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DOPE SALES BUILD SECRET EMPIRES

Frank Main and Carlos Sadovi- Chicago Sun-Times (IL)

Sun, 07 Apr 2002

You can't order a milkshake or a sundae at the "Ice Cream Shop." Only crack cocaine and heroin are on the menu, and gang members take your order.

On a 20-degree day, a young Gangster Disciple in a black parka stands guard in front of one of the low buildings of the Ida B. Wells housing development on the South Side.

While he watches, another teenager strolls up to a slow-cruising Toyota Corolla, a knit stocking cap pulled low over his eyes.

Holding a roll of cash in his gloveless hand, he calls out, "Rock! Blow!" The puffs of his breath vanish in the chilly air, and the Corolla rolls on.

Minutes later, another car pulls up. The kid in the stocking cap hands something to the driver. The driver hands something back. Probably a $10 bill.

This will go on all day.

Thousands of street-corner drug sales, the backbone of powerful gang empires in Chicago, rake in more than half a billion dollars a year in drug profits--nearly 1 percent of the city's economy, experts say.

A trickle of this river of cash pays for fancy cars and expensive suburban houses. The rest--the kind of money that would put legitimate enterprises into the Fortune 500--seems to disappear. But, in fact, it flows deep underground, seeping into cell phone stores, nightclubs, beauty shops, apartment buildings, record companies and even Hollywood.

For five months, the Chicago Sun-Times tracked the huge sums made by drug sales by interviewing cops, gang members and university experts, and spending days and nights on neighborhood streets and alleys to see drug dealers at work.

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