Big Law: The King Who Killed the King’s Blood and Later Took the Throne – ht
February 2019, Chicago. A man is dead. Not just any man. The highest ranking black disciple on the outside. The closest thing to a king that one of Chicago’s oldest and most feared street organizations had walking free. When the news spread, Chicago police didn’t just open a homicide file.
They braced for a wave of retaliatory violence across the south side. They put officers at his funeral. They put the entire southside on watch. No matter how many times I come back to this story, one detail will not let go. For 10 years after walking out of prison, he left almost no footprint in any system that should have been watching him.
And for seven of those years, the years he spent at the top of the Black Disciples, the department didn’t even have a current face on file, no Wikipedia page, no updated mugsh shot in the Chicago Police database, and almost no widely circulated public obituary with a confirmed recent face attached. One line in a gang statistics report for a man who ran one of the most powerful street organizations in America for seven years.
The official public record of his face and daily life is almost non-existent despite the court documents, federal affidavits, and newspaper investigations that do exist because we live in a world where your face ends up on file for a parking violation. And this man who ran an organization the Chicago Police Department estimated had once claimed 15,000 members across the south side.
The system barely knew what he looked like. His name was Lawrence Loggins. On the street, everybody called him Big Law. The question this whole story turns on is simple, and I have not found a clean answer to it. How does a man powerful enough to make Chicago police fear a citywide war die with almost no public record of his face? That answer does not start in February of 2019.
It starts 30 years before the night he died in a park on the south side with a body on the ground. Low Park sits on the south side of Chicago. It is not a famous park. It does not have a historical marker. It does not appear in any travel guide, which is fine because nobody was visiting Low Park in 1989 for tourism.
It is the kind of park that exists in neighborhoods the city builds something in because it was supposed to and then forgets about. In 1989, Lawrence Loggins was 17 years old. And in that park in a city that was grinding through one of the most violent decades in its recorded history, he killed a man named Gregory Freeman. He said it was self-defense.
The court heard him and then the court disagreed or disagreed enough. Loggins was convicted and sent away. He would not walk out again for 20 years. Now, Gregory Freeman, I need you to hold that name, not because the record gives us a full biography of the man, because it does not, but because of what the name was attached to.
Because on the south side of Chicago in 1989, the name Freeman carried a very specific kind of weight. Jerome Freeman, known everywhere as King Shorty, the King of the Black Disciples, one of the oldest and most deeply rooted street organizations Chicago has ever produced. He had been running it since 1974, commanding loyalty across Englewood, Gresham, Grand Crossing, block by block, corner by corner.
When King Shorty was locked up himself in 1990, one year after Gregory Freeman died in that park, he retained powerful symbolic authority, though day-to-day operations on the street were largely run by Marvel Thompson. You do not hold the title king on Chicago’s Southside for nearly four decades by being easy to replace.
Gregory Freeman was his relative. There is no version of that fact in this world under these rules that does not carry consequences. You do not kill the king’s family and close that account. Not in Englewood. Not inside a structure where loyalty is the only real currency and memory does not expire. The southside keeps receipts.
Not in filing cabinets and people. King Shorty died in prison in 2012, nearly four decades as king. When he died, the Black Disciples needed someone to hold the top position. The highest ranking member still standing on the outside. That someone was Lawrence Loggins. The man who stepped into the position of highest ranking black disciple after the king died was the same man who had killed the king’s relative in a southside park 23 years before.
I want to be careful here. The world does not usually work that neatly and Chicago Southside especially does not. What I am saying is that the shadow from Low Park in 1989 did not disappear when Lawrence Loggins walked out of prison in 2009. It waited. It followed him through a decade of silence.
And in 2012, when the throne opened up, it found somewhere to land. And when Big Law sat down on that throne, he sat down carrying everything the throne already held, including the weight of a name from a park that nobody visits. That is the thing about first crimes. They do not stay where you put them. 2009, the doors of an Illinois correctional facility opened and Lawrence Loggins walked out.
He had been inside for 20 years. A lot changes in 20 years. The southside changed. The black disciples changed. Chicago changed. The city had cycled through mayors, through scandals, through whole generations of people who had been born, grown up, and built lives in the time he was counting days inside a cell. The next 10 years, according to every record I could find, nothing.
No arrests, no new charges, no updated photograph in the Chicago Police Department’s database. For 10 years after walking out of prison, the man who would become the highest ranking black disciple in Chicago left almost no footprint in the official system at all. Which if you know anything about how law enforcement tracks people who come out of long gang related sentences is not nothing. That is a choice.
a deliberate, sustained, daily choice about where you go, what you do, and who sees you doing it. What Logans was doing, at least in part, was working as a violence interrupter for Ceasefire Illinois, an organization built around a public health approach to street violence, not police, not social work in any traditional sense.
Violence interrupterss are people with credibility on both sides of the line. People who can walk into a situation that is three seconds from turning lethal and because of exactly who they are, make it not turn lethal. The credential is not a degree. The credential is the life you already lived. Tio Hardman ran Ceasefire for years before going on to lead Violence Interruptors Incorporated.
He spoke about Loggins after his death. He said Lawrence had interrupted at least 20 conflicts that could have turned deadly. And then he said something I have not been able to move past. Lawrence had another side. He was a peacemaker. A peacemaker. This is the part that took me the longest to understand. I do not think peacemaker and king of the black disciples are as contradictory as they sound from the outside.
In Englewood, credibility is not given. It is accumulated through very specific kinds of experience and not all of it clean. A man can walk into a burning situation and make people stand down precisely because they know what he is capable of. Tio Hardman was not eulogizing a saint. He was describing a man whose history, his very specific and violent history, was the exact thing that gave him the standing to stop other people’s violence.
Which means every conflict Lawrence Loggins walked into and deescalated was also an advertisement, a reminder, a quiet announcement to the street of exactly what he was and what he had been. People who knew him had words for him that the record never did. The question that will not sit still was big law trying to escape 10 years no arrests an antiviolence organization invisible to a system that should have had eyes on him.
Was he building something different? Or was he doing what the southside sometimes teaches men to do? Hold very still. Keep your name out of every system that would use it against you. Wait for the world to recalibrate around you. I have no way to prove this. He made himself invisible to the system. He could not make himself invisible to the street. The system loses your face.
The street keeps your name. And on the south side, those are not the same archive. What I know is that in 2012, the question stopped mattering. King Shorty died. The Black Disciples needed a king and the street did not ask Lawrence Loggins whether he wanted the job. 2012 is when the story changes direction. King Shorty was dead.
The Black Disciples had not had a strong centralized hand at the top for years before that. Marvel Thompson, who had been holding the operation together as a de facto leader, was swept up in a federal case in 2004. The organization had been running without a real center for nearly a decade.
And into that vacancy in 2012 stepped Lawrence Loggins because the street had been holding his name in reserve for exactly this kind of moment. A decade of silence had not erased him. It had preserved him. What Big Law inherited was not an empire. It was the memory of one. At their height, the Black Disciples had somewhere around 15,000 members across Chicago’s Southside.
Strict hierarchy, clear chain of command. Orders came from the top. Money flowed up, protection flowed down, and anyone who broke the structure paid for it. Sometimes violently, sometimes permanently. That model had produced one of the most organized street operations in American urban history for nearly three decades. By 2012, the organization had fractured into many autonomous independent factions.
Each running its own corners, its own deals, its own rules. Nobody paying street tax to anybody above them because there was nobody above them they recognized anymore. The younger generation, the one that had come up after the federal sweeps, after King Shorty went behind bars, after the whole central structure dissolved, they had never known the black disciples with a functioning center.
Independent operation was not a rebellion for them. It was just Tuesday. Big Law looked at all of this and decided it needed to be fixed. According to the Chicago Sun Times, what Loggins wanted was to restore what the paper described as a corporate governance structure to the organization. Leaders issuing orders through a rigid hierarchy, money flowing upward through street tax and low-level members who ignored orders facing the same consequences the organization had always used to enforce itself.
I kept having to remind myself of this. On paper, this logic is not crazy. Any organization that has fragmented, corporate, political, criminal, it does not matter, faces the same fundamental problem when someone tries to pull it back together. The center wants control. The edges want to keep the autonomy they built while the center was absent.
That tension is older than Chicago and it does not usually end quietly. The difference here is that the edges have guns and Big Law was trying to do this without his most obvious source of support at his side. His son, Lawrence Jr., known on the street as Lil Law, was 29 years old by the time his father was killed.
He led the Lamron faction, the set running Normal Avenue from 59th to 67th in Englewood. And he was sitting in prison on a 15-year sentence for attempted murder with no immediate path to the outside. So big law was doing this alone, trying to impose a structure on young men who had never operated under one in neighborhoods where memory of the old order had faded and resentment of anything that felt like control ran close to the surface.
The younger generation did not see a king returning. They saw an old head from a different era coming back to collect money they had earned under rules they had never agreed to. Written for a world that no longer existed outside of his memory. Big law was not wrong about power. He was wrong about which power still existed.
He was reading a map of a city that had changed its streets while he was away. That kind of arrangement does not stay comfortable and it does not stay quiet. The mold was set. The pressure was building and big law kept pushing. Wednesday, February the 6th, 2019. The kind of February day Chicago does without apology.
Cold, flat light, wind moving through Englewood like it owns the place. nothing in the air to suggest that anything particular was about to happen. Every time the ordinary surface of a day that ends in something irreversible. Sometime that afternoon, Big Law called a meeting. According to the Chicago Sun Times, citing a source close to the investigation, Loggins called junior members of the gang in and in the paper’s own words, chewed them out.
A source told the Sun Times that some police officials believe he was killed as a direct result of that meeting. That detail has never left me. The man who had spent years trying to rebuild a centralized structure, demanding street tax, demanding order, demanding that factions running themselves for a decade fall back into line.
That man called the people who resented him most into a room and told them again that things were going to change. What the gangster report described, drawing on sources close to the organization, was a man laying down the gauntlet, demanding unified operations, demanding that the old rules apply again in a world that had moved on from them.
what the room felt like by accounts of people who track these things. Heads nodding and behind the nodding a different calculation entirely. The meeting ended. The hours passed on the south side of Chicago in February. Hours passed the way they always do. Cold air, television, people going about the ordinary business of a Wednesday evening. Nothing announces itself.
Nothing prepares you. 9:08 p.m. 7100 block of South Union Avenue, Englewood, right in front of his own home. Lawrence Loggins was standing near his Nissan Rogue, the SUV parked at the curb when the shots came. He was hit in the head. When police arrived, he was found face down across the driver’s seat. Kenneth Brown, his right-hand man, the person closest to him in the organization, was in that vehicle.
Brown took what the reports describe as a graze wound. He survived. The shooter ran across an empty lot on foot through the dark. He got into a gray infinity sedan waiting on the other side of that lot and then the car was gone. No one has been arrested for the murder of Lawrence Loggins.
Not that night, not in the weeks that followed, not in the months, not in the years. At the time of this video, no one has been publicly charged with standing outside Big Law’s home on South Union Avenue on the night of February the 6th, 2019 and killing the highest ranking black disciple in Chicago. That absence, the complete sustained absence of any arrest tells its own story.
Whether it speaks to a professional killing or a street killing where everyone who knows anything has reasons not to speak in Englewood, silence like that is also a decision. Chicago police responded hard and fast. Anthony Googlme, the department’s chief spokesman, said publicly that investigators were working to prevent what he called revenge killings.
Officers were deployed to the funeral. The entire southside was put on watch. The department braced for a war. The large-scale war they feared did not materialize, at least not in the way they expected. The street absorbed it quietly, the way the southside sometimes absorbs things the outside world expects to explode.
352 candles were lit for him on a memorial site. People who had known him left tributes. One word came back again and again across tribute after tribute from people who had grown up in the same streets as this man. Kind. I do not know what to do with that word sitting next to everything else in this story. But it is there in the record written by real people who knew him next to the 20ear sentence and the throne and the afternoon meeting and the gray infinity disappearing into a February night.
That is when the question underneath all of this finally surfaces because the street had one answer for what happened on South Union Avenue and the FBI a year and a half later had a different one. The streets gave the murder a memory. The FBI gave it a shipment. The streets had their version.
In 1989, Big Law had killed Gregory Freeman, the relative of King Shorty in Low Park. 30 years passed and in the winter of 2019 in the same city, the King of the Black Disciples was shot in the head outside his own home. Old-timers in Englewood drew the line immediately. According to the Gangster Report, they called it Shorty’s vengeance from the grave.
Whether that is true, whether anyone put a gun in someone’s hand 30 years later over a debt that old, I cannot tell you. What I can tell you is that the southside believed it. And in Englewood, what the neighborhood believes becomes part of the record, whether the courts agree or not. The FBI had a different one. Shortly before Big Law was killed, a shipment had arrived in Chicago from the Gulf cartel.
Narcotics and firearms. According to federal records, Big Law and his right-hand man, Kenneth Brown, had planned to move the shipment to a secure location. The shipment went missing. All of it. In a federal criminal complaint filed in July of 2020, an FBI affidavit recorded what Brown had told a wired informant that he believed Big Law’s murder was directly related to those narcotics and those firearms.
Brown matters in this story for one reason. He was the man sitting next to Big Law when the shooting happened. He survived and what he said afterward changed the shape of everything. According to the affidavit, Brown personally recovered a portion of the missing package and collected $450,000 to pay in the affidavit’s own framing.
The dude in Mexico. According to a 2017 DEA unclassified report, the relationship between Mexican cartels and Chicago street organizations is described as ad hoc, purely business. Whoever buys at the right price, no formal alliance, no loyalty beyond the transaction. And when a transaction goes wrong at that level, someone answers for it.
The cartel does not send a strongly worded letter, the part that will not close. The meeting happened in the afternoon. The shipment had gone missing before that. Both of those facts live inside the same day. One person pulled a trigger and two completely different sets of people may have had a reason to want it done.
No one has been arrested, which means neither map has been officially closed. and both still have Big Law’s name on them. Big Law died on a Wednesday night. By the end of that week, the Black Disciples had already started filling the vacuum. Not in weeks, in days. Highranking members moved immediately to keep things running.
Kenneth Brown, the man who had been sitting next to big law when the shooting happened, the man who survived, stepped into what a federal affidavit would later describe as the role of top advisor and supply lieutenant. The organization did not pause. It reconfigured because organizations like this are not built around a single person.
They are built around a position and the position does not grieve. Big Law had not been rebuilding a structure. He had been holding the perception of one. The moment he was gone, every faction leader who had nodded through those meetings, every man who had paid the tax while resenting it, every person who had calculated quietly and waited, they all started moving toward the same open space at the same time.
By April of 2019, a man named Darnell McMiller had walked out of federal prison after eight years on a drug conviction. His street name was murder. Within weeks of his release, he was sitting in a secret meeting with senior Black Disciples members declaring that he had the backing to lead. Less than three months after Big Law was killed, not a period of mourning, a competition for what he left behind.
By July of 2020, the Department of Justice had charged 23 people connected to the organization’s leadership in Englewood. The DOJ’s own press release named McMiller as the current leader of the Chicago Black Disciples. Brown was charged alongside him. Within 17 months of Big Law’s death, many of the highranking figures who moved to fill the vacuum, including Brown and McMiller, soon found themselves either cooperating with the FBI or facing federal charges.
Big Law had held something together for seven years. Not cleanly, not without enemies, but held. The moment he was gone, every scene pulled apart at once. That is not coincidence. That is what a center does. You only understand what it was holding when it is no longer there. The official public record of Lawrence Loggins is almost non-existent.
One line in a gang statistics report, a newspaper article where his name appears because of how he died and who killed him. No updated mugsh shot on file with the Chicago Police Department. No Wikipedia page. almost no widely circulated public record with a confirmed recent face attached. That used to bother me more than it does now because I think the archive was never the point.
The question this story turns on is the simplest one I know. Can a man escape the first crime of his life? Big Law had 10 years to try. He walked out of prison in 2009. He made himself invisible to a system that should have had eyes on him. He interrupted 20 conflicts that could have turned deadly. For a decade, he was as close to gone as a man like him could get.
And then the street called and he answered. He could not disappear from the throne. Not because he was weak, because the very things that made him capable of disappearing from the system, the discipline, the silence, the credibility built from a lifetime of violence were exactly what the street had been saving him for.
You do not escape a role by living it quietly. You perfect it. And once he sat on the throne, the old debts, the young resentments, the missing shipments, they all started moving toward the same car on the same night. 352 candles, one word written again and again by the people who knew him. Kind. The system barely has a face for him, but Englewood does.
Because Englewood never forgets the things the archive refuses to write down.