. Though they claimed that El Rukn influence in Chicago had nothing to do with it, prosecutors ensured that Fort was tried in Mississippi - ironically, where he was born. He was convicted and sentenced to 13 years in prison.But this time - for the first time - the imprisonment of a gang leader in no way cut him off from the day-to-day operations of his outfit. Times had changed, and gangs behind bars had begun to get as organized as the Stones had been in the streets."King" David Barksdale, Fort's old rival from the Disciples, had died of injures related to a gunshot wound. The Disciples broke up into a number of different gangs, one of which - the Gangster Disciples - was run by the "Chairman," Larry Hoover. The Chairman himself was arrested in the late 1970s and hasn't been out of prison since. But from behind bars, he brokered a massive gang "alliance," called the "Folks," which was countered by a rival alliance, the "People". People and Folks would watch each others' backs behind bars and made their leaders virtual sultans in confinement. Corrections officers - just like the community activists on the South Side - were forced to acknowledge the de facto power of gang leaders to ensure peace, if not their lives. The result is that Hoover spent years in a minimum security "country club," sending out edicts to his street lieutenants through a constant and unimpeded stream of visitors.Fort on the other hand was imprisoned in Bastrop, Texas, and kept his gang in line via nearly daily calls to the El Rukn Temple on Drexel. The FBI would record some 3,200 hours of Fort's phone calls to Chicago - an endless magnetic record of conversations in primitive El Rukn code about paying people in "four dinners," "lunches," and "half-lunches."MISSILES FOR HIREMuslims are obligated, if they are capable, to make a pilgrimage to Mecca. The El Rukn was obligated, it would seem, to make a trip to Libya.In 1985, Fort's lieutenants made contact with Libyan leader Col. Moammar Kaddafi. There is a considerable controversy over how exactly the gang commanders got in touch with a foreign dictator, but many attribute the introductions to Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, who had recently made several public appearances with El Rukn leaders.In the late Spring and Summer of 1986, Fort's lieutenants made two trips to Panama City, Panama and met with a Libyan delegation. The meetings were blessed by Fort, who made one of his collect calls from Bastrop to Chicago and was transferred to another line on which a Libyan operative was on hold. The two sides agreed on the broad outlines of what would become the basis of the El Rukn indictments. In exchange for some $2.5 million and the possibility of asylum in Tripoli, the El Rukns would unleash a massive terrorist and urban warfare campaign in the United States, targeting police stations, army bases, government offices - even an airliner.The former El Rukn wouldn't speak about the substance of the agreement in his interview, but Federal officers monitoring El Rukn communications largely thought the whole thing was a sham. The El Rukns, they thought, were little more than a street gang, without the sophistication to obtain military-grade weapons or carry out complicated lines of attack. It was only when the El Rukns began to make serious overtures to acquire shoulder-fired missiles and other high-tech weapons that they swung into action with an operation codenamed "RUKBOM".One of the urban myths around the El Rukns is that Kaddafi himself had supplied the El Rukns with weapons - that he had covertly shipped a LAW anti-tank weapon to the United States, which the CIA intercepted, disabled, and tracked to the El Rukn Temple. In fact, the missile - an M-72 series light anti-tank weapon - was obtained from an undercover FBI agent on July 31, 1986. Shortly after delivery was made, a grand jury was convened and hastily returned a bill of indictment containing dozens of charges against the El Rukn senior command, including Jeff Fort.News of the indictments created a media frenzy. Thousands of reports on the El Rukns, the Blackstone Rangers, the Black P. Stone Nation and their enigmatic leader were published and consumed by a credulous audience. The allegations confirmed the worst fears of prosecutors: that Chicago's black and Latin street gangs were becoming organized enough to establish and maintain contact with America's enemies. (There were few comparisons made, for some reason, with Chicago's Italian mob, which was better armed and had far more inroads into "legitimate" society than the El Rukns could have dreamed of.)STONE COLDThe first of the El Rukn trials concluded in 1987, with Fort sentenced to 80 years without the possibility of parole. He was later indicted and convicted in the state of Illinois for murder and sentenced to a further 75 years - to be served consecutively when his term 80 year federal term is finished, not concurrently. Unless he sustains his vital essence and lives to a truly Adamic age, Fort will never walk the streets near Blackstone again.Other El Rukn trials - more than 50 leaders were eventually prosecuted - were more problematic. A Justice Department investigation revealed that prosecutors had permitted El Rukn commanders who had agreed to testify for the government to obtain drugs, money and whores while in prison. The prosecutor, William Hogan, was eventually forced to resign in disgrace and a number of re-trials were ordered due to prosecutorial malfeasance.Fort's gang, however, still wanders the streets and has even grown in strength in recent years, as rivals were taken out by government sweeps and the housing projects are torn down. They're once again known as the "Black P. Stone Nation" and renewed the use of the pyramid in their iconography. Much of their graffiti incorporates the use of the name "Malik" or "Chief Malik," the next-to-last of Jeff Fort's aliases.Fort is presently being held in the maximum security prison in Marion, Illinois. Some allege that he maintains control over the gang, though to what degree is not known. He nominated his sons to replace him on the streets, which some of the El Rukn old-timers that eluded prosecution refused to recognize. One son, Antonio Fort, was gunned down in 1997, his body found in on a beach in Wolf Lake, Indiana. The assassination was thought to have been carried out by other Stones, and not the gang's rivals. The next in line in the succession, Wakeeta Fort, was convicted of a drug offense in the same year. It's unclear who runs the Stones today.One of Fort's grandsons - his name is withheld here - was arrested two years ago in connection with the infamous vigilante killings of two motorists whose car had crashed into a porch in the Oakland neighborhood. The arrest of Jeff Fort's 16 year old grandson was widely reported - his acquittal less than a year later was not. There is no indication that he has anything to do with the family business. The judge in the case even agreed that jurors could be quizzed about the young man's grandfather to ensure they had no prejudices against him. The conduct in the court, unfortunately, didn't carry over to the press.The urban legends surrounding Jeff Fort continue to bubble to the surface. In 2002, former Chicago gangster Jose Padilla was apprehended by US officials while supposedly preparing to detonate a "dirty bomb" - an ordinary explosive packed with radioactive materials - in an American city.The similarities to the El Rukn terrorism case were too tantalizing to resist. Padilla was a prison convert to Islam - and, reports added, a former El Rukn. He was nothing of the kind. Padilla identified himself to police as a member of the "Maniac Latin Disciples" - a member of the "Maniac Familia" of Latino gangs allied to Larry Hoover's Gangster Disciples - and, as such, allied against Fort's gangs in all of their incarnations.Fort continues to issue edicts and commands to his troops, though it's unclear if they're capable or even willing of following them. Per Fort's decrees, if not the gang's reality, there are now two organizations intertwined, with a few Islamic ornaments dangling garishly from the gang's backside. The Black P. Stone Nation is the same as it always was - street sets, overlords, and what Fort calls "Al-Akbars" but are basically still referred to on the street as "generals." The officers of the Stones are called the "Mahdi." The religious side of the Black P. Stone Nation is called "Masjid Al-Ka'bah," with Fort himself as "Imam Abdul Malik Ka'bah". Ranking "clerics" are called "amirs," "muftis," and "sharieffs," and are collectively known as the "Iquaams." To what degree, if any, Fort's rambling instructions are taken seriously by Black P. Stone leaders is not known.It's hard to know exactly where the Stones rank in Chicago's urban slums these days, as both the gangs and the people who fight against them have some incentive, either psychological or budgetary, to distort their true strength. The Stones are still active in what they call "Terror Town," on the far South Side, as well as "Moe Town" in North Englewood ("Moe" comes from Fort's short-lived Moorish Temple of America; some Stones still refer to each other as "Moes").The Stones were generally considered a junior partner in the (now largely defunct) "People" alliance, beneath the far larger Latin Kings and Vice Lords, and are much smaller and less influential than the remnants of Barksdale's gang, the Gangster Disciples and Black Disciples. They're more or less in the middle of the pack, their history and Fort's notoriety elevating them above the smaller gangs confined to one or two neighborhoods. The Stones have, however, been making a comeback, as they never relied on public housing as strongholds to the same degree and thus have been able to adapt to Chicago's latest "urban renewal" scheme better than their