The Day Boonie Black Ordered A Hit On Larry Hoover Inside Stateville – ht

 

Chicago, 1938. While Al Capone was rotting in federal prison and the city was still rebuilding from the depression, a boy was born on the near west side. George Davis. No headline, no announcement, just another black kid in a neighborhood the rest of Chicago had already decided didn’t matter.

 But here’s what you need to understand before anything else lands right. By the time Larry Hoover was running through the streets of Inglewood as a teenager, Boon Black was already a grown man doing paid work for the Chicago outfit. By the time Jeff Fort was building the Blackstone Rangers into a power, Boon had already been to prison.

By the time the vice lords, the disciples, the cobras were becoming household names on the south and west sides, this man had already built something older, quieter, and more dangerous than all of them. He was born on May 23rd, 1938. That detail matters more than people realize. He predated the entire modern Chicago gang era, not by months, by a generation.

 His entry point was the Impressionist Cobras near Westside Maxwell Street Market Territory. The Cobras had been running that neighborhood since 1947, long before the gang wars that would define the city. Boon came up inside that world as a teenager and never looked back. And then came the part nobody talks about. Through the 1950s, Boon Black was being paid by the Italian mob, not doing business with them, not on the periphery.

 Paid contract work, the kind that involve violence. Historians who have spent years studying Chicago’s underground say they have never found another African-American gang leader with a connection to the Chicago outfit as personal as his. Other leaders had business arrangements. with Boon. It went deeper than that. There’s even a rumor, and I want to be clear, this is unconfirmed, that Italian blood ran in his family.

 I can’t prove it, but I’ll tell you this, the mob didn’t hire people they didn’t trust with their lives. He was large. He was fearless. And he had a word for what he did. Goon, not an insult, a job title, someone who collects pain, or delivers it for money. In his own words from his final interview in 2009, he said not one person he ever went to collect from told him no. Not one.

On the west side, there’s a saying that prison is either a coffin or a classroom. For most men, it’s the coffin. They go in with something and come out with nothing. No crew, no money, no ground to stand on. Boon Black treated it like a graduate program, except the degree he came out with wasn’t hanging on any wall.

By the time 1968 arrived, the institution had a problem, and Boon had already been inside long enough to be the obvious answer. The prisons were out of control, violence everywhere, staff outnumbered. So, the system did something that looking back seems insane. They formalized a program called the barn boss system.

 They hand selected the most dangerous, most respected alpha inmates and gave them power. Real power. Barn bosses could tax other inmates. Move freely through all sections. Use deadly force to maintain order. The only key they didn’t have was the one that opened the door to the outside. Boon Black was chosen. And here’s the part that puts it in perspective.

 At that point, the only other major gang leader inside was Eugene Haristen of the Black Pea Stones. Larry Hoover wasn’t there yet. Jeff Fort wasn’t there yet. Boon held that position before the men who would define Chicago gang history for the next 50 years ever walked through a prison gate. He and his partner Roger Koshis Collins were later moved to Stateville and Manal Correctional, which not coincidentally were the same facilities housing Chicago outfit wise guys.

That mob connection didn’t just follow Boon into prison. It elevated him. The black gangsters became the top tier of the entire prison hierarchy because of it. Historians have noted they went uncaught for hundreds of possible homicides behind those walls. They had a policy about witnesses. They didn’t leave any.

 And then there’s the interview 2009. In the final year of his life, Boon Black sat down and described in his own words how he collected debts when words weren’t enough. He described, in his own words, a collection method so brutal that even recounting it here feels like a line. Let’s just say it involved heat, blades, and the kind of patience that only a man with nothing to prove can sustain. The interview exists.

You can find it. I’ll leave the details there. By 1978, while still cycling in and out of the system, he formalized what he’d been building, the new breeds. 1978, the same era that saw Larry Hoover consolidating the gangster disciples. Jeff Fort rebuilding the Stones as Eluka, the Vice Lords, spreading across the West Side.

 Boon’s organization took its place alongside all of them, except quieter, less visible, exactly how he wanted it. Then in 1981, he walked back into Stateville and found that someone had been sitting in his chair. May 6th, 1981, an apartment 1440 South Kzie, North Lawndale. Three men knock on a door to buy a $100 worth of cocaine from a local dealer in the building.

 Simple transaction, except someone had a problem with the weight. Words became gunfire. The dealer was killed. His roommate was wounded and survived. And George Boon Black Davis, 42 years old, already a legend in the streets, was going back to prison, specifically back to Statesville. Now, when Boon walked into Stateville in 1981, he expected to walk back into the same structure he’d left.

 His organization, his hierarchy, his name on the wall. What he found instead was Larry Hoover, already the most powerful man in the Illinois prison system, running the black gangsters, folding them into the black gangster disciple ways, absorbing them into his own machine. Boon viewed that as disrespect of the highest order, so he ordered a hit on Larry Hoover.

Hoover was stabbed multiple times. Fellow inmates pulled him out. He survived. Then Hoover returned the message. Boon Black was stabbed 27 times. He survived, too. I want you to think about what it takes to survive 27 stab wounds and then instead of going to war, sit down and make peace with the man who ordered them.

 That’s either the most calculated move in Chicago gang history or the two most stubborn men alive finally realizing they needed each other more than they needed to be right. Probably both. What came out of that conversation was the Black Gangster Nation, the BGN, a formal alliance that brought together Boon’s Black Gangsters, the Goon Squad, the Royal Family, and the Village Disciples that Hoover gifted as a peace offering, a union sealed in blood, literally.

 But Boon spent most of the next 16 years locked up. And while he was inside, something started to happen on the streets. His members drifted, started calling themselves folks, started moving under the same alliance banner as the gangster disciples, the very structure he’d nearly died resisting. He couldn’t stop it from a prison cell, but he filed it away.

In 1997, Boon Black came home and the first thing he did was settled at school. 1997, Boon Black walked out of prison at 59 years old, nearly six decades on this earth. More than half of them spent behind a wall. And when he hit the streets of the West Side, the reaction wasn’t confusion. It wasn’t indifference. It was fear.

 Immediate, instinctive, the kind you can’t manufacture. The first order of business wasn’t territory, wasn’t money, it was ideology. His members had been calling themselves folks for years while he was inside. Sliding under Larry Hoover’s alliance banner like it was nothing. Boon shut that down on day one. No more folks. No more BGD alignment.

 He merged his black gangsters with his son Spoon’s new breeds and made it official. The black gangster new breeds. Independent. sovereign answering to nobody. Let me put that in perspective. The Folks Nation was the biggest gang alliance Chicago had ever seen. And Boon Black looked at all of it. The power, the reach, the whole structure, and said it wasn’t his.

 Then he walked away, 59 years old, fresh out of prison. The organization that followed was significant. The New Breeds controlled the ABLA housing projects. Robert Brooks Homes, Grace Abbott Homes, Lumis Courts, the 1600’s corridor in North Lawndale. Over 4,000 members stretched across the West Side into Rockford, Maywood, Bellwood, and eventually New Orleans.

 A DOJ criminal complaint later confirmed one faction alone was generating more than $15,000 in narcotic sales every single day. crack cocaine, white heroin, around the clock, and then September 29th, 2000. Three years after Boon came home, a group of new breeds kidnapped Elbert Mahon, known on the street as Pierre, the number two leader of the conservative vice lords, five-star universal elite rank, one of the most powerful men in the vice lord nation.

They found his body near 26th and Kaminsky. Three weeks later, a man named Leonard Kidd, 27 years old, was arrested and convicted for the killing. That murder sent a message to every organization on the west side. The Dawn was home and he was not playing catchup. 2009, George Boon Black Davis died at 71 years old.

 No national headline, no obituary in the Tribune that anyone can find. The mainstream world didn’t know his name, and that was exactly how he’d always wanted it. But the West Side knew. When word spread that the Dawn was gone, members of the new breeds came from everywhere. All 4,000 plus, multiple states, people who had never met him in person, but had grown up speaking his name like a prayer.

The funeral was not a small gathering of old men mourning a friend. It was a procession, a demonstration, a city within a city saying goodbye to the last of something that will never exist again. They called him the last dawn. And they meant it because the men who came before him, the founders, the originals, the ones who built Chicago’s underworld with their bare hands, that generation was gone.

 Boon had outlasted all of them. And when he left, he took something irreplaceable with him. What he left behind, though, that was a problem. The new breeds kept running. Same territories, same product, same violence. Except now there was no one at the top with 60 years of discipline holding the structure together. A faction based out of a westside housing complex called the square operated like they were untouchable.

 Open air drug market murders in broad daylight. Prosecutors would later use one specific word to describe how they moved. Impunity. So the FBI named the investigation after it. Operation Impunity. undercover agents, wiretaps, years of work, and when it landed, 56 defendants arrested or charged. The faction leader, Dana Bostik, known as Bird, known as Melo, sentenced to 38 years in federal prison in August 2012.

Gone. And then there was Jeepers. Thomas Jeepers Jefferson, born 1922 in Mississippi. Not a gangbanger, never was. A self-taught jailhouse lawyer who spent five prison terms helping inmates fight their cases and walked out every time. Boon’s closest friend. He reportedly died at 96 years old, surrounded by new breeds members who considered him family.

 He outlived the dom. He outlived the organization. He outlived all of it. The man who ran Chicago’s west side for six decades never made a single headline while he was alive. His organization was dismantled 3 years after he was buried. That’s not a coincidence. That’s what it means to be the last dumb.