How Edwin ‘Pepalo’ Perry Founded Chicago’s Most Feared Gang At 15 HT

30,000 members, 28 states, 75 cities, one of the most powerful street organizations ever built on American soil. And the man who started it all, nobody wrote down how he died. Think about that for a second. You can look up the founding date of the Vice Lords, the size of their territory, the names of every faction they ever spawned.

But the man who built the whole thing from inside a reform school at 15 years old, the man they called Peplo, left no orbituary, no death notice, no grave marker that anybody’s been able to find. Streets have a way of doing that. Taking the very people who built them and swallowing them whole.

This is the story of Edwin Marlon Perry, the founder, the original, the one name most people have never heard, and the one name that started everything. Here’s where the story starts. Not with the Empire. Not with the 10,000 members or the 28 states. With a 14-year-old kid living alone on the west side of Chicago, running burglaries and trying to get into a gang that didn’t want him.

North Lawndale in the late 1950s gave young black men exactly two options. Get swallowed or become something the streets couldn’t ignore. Edwin Perry chose the second one, but he didn’t start out trying to build an empire. He started out trying to belong to somebody else’s. 1957, Perry is 14 years old, 6’1, 190 lb, living on his own.

No parents, no safety net, just the streets of the west side and whatever he could take from them. He was running burglaries, smalltime stuff, the kind of work that keeps you fed. but eventually gets you caught. But Peplo, that’s what they called him, wasn’t built for small time. He knew it. So he walked up to the Imperial Chaplain, one of the biggest outfits on the west side at the time, and asked to get in.

Their leader, a man known as Big John, looked him up and down and said, and I’m quoting directly here, “We don’t want no punk [ __ ] in the organization.” 6’1, 190 lb, 14 years old. And Big John said, “No.” I genuinely believe that was the most expensive decision any man made in Chicago that decade. Because what happened next is the part nobody talks about. Perry didn’t go home.

He didn’t sulk. He went back to the streets, kept running with his crew, a group they called the Phantom Burglars, and kept moving until 1958 when the Chicago police swept through Lawndale and picked him up. 15 years old, burglary charges. Destination: The Illinois Youth Center in St. Charles, Illinois. Reform School.

Most kids go in and come out worse than they went in. Peplo went in and came out with the nation. Inside St. Charles, Perry linked up with six other young men and they built something. When they got out, Bobby Gore, who’d been running with the crew called the Clovers, heard what was forming and walked straight over.

Left his old crew behind without looking back. They needed a name. Someone grabbed a dictionary, looked up the word vice, found the definition, having a tight hold. That was it. The vice lords were born. Not on the streets, not in some smoke filled back room, but in a juvenile detention facility in St. Charles, Illinois.

And then something happened inside those walls that tells you everything you need to know about who Edwin Perry really was. Word got back to him that a man named Bo Chess, a member of the very Imperial Chaplain who had rejected him, had put his hands on Perry’s girlfriend in front of his sister. Perry didn’t explode.

He didn’t rush out swinging. He got quiet, asked one question. Which arm did Bo Chess use? Then he told people that the moment he got out, he was going on a week-l long vacation and that he’d be bringing back that arm when he came home. A man who thinks in consequences in debts that must be settled with precision.

Big John called him a punk. Bo Chess put his hands on his girl. Perry was keeping score and he was just getting started. When those gates opened at St. Charles, Perry walked out with something most men spend their whole lives chasing. a following. The Vice Lords hit the streets of North Lawndale in 1958 and they were nothing like what came before them.

Every other gang on the west side, the Cobras, the Clovers, the Continental Pimps, they were social clubs with a rough edge, weekend warriors. The Vice Lords trained like they were preparing for something. During the day, members boxed and wrestled each other. At night, they went to work.

knives, molotov cocktails, pistols, systematically taking turf from every gang that stood in their way. This wasn’t random violence. Perry ran it like a campaign, block by block, set by set, and the results speak for themselves. Within 6 years, 6 years, the vice lords had absorbed nearly every significant gang on the west side.

The Cherokees, the morphines, the Comanches, the Continental pimps, even the Imperial Chaplain, Big John’s crew, the same men who told a 14-year-old Peplo he wasn’t worthy, got folded into the Vice Lord Nation. By 1964, the Lords controlled 28 sets across the West Side. Territory stretching from Palaski all the way to Western Avenue, from Lake Street South to Ogden.

10,000 members, a nation inside a city, and Peplo Perry was 21 years old. Now, here’s the part of this story that I think gets completely buried under everything that came after. In 1964, at the absolute peak of his power, when he was running the most feared street organization the West Side had ever seen, Perry stepped down.

Not because he got locked up. Not because someone took him out. He chose to walk away from the top spot voluntarily. The organization had grown so large that even he couldn’t control all of it anymore. And somewhere in that reality, Perry made a decision that almost no one in his position ever makes. He chose his family over the throne.

One night in a pool room, the leadership agreed. 29-year-old Alfonso Aler would take over. Perry would stay close, advised from the shadows, but the daily weight of leading 10,000 men was no longer his to carry. Think about what that decision cost him in street credibility alone. Think about what it took to make it anyway.

Most people who build something that large can’t let go of it. The power becomes the identity. Perry separated the two at 21. Whatever else you want to say about the man, and there’s plenty more to say that tells you something real about who he was underneath all of it. July 1964, 16th in Lawndale.

A group of men are standing on a corner passing bottles of wine, throwing the empties into vacant lots. Edwin Perry is there, Bobby Gore, Alfonso Alford, who had just taken over the top spot, and Leonard Callaway, the founding generation of the Vice Lords, the same men who had spent six years building something the entire West Side feared.

Then some younger lords come around, hyped up, talking about going after rival gangs, gangs that were already broken, already asking for mercy. There was nothing left to take from them. But out here, when you stop moving forward, you start looking weak. So you keep swinging even when there’s nothing left to hit. Alford looked at the young men, then looked at the bottles in his hand, then said something nobody expected.

What if they open businesses instead? Just like that, on a corner, half drunk. That was the moment. Perry was standing right there when it happened. And he didn’t laugh it off. He didn’t shut it down. He endorsed it. The man who built the vice lords on knives and molotov cocktails decided that night that the same energy that took the west side could be used to rebuild it.

Two years later, Martin Luther King Jr. moved into an apartment right in the heart of North Lawndale, specifically to draw national attention to what redlinining and slumlords had done to North Lawndale. Black consciousness was rising across the city. The gangs felt it too. The vice lords weren’t just reacting to a moment. They were trying to lead one.

Perry had already stepped back from daily leadership. But this new direction, he was all the way in. Between 1967 and 1969, the conservative vice lords did something that had never been done before and hasn’t really been done since. They got funded. The Rockefeller Foundation came in first, $15,000 to get CVL Incorporated off the ground.

Then the Field Foundation added 25,000. The Ford Foundation wrote a check for 130,000. The Department of Labor dropped 36,000. Philanthropist William Clement Stone, one of the wealthiest men in America at the time, contributed $60,000 to a street gang from North Lawndale. With that money, the Lords built five businesses on the 3700 block of West 16th Street alone, a teen center, job training programs, a tenants rights group that helped residents fight back against the slum lords who had been bleeding the neighborhood for decades. They organized Christmas dinners open to the whole community. They ran summer jobs for neighborhood youth through a contract with the Catholic school board. And then, I promise I’m not making this up, they started developing a cosmetics line called Simone, specifically designed for black women with color

tones that the mainstream beauty industry wasn’t making. They partnered with Sammy Davis Jr. to market it. Meanwhile, Perry himself was in class. A 1969 press photograph, still archived today, shows him identified as a student at Central Community YMCA College. The caption reads, “The founder of the conservative vice lords organization.

He was hitting the books while building a movement.” 15 vice lords got enrolled at Dartmouth University through the influence of filmmaker Dwit Beal who had embedded himself with the organization. Cynthia Cobalt who worked alongside Beal later said he was genuinely stunned by the intellectual capability of the men he met in North Lawndale.

And here’s the number that should end every argument about whether any of this was real. In 1968, homicide rates were climbing sharply across black Chicago neighborhoods. In Lawndale, ground zero for the Vice Lords, the murder rate dropped by nearly a third. A street gang reduced violent crime in their own neighborhood by 30%.

while running businesses, while sending members to an Ivy League university, while the founder took college classes. Whatever was happening on 16th Street between 1967 and 1969 was something genuinely different, something that deserved to survive. It didn’t. There is footage of Edwin Perry. Let that sit for a second.

In a story where almost nothing was written down, where the founder left no obituary, no public record of his death, no dedicated historical record of his own, there is actual film of the man. Color footage him on camera in the middle of the conservative vice lord’s transformation. The film is called Lord Thing, directed by Dwit Beal, a Dartmouth graduate who had spent years embedded with the CVL.

Funded not by a documentary studio or a public broadcaster, but by the Xerox Corporation. Shot in 1970, it traces the full arc of the Vice Lords from the violence of the early years straight through to the business district on 16th Street. Perry is in it. Gore is in it. The whole founding generation documented in real time telling their own story in their own words.

Bill submitted the film to Europe. It screened at can. It won a silver medal at the Venice Film Festival, one of the most prestigious documentary honors in the world. In America, it was never released. Xerox funded it and never distributed it. No distribution deal, no theatrical run, no television broadcast.

Whether that was deliberate or just indifference, nobody has ever said for certain. By 1970, the political mood had shifted. The same foundations that had competed to fund the vice lords two years earlier were now chasing environmental causes. The public appetite for nuance around street gangs had evaporated.

Cynthia Cobalt, who worked alongside Beal on the production, put it simply. It wasn’t pushed enough in this country, and the atmosphere had changed. By 1970, people were more upset with gangs than they had been a few years earlier. So, the film sat and sat and then it disappeared entirely. Decades passed.

Nobody knew where it was. Researchers looking into CVL history couldn’t find a copy. Film archivists had no record of it. Lord Thing, a silver medal documentary featuring the founder of one of the largest street organizations in American history, was effectively gone until someone found a single damaged VHS tape. One tape, the Chicago Film Archives, located it, restored it, and brought it back.

That is the only reason any moving image of Edwin Perry exists today. One damaged cassette between his face and permanent eraser. I find that almost unbearable. The man built something that now spans 28 states and his entire visual record nearly fit in a shoe box. 1969 arrived like a wrecking ball. And I want to be real clear about this part cuz the way CVL Incorporated fell apart, that ain’t some story about a group that couldn’t stay legit.

No, this is about power and what happens when the wrong people start stacking way too much of it. Go back to 1967. The Vice Lords and the Blackstone Rangers, the two most organized Black Street entities in Chicago both campaigned against Mayor Richard Joseph Daly in his fourth bid for reelection. Openly, actively, these men from North Lawndale were telling their communities not to vote for the most powerful politician in Illinois.

That same year, the Chicago Police Department quietly created its first gang intelligence unit, whose job was specifically to monitor and infiltrate black youth street organizations. Coincidence, sure. By early 1969, Alfonso Alfort had already suffered a stroke that left him unable to function as the head of CVL Incorporated.

The man who had held the whole legitimate operation together was effectively gone. Then in May, a gunman shot and killed Robert Weatherall directly in front of Teen Town, the Vice Lord’s Youth Center on 16th Street. The organization had already lost its leader. Now it was losing its safety, too. May 1969, Mayor Daly and state’s attorney Edward Henrahan formally declared a war on gangs.

6 months later in November, Bobby Gore, the face of CVL Incorporated, the man who had sat across from foundation executives and city alderman and made the case for what the vice lords could become, is arrested for murder. He is convicted. He serves 10 years in prison. Bobby Gore maintained his innocence until the day he died.

He said he was framed. Historians, journalists, and community members who lived through it widely believe him. The arrest came at the exact moment Dy’s war on gangs was dismantling every black organization in Chicago with enough power to threaten his machine. the same year his state’s attorney’s office orchestrated the raid that killed Fred Hampton.

The legal system never officially cleared Gore’s name, but the court of history has a pretty clear verdict on what happened on that corner in 1969. By 1970, David Dolly had gone back to Massachusetts. The Ford Foundation had moved on to environmental causes. The Department of Labor contracts dried up.

One by one, the businesses on 16th Street closed. The teen center, the job training programs, the cosmetics line that never quite launched. All of it gone within 18 months. Not because the vice lords failed, because the city decided they couldn’t be allowed to succeed. September 9th, 1969. A press photographer captures Edwin Marlon Perry on camera one last time.

Not in handcuffs, not on a corner, in a classroom. The caption reads, “The founder of the conservative vice organization, a student at Central Community YMCA College, while Bobby Gore was being led away in handcuffs, while Alonso Alford lay incapacitated by a stroke he would never fully recover from.

While the businesses on 16th Street were quietly going dark one by one, Peplo Perry was in class. I’ve been sitting with that image for a long time. a man who built a 10,000 member organization from inside a juvenile detention center, who stepped away from one of the most powerful positions on the west side at just 21, who watched the legit empire he helped build get torn apart piece by piece by a mayor who was scared of what it stood for.

And in the middle of all that, he was doing homework. What was he studying? We don’t know. What did he do after that photograph was taken? We don’t know. Did he stay in school? Did he go back to the streets? Did he try to hold what was left of CVL together from the shadows the way he’d been doing since ‘ 64? We don’t know.

Here is what every researcher, every historian, every source that has ever documented device lords agrees on. By the early 1980s, Edwin Marlon Perry was dead. That’s it. That’s all they’ve got. No cause of death, no exact year, no orbituary published in the Chicago Tribune or anywhere else.

No death notice, no funeral record that has surfaced publicly. The man who founded one of the largest street organizations in American history left no paper trail out of this world. I searched, you know, other people have searched. The silence is total. He was born sometime in the early 1940s. Best estimates put it around 1942 or 43, though no record has been confirmed.

He was dead before he was much past 40, if he even made it that far. Nobody left a record specific enough to say. Everything in between after that September photograph is a blank. And I think that blank is the most honest thing about this entire story because that’s what the West Side did to its men. It used them up and moved on.

The organization Perry built kept growing after he was gone. Kept spreading, kept recruiting, kept evolving into something he probably wouldn’t have recognized. But his name didn’t travel with it. Bobby Gore came home from prison in 1979 after serving 10 years on a conviction he maintained until his dying day that he did not deserve.

The vice lords he returned to were unrecognizable. The businesses were gone. The grant money was gone. The community programs were gone. Someone offered him his position back. He turned it down flat. Said the drugs and the violence were destroying the very community he had spent his life trying to protect.

And Bobby Gore, the man who had sat across from Rockefeller Foundation executives and made the case for what the Vice Lords could be, walked away from the gang entirely and spent the rest of his life working for the Safer Foundation, helping formerly incarcerated men find employment. He turned the mission inward.

Couldn’t save the organization. Spent the next 30 years trying to save the people it left behind. Today, the United States Department of Justice estimates the Vice Lord Nation has between 30,000 and 35,000 members operating in 75 cities across 28 states. 28 states built from a conversation in a reform school in St.

Charles, Illinois between a 15year-old kid and six other boys who had nowhere else to go. Bennett Lee, a former vice lord’s chief who later became director of the National Alliance for the Empowerment of the Formerly Incarcerated, still uses Lord Thing as a teaching tool for young men trying to find a way out of street life.

It shows how a street gang with the proper backing can become a positive influence in communities. He said the Hull House Museum in Chicago created a dedicated traveling exhibition specifically to preserve this chapter of Vice Lord history because someone understood that if they didn’t, it would disappear completely the way Peplo nearly disappeared.

founded at 15 in a cage, 10,000 members by 21, stepped back for his family before most men his age had figured out what they wanted to be. Watched his co-founders get convicted, at least one of them wrongfully. Enrolled in college while the dream collapsed around him, dead before 40, cause unknown.

And the thing he built with six other boys and a dictionary definition is now in 28 states. Nobody put his name on it. No statue, no street named after him, no dedicated historical record of his own. Just a caption on a 60-year-old press photograph and the organization that still bears the mark of everything he started.

Every vice lord alive today walks in the shadow of Peplo Perry. Most of them probably don’t even know his name. Now you do.