The King of All the Undertakers Built a $30K-a-Day Drug Empire and Changed Federal Law – ht
In 1999, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled 6 to3 in favor of Eddie Richardson. He won. He was serving a federal life sentence at the time, had been since 1995. And from inside that cell, no press conference, no rally, no celebrity advocate holding a microphone on his behalf, he had taken his case all the way to the highest court in the country.
Justice Steven Brier wrote the opinion himself. Six justices agreed. The jury that convicted Eddie Richardson of running a continuing criminal enterprise had been instructed incorrectly. They were told they had to agree he committed at least three federal drug offenses, but not which three specifically.
The Supreme Court said that wasn’t good enough. that violated the constitutional right to jury unonymity on each individual act. The ruling was six to three. Richardson won. Count two of the indictment, the continuing criminal enterprise charge, the kingpin charge, the one that carried its own mandatory life sentence, was dismissed, and Eddie Richardson remained in federal prison on count one, his life sentence untouched.
The appeal that reshaped federal criminal law, the ruling that now protects every defendant charged under that same statute in the United States, had cost the government a few months of litigation. It had cost Richardson everything he had left. He is still in the system today. Age around 70, location not publicized. The government is not required to tell you where.
To understand how a man ends up winning at the Supreme Court and staying in prison, you have to go back to where all of this started. Back to 1970, back to a street corner on the west side of Chicago. Nine teenagers and a funeral home with broken windows. The corner of Congress and Cicero sits at the southeastern edge of the Austin neighborhood on Chicago’s west side.
the exact point where the neighborhood’s eastern and southern boundaries meet. If you’ve ever driven the Eisenhower Expressway, Interstate 290, you’ve crossed Cicero Avenue on it. That expressway was built between 1949 and 1961 at a cost of $183 million. It displaced an estimated 13,000 people and forced out more than 400 businesses in Chicago alone.
The neighborhood it cut through was already being gutted by redlinining, by blockbusting, by every instrument the city and the federal government had developed over decades to ensure that where black families lived, investment did not follow. By 1972, Austin was in the middle of one of the fastest demographic shifts in the city’s history.
Less than a decade earlier, it had been a near exclusively white neighborhood. By 1970, nearly a third of its residents were black. By 1980, it would be almost three quarters. The people who arrived didn’t find opportunity. They found the same walls moved west. into this neighborhood, into the Courtway building at the corner of Congress and Cicero, to be specific, came a group of teenagers who would spend the next two decades building one of the most structured street operations Chicago’s west side had ever produced. The leader was a
15-year-old named Eddie Richardson, street name High Ne, short for High Nephew, a rank within the Vice Lord Nation hierarchy. Before he founded the Undertakers, Richardson had run with the Black Souls, a gang out of West Garfield Park. What made him leave? What drove him to cross the invisible lines between organizations and plan himself on a new corner? That is not in any public record. It may never be.
What is on the record is what happened next. Richardson co-founded the gang alongside Carmen Tate, street name Redmond, and Clifton McFer, who became the original prince. Nine members total, all from the same block, most from the same building. And on the night they decided to give themselves a name, Richardson walked them across the street, Fountain Jordan Shepard Funeral Home, 418 South Cicero Avenue.
They picked up rocks and threw them through the windows. Then they leaned through the broken frames and looked at the bodies inside. That was the initiation. You want in, you look death in the face first. No exceptions. It was psychological design. Richardson was teaching his recruits from the very first night that the organization they were joining operated without the boundaries most people lived inside.
They called themselves the Cicero undertaker. Insane vice lords. 1970. Think about that name for a moment. Not the vice lord’s part, not the insane faction marker, the undertakers, the people whose job is to manage what remains after everything else is gone. A 15-year-old chose that. Clifton McFer would go on to serve 37 years in federal prison before walking out and spending his remaining years trying to undo what he had helped build.
Years later, reflecting on that night, he said, “When we started this gang, we had no idea that 40 years later, the effects of something we did as kids would have on my community. The funeral home is still there. 418 South Cicero Avenue. It is still receiving the dead.” Most gang leaders want territory.
Eddie Richardson wanted something more durable than that. Territory gets taken. Corners change hands. The man standing on a block today isn’t guaranteed to be there tomorrow. Not in Chicago. Not on the west side. Not in 1970. Richardson had seen what happens when organizations run on loyalty to a person.
When the person falls, the organization falls with him. He had watched other organizations collapse from the top down. He had no intention of building one. He decided to build something that could survive him. Not something that would make him rich, though it would. Not something that would make him feared, though it did. Something that would still be standing after he was gone.
That is a strange thing to want at 15. Most people don’t think about legacy until they have something to lose. Richardson was building legacy before he had anything at all. What Richardson constructed over the next decade was not a traditional street gang in any recognizable sense. It was a tiered organization built around five groups called generations.
Each generation was defined by age and time of entry. Join the undertakers in the mid 1970s. You were one generation. Join in the early 80s, you were another. Each generation had its own king and its own prince, its own chain of command, its own internal accountability structure. Above all, five generations sat Richardson, king of all the undertakers.
Five generations, each with its own king and prince. That is not street slang. That is the vocabulary of a man who understood early and clearly that territory gets taken but structure survives within the broader vicelord nation. One of the largest gang confederations in American history. Richardson achieved the rank of universal elite, one of the highest designations in the Confederation, a title that commanded difference from every vice lord faction in the city, not just his own people, all of them.
Carmen Tate held no official rank. That detail matters. He co-founded the organization. He was on that corner in 1970. He helped build everything that followed. And yet, federal court records describe him simply as a member whom, it was said, all undertakers looked up to. Influence without title, power without position. In most organizations, that arrangement ends in conflict.
In the undertakers, it held for over 20 years. Richardson alone decided who became a leader. Not seniority, not toughness, not a vote. Richardson decided that is not how most gangs work. That is how institutions work. And like every institution, legitimate or otherwise, the undertakers had a disciplinary system. They called it a violation.
What a violation could mean tells you exactly how seriously Richardson took the structure he had built. At the low end, a member who broke the rules could be banned from selling, removed from the corner, cut off entirely. For someone whose entire economic life ran through the organization, that alone was severe enough. It did not stop there.
Federal court records from the 1995 trial document punishments that escalated from banning to severe physical violence, beatings, stabbings, and shootings. And at the furthest edge of the system, murder. At least one person was killed as an act of internal enforcement. Not a rival gang member, not a police informant, someone inside the organization who had broken the rules and been judged for it.
That is what the blueprint contained. Richardson never commented on any of it publicly. No memoir, no interview, no statement to the press, no documented moment where the man explained himself, his thinking, or his intentions. The architect of one of the most structured criminal organizations on Chicago’s west side left almost no trace of himself in the historical record.
What speaks for him is what the organization did. For two decades, what it did was function. In 1984, the machine started generating money. Not a little money, 20,000 to $30,000 every single day. That figure came from a king within the organization who was himself convicted in a separate federal case. Sergeant put his own number on record separately.
He received heroin from Richardson directly three times a week, each delivery valued between $40,000 and $60,000. He was not an executive. He was not close to the top. He was a mid-level operator inside the fourth of five generations. And the money moving through his hands alone was enough to make a federal prosecutor stand up straight.
The operation ran on two products, two locations, and two decades of uninterrupted supply. First, heroin, brown heroin, starting in 1984, sold at street level prices at the Courtway building, the same corner where Richardson stood in 1970 with rocks in hand in a building where many of the original members had grown up.
By the late 1980s, the product shifted to white heroin, a different grade, a different customer. Witness testimony at trial placed the combined volume of heroin moved through that single building between 1984 and 1990 at an estimated 125 kg. 125 kg. One building, one corner. Then in 1990, crack cocaine appeared at a second location, the Highway Beef Stand at the corner of Glattis and Cicero, a food stand in public, the kind of spot where people stop on a lunch break. The undertakers were not subtle.
They didn’t need to be by then. They had become what local historians of the westside drug trade would describe plainly, the biggest distributors on Cicero Avenue. Cicero Avenue had a name by this point. Federal law enforcement called it the heroine superighway. The mechanism was straightforward and ruthless.
The Eisenhower Expressway, the same road, ran directly alongside Cicero. A customer from the suburbs could exit the highway, complete a purchase, and be back on the ramp in under 10 minutes. Investigators compared it to a fast food drive-thru. Pull up, pay, go. Except the product was heroin and the staff didn’t wear uniforms.
The infrastructure of displacement became the infrastructure of the trade. Not metaphor, a logistics chain built with public money and federal authority inherited by the people left behind after the concrete dried and the undertakers were running it. The money moved upward through the generation structure. Sergeant delivered. The corners stayed stocked.
Richardson, sitting above all five generations, controlled supply, managed the network, and in the language of the federal indictment, obtain substantial income from everything that moved through it. 20,000 to $30,000 a day for seven years. The machine did not break down. It was not interrupted by competition, by internal collapse, or by market forces.
It ran because Richardson had built something capable of running, structured, disciplined, and ruthless enough to protect itself. What ended it was not the machine failing. It was someone watching. 1989. The machine was still running. The corners were still open. The money was still moving. And then the vice lord nation started eating itself.
A man named Troy Martin, a top leader within the insane branch of the vice lords, consolidated the various insane factions under a single banner, the mafia insane vice lords. He declared it law. Every insane vice lord in Chicago was expected to submit. Most did. Eddie Richardson did not.
The undertakers were an insane faction. By Martin’s logic, they belonged inside the new organization, subordinate to it, folded into it, no longer their own. Richardson had spent 19 years building something that answered to no one but him. He was not going to hand it over. Not to Martin, not to anyone. He prepared for war. What followed was instantly deadly.
The undertakers held their territory. The mafia insanes pressed. The violence was real. And the math was against Richardson in a way it had never been before. He was no longer expanding. For the first time in the organization’s history, he was defending. And a structure built to grow outward had never been designed to hold under pressure from every direction at once.
His response was the same cold calculation that had always defined him. The Undertakers reached out to the Four Corner Hustlers, a gang they had been at war with for years, and proposed an alliance. Former enemies united by a common threat, not sentiment, survival, arithmetic. It was a reasonable move. It was also a sign of how far the situation had shifted.
Richardson had built an organization meant to be self-sufficient, internally structured, answerable only to its own hierarchy. The blueprint had not included asking for help from outside. Now it had to. Inside the organization, some members rid the situation and made a different calculation. They began flipping to the mafia insanes.
Quietly at first, then in larger numbers, these were not strangers. These were men Richardson had recruited, promoted, placed at corners he trusted. The structure he had built, five generations, each with its own chain of command, was designed to hold even when the top was under pressure. Parts of the structure were now choosing the other side.
Here is the question that sits under all of it. Was Richardson wrong? The refusal to bend was not stubbornness in the ordinary sense. It was the loadbearing wall of everything he had built. If Richardson submitted to Martin, he was no longer the man who built something that answered to no one. He was just another leader who folded when the pressure came.
And if he was that man, then the structure he had spent 19 years constructing was not what he thought it was. It was just a corner operation with a complicated org chart. He could not afford to find that out. His logic had never failed him before. It had held through two decades of competition, attrition, and everything that normally destroys organizations like this.
But the refusal to bend was also the reason he was still fighting a war he could not win. Hemorrhaging members, holding territory by force, leaning on old enemies for support, doing exactly what he had always done in a world that had moved past the moment when it worked. And while he was fighting that war, the federal government had been watching him since 1988. He did not know that.
Agent John Rotuno of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms began building a case against the Undertaker Vice Lords in 1988. He was not in a hurry. He had a confidential informant named Deborah Schweed and three years of patience undercover buys, wire recordings, transaction logs. The kind of federal groundwork that moves slowly, quietly, and with the explicit intention that when it finally moves, it doesn’t miss.
In the meantime, the corners kept running. One of the moments that crystallized the case came when investigators approached Joseph Westland, street named Smoke, King of the Undertaker’s fourth generation. Undercover agents posed as West Coast marijuana dealers and proposed a trade. West Morland agreed. His associate handed over 11 bags of crack cocaine in exchange for three pounds of marijuana and two guns.
Backup units closed in immediately. West Morland was arrested on the spot. What investigators had assembled by 1991 was not simply a drug case. It was a map. Generations labeled leadership identified roles connected to names and names connected to money. The kind of documentation a federal grand jury is built to receive.
On March the 23rd, 1994, that grand jury returned an indictment charging 21 alleged members of the Undertaker Vice Lords. The charges ran three counts: conspiracy to distribute narcotics, engaging in a continuing criminal enterprise, the Kingpin Law, first written in 1970 and later strengthened to carry mandatory life imprisonment for anyone who sat at the top of an operation. exactly like this one.
And for Tate, conspiracy to defraud the United States. Richardson and Tate faced the most serious charge, life imprisonment if convicted. The trial opened March the 29th, 1995 before Judge James Holderman in Chicago’s Northern District. It ran for 56 days. The government called Sergeant Chu, who had managed the Courtway building heroin spot for years.
Cal, a fifth generation member who had cooked crack alongside tape, undercover recordings, wire transcripts, years of documented transactions laid out actby act in a federal courtroom. 11 defendants sat at the defense table. When the jury returned, three of them walked acquitted. The case that had taken years to build did not reach everyone it aimed for.
That fact almost never makes it into any account of this trial. Three people went home. The other eight did not. Then came the sentences. Judge Holderman moved through the names over the course of a full year from August of 1995 through August of 1996. Eddie Richardson, life in federal prison.
Carmen Tate, life in federal prison. Cedric Curry, life in federal prison. Nate Hall, life in federal prison. Stanley West Morland, 324 months. Martell Lee, 324 months. Rodney Palmer, 292 months. Lenel Smith, 194 months. Lenel Smith had testified at trial that he sold drugs for Richardson and Tate for three years, made roughly $50,000, sold heroin, sold crack, witnessed violations carried out inside the organization against his own members, 194 months.
Four people received life sentences. The machine that had generated 20,000 to $30,000 a day for seven years had cost four men the rest of their lives. The Undertaker Vice Lords, the organization built on a westside corner by a 15-year-old with nine people and a broken funeral home window, had been, in the formal language of federal prosecution, put out of business.
The corners did not close. By 1997, Eddie Richardson had been in federal prison for two years. His appeal was moving through the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. The Seventh Circuit upheld the conviction, every count, every sentence. Richardson’s attorneys petitioned the Supreme Court of the United States.
The question they brought was not at its core about whether Richardson had run a drug empire on Chicago’s west side. That had been established at trial beyond any dispute. The question was about the jury instructions Judge Holderman had delivered during those 56 days in 1995. Here is what those instructions told the jury.
You must unanimously agree that the defendant committed at least three federal drug offenses, but you do not have to agree on which three. Richardson’s legal team argued that was unconstitutional. The continuing criminal enterprise statute requires proof of a continuing series of violations, specific acts, not a general impression. Richardson’s argument was this.
If 12 jurors are sending a man to prison for life, they should all be looking at the same acts. Four jurors might be thinking about a transaction in 1987. Four others might have a deal from 1989 in mind. The last four something different entirely. Under Holderman’s instruction, that was acceptable. They had all agreed he did something at least three times.
They just didn’t agree on what. Richardson said that wasn’t unonymity. That was a patchwork verdict wearing a unanimous face. On February the 22nd, 1999, the case was argued before the Supreme Court. Richardson’s attorney, William Barnett Jr., stood at the podium and made the argument that a man in a federal prison cell had built from scratch.
The Supreme Court agreed with him. On June the 1st, 1999, Justice Steven Brier, writing for a six-3 majority, issued the ruling in Richardson versus United States. The opinion held that a jury must unanimously agree not only that the defendant committed some continuing series of violations, but also that the defendant committed each of the individual violations necessary to make up that series.
everyone specifically by name. That ruling is now federal law. It has been for over 25 years. Every defendant charged under the continuing criminal enterprise statute since 1999 carries that protection. It came from Eddie Richardson from inside a prison cell through a legal argument that traveled from the northern district of Illinois all the way to the top of the American judicial system.
And then count two of his indictment, the continuing criminal enterprise charge was dismissed and Eddie Richardson remained in prison on count one. Count one was the conspiracy charge, a separate conviction, a separate life sentence. The Supreme Court ruling had not touched it, could not touch it. The two counts were legally independent.
Richardson later filed a habius corpus petition, a formal challenge to the legality of his continued imprisonment. On July the 2nd, 2002, Judge Matthew Kennaly of the Northern District of Illinois dismissed it with prejudice in its entirety. The life sentence on count one stood. Now, look, I’ve read a lot of court outcomes.
A lot of them go the way you expect. A man fights the system. The system barely moves and everybody already knows how it’s going to end. But this one, this one is different. Richardson pushed his case all the way up to the Supreme Court and made them change the rules of federal criminal law. That’s not small. But here’s the cold part.
The rule changed. The door didn’t open. He was one count away, one conviction away. And the conviction that kept him buried was the one his Supreme Court win never touched. Clifton Boon McFaller, co-founder of the Undertaker Vice Lord’s original prince, the man who stood on the corner of Congress in Cicero in 1970 and threw rocks through a funeral home window, was released from federal prison after 37 years.
He went back to Austin, not because he had nowhere else to go, because he believed it was his punishment. His words, not mine. I believe that’s my punishment to come back to my community and save as many as I can. And that’s a good punishment. He now works with teenagers in the same neighborhood where he helped build the organization that consumed a generation of that neighborhood’s young men.
He stands on corners where the undertakers once controlled every transaction and talks to kids about what he saw from the inside. He co-founded the thing. He watched it become the thing. He spent 37 years paying for it and then he came back. That is one story about what the Undertaker Vice Laws produced. Here is another.
Richardson versus United States. The 1999 Supreme Court ruling that Eddie Richardson won from inside a federal prison cell is now a foundational case in American criminal law. It is taught in law schools. It is cited in legal briefs. Every defendant charged under the continuing criminal enterprise statute since that ruling has been entitled to a constitutional protection that did not exist before Richardson fought for it.
He built a structure that survived him on the street. Then he built a legal precedent that survived him in court. Neither one set him free. He is still in federal custody. Somewhere in the system, age around 70. In the entire history of this story, from the night in 1970 to the Supreme Court ruling to the habius petition dismissed in 2002, Eddie Richardson has not said one word for the record.
No interview, no statement, no letter to a journalist, no memoir. This entire story exists without his voice. You know everything about what he built. You know nothing about what he thought. Boonie McFer came back. Eddie Richardson never did. The government does not publish his location. And Fountain Jordan Shepard Funeral Home, 418 South Cicero Avenue, the building whose windows he told nine teenagers to break in 1970.
The building that gave the Undertakers their name and their initiation and their identity is still standing, still open, still receiving the dead. Some things outlast the people who built them. Some things outlast the people who tried to destroy them. And some things just stand there on a corner on the west side of Chicago, quiet, doing exactly what they have always done.
While the stories around them rise and fall and disappear, the graveyard is still open.