Chief Poppa: The Ghost Who Built One of Chicago’s Largest Stone Hoods and Left No Trace – HT
South side of Chicago, a neighborhood that stretches nearly 50 blocks from the back of the yard streets of New City all the way down into the heart of Englewood. More than 20 separate sets, all flying the same flag, all claiming the same name, Black Pea Stone Nation. They call this territory Mottown.
And in 2026, Mottown is still split in half. Two factions, one park as the line, two names that have been at war with each other. Not always with guns, not always with bodies, but always with distance, always with tension for longer than most of the people currently holding those corners have been alive. On one side of Sherman Park, Papa Heads on the other, key to crazy.
Two belief systems, two territories, one hood. Here is everything the official record knows about the man whose name the first faction carries. His name is Papa Stone, also known as Chief Papa, also known as Gman Papa Stone. The streets have several names for him, and the archives have none. No arrest record, no photograph, no real name in any publicly available document from the city of Chicago, the Cook County Court system, or the federal government.
Just a name, a territory. Abedine through low east of Sherman Park. A faction that carries his ideology like a banner into corners. He may or may not still be alive to see, and a rift that has run down the middle of Mottown for decades, anchored to his name on one side and a different name on the other. The question is not who Papa Stone was.
The question is how a man with zero presence in the official record could build something large enough, real enough that the people who came after him are still dividing over what he stood for. That answer starts the way most things on Chicago’s Southside start. Not where you’d expect. It starts with a word. The word is Mo.
Not a nickname, not a shortorthhand, not the kind of name a group of guys picked off the top of their heads one afternoon on a corner in Englewood. A declaration to understand Mottown, what it is, why it exists, why the rift that runs through it cuts as deep as it does, you have to go back to a man most people have never heard of.
A man who never set foot in back of the yards, who died decades before the first stone ever claimed that territory. who built in 1913 in Newark, New Jersey, a religious movement that would travel to Chicago, transform a street gang, and eventually put his name on one of the largest hoods on the south side.
His name was Timothy Drew. The streets called him Noble Drew Ali. Alli taught that black Americans were not black at all. That underneath the identity imposed on them was something older. A Moorish lineage that predated the slave trade, predated colonization, predated every system built to make them forget who they were.
Stop answering to any name that isn’t your own. Call yourselves Moorish Americans. The Moorish Science Temple of America spread across Chicago. a theology built not on victimhood but on ancient lineage. Alli died in 1929. His idea did not. Fast forward to 1972. A man named Jeff Fort, co-founder of the Black Pea Stone Nation, the most organized street organization Chicago had ever produced, was sentenced to federal prison.
He went in as a gang leader. He came out as something else entirely. Four years later, 1976, Fort walked out of Levvenworth Penitentiary and made an announcement that nobody on the southside was prepared for. He had converted to Islam. He had studied the Moorish Science Temple. And the organization he co-founded, the Black Pea Stones, more than 7,000 strong across the south and west sides, was no longer just a gang.
It was now the Elukin tribe of the Moorish Science Temple of America. Fort put it this way. We now understand the symbolic meaning of the stones as the cornerstone of the holy cabba in the city of Mecca. Every member of the black piece stones, every set, every corner, every OG going back to the Blackstone Rangers days was now expected to carry this identity.
The rules changed, the name changed, and members started calling themselves something new. Mo, short for Moorish. A theology routed through a New Jersey preacher, filtered through a federal penitentiary, handed down to every man on every corner, flying that five-pointed star. Now, go back to 1971. A young man named Charles Hardwick, they called him Teddy Bear, which tells you everything about how old he was, moved into the back of the yard’s neighborhood on the southwest side.
He was running with the King Cobra Stones, a founding chapter of the Black Pea Stones. They followed the demographic tied in as white families moved out. The slow reshaping of the city block by block, year by year. These young men, these Cobra Stones who called themselves Moors, who carried that identity into a new neighborhood, they put a name on what they were building. Motown.
Not a neighborhood name, not a street designation on any city map. A declaration carried by a teenager into a back of the yards block and planted there like a flag. This is the world Papa Stone eventually helped define. And this is the name, this single two syllable word that a man sitting in a federal penitentiary right now used decades later to break it all apart.
It was not optional when fork came out of Levvenworth and announced that the Black Pea Stones were now the El Rukan tribe of the Moorish Science Temple of America that every member was expected to align with this new identity, these new rules, this new theology. He was not making a suggestion.
Jeff Fort did not make suggestions. He made decisions. And if you were a stone, a decision from Jeff Fort was a decision you found a way to live with. Most people did. One man didn’t. His name was Henry Cogwell. The streets called him Mickey. And Mickey Cogwell was not a small figure in this organization.
He was one of the most consequential men in it. Official spokesman for the entire Black P Stone Alliance since 1968. The man who walked into Richard Nixon’s inaugural ball in 1969 as a representative of the Stone Nation, Jeff Fort had been invited. But it was Cogwell who went through that door. Cogwell ran the King Cobra Stones, the organization whose chapter had planted the flag in back of the yards in 1971.
His blessing had helped to legitimate that ground. His name was on the structure that Teddy Bear Hardwick had carried into that neighborhood. In 1976, Fort invited Cogwell to join the El Rukans. Cogwell declined. No hard feelings, at least not on the surface, just a no. A quiet refusal from a man who had been in this organization since his earliest days, who had his own way of running things, his own people, his own corner of the city.
The new theology didn’t fit. The new structure didn’t fit. Mickey Cogwell was not a man who bent easily. And Jeff Fort was not a man who heard a no and let it go. 11 months passed. February 25th, 1977, 3:45 in the morning. Mickey Cogwell was shot and killed in Auburn Gresham. the manner of it, the location, the timing, the way it was done.
Told the streets everything they needed to know. He did not get up. Jeff Fort had an alibi. No one was ever charged. No one was ever convicted. The case went nowhere. And in the way that certain things on the southside are understood without ever being said out loud, people drew their own conclusions. I’m not going to tell you Jeff Fort ordered that killing.
The courts didn’t establish that. The record doesn’t confirm it. Cogwell said no to Fort in March of 76. He was dead by February of 77. And Fort had also around that same period moved against another founding stone chapter, the Titanic Stones. For similar reasons, men who didn’t follow the new direction had a way of disappearing from the organization.
Sometimes quietly, sometimes not. The streets have always had their own verdict on what that sequence of events meant. The oral history never called it anything other than what it looked like. The Cobra Stones responded the only way left to them. They began calling themselves the Mickey Cobras, a name that would be formerly adopted in the years that followed in memory of the man who had led them in defiance of the organization that had taken him.
And they walked out of the black peace nation off the flag away from everything they had built alongside that alliance since the beginning. Mottown, the territory the Cobrastones had carved out in back of the yards, the ground they had named after their own identity, lost its Black Pea stone connection for the first time.
1977, the same year Jeff Fort finished remaking the stones in his own image, he had without designing it this way, or maybe exactly by designing it this way, burned down one of its most important outposts. The man who gave the Moe’s their name had just sent the original MO out the door. Mtown went quiet.
The name stayed. The stone was gone from it. For more than a decade, that territory drifted. Other crews moved through. The ground hails, but the flag did not until a different fort came to take it back. The man who came to reclaim Mottown had a name that told you everything about who he was before he ever opened his mouth.
Weta Valenuela, known on the streets as Wakia Fort. He was the son of Jeff Fort, which is how the streets knew him, even if that last name never appeared on his federal indictment. He did not inherit a house or a business or a piece of real estate. He inherited an ideology, a flag, a network of loyalty that ran from the south side of Chicago all the way to a federal penitentiary and a last name that on certain blocks in this city carried more weight than any badge or title. the legitimate world could offer.
In the late 1980s to early 1990s, Wita moved on Mottown. The Mickey Cobras had held that ground since 77. Since the night Mickey Cogwell went down in Auburn Gresham and his people walked out of the Stone Alliance and carried the territory with them for more than a decade, the name Motown had existed without the Black Pea Stones in it.
a moor town with no mo. Wita changed that. He pushed the cobras out set by set, block by block. The way these things actually happen, not in one dramatic confrontation, but in the slow, grinding accumulation of pressure and position until one day the ground simply belongs to someone else. The Black Pea Stones return to Mottown.
And at the center of that return at 54th in Laughaflin, Wakita established his headquarters. He called himself the prince. That is what the Tribune reported, a Chicago gang crimes investigator, describing how Wakita, the man the streets called Fort Sun, presented himself to the world. the prince of the black pea stone nation positioned to lead the organization after his father’s imprisonment in a world built entirely on hierarchy calling yourself the prince is either supreme confidence or supreme delusion with Wakita it appears to have been the
former the operation he ran out of Mottown was not small $20,000 a day according to federal prosecutors and Chicago Tribune reporting at at the time, a narcotics distribution network, moving that kind of money through the neighborhood every single day. He wasn’t just holding territory, he was running a business.
And like his father, he was willing to use whoever was available to run it, a charge that would follow him all the way into federal court, becoming one of the two counts he eventually plead guilty to in March of 1997. The other count, conspiracy to distribute cocaine and cocaine base. He was sentenced in June of that same year. 360 months in federal prison, 30 years, $12,000 in fines for a man who called himself the prince.
The ending read a lot more like a cautionary tale than a dynasty. And before sentencing, according to a Chicago gang crimes investigator speaking to the Tribune, Wita said something that has stayed with this story ever since. I was born into this. I had no other choice. I have thought about that sentence a long time. It is an excuse.
The kind of thing you say when you are standing in front of a federal judge trying to explain how a person ends up running a federal narcotics case before his 30th birthday. It is also simply true. His father built this. His family was this. The identity he carried, the prince title he claimed, the territory he reclaimed, none of it was something he selected from a list of options. He was handed it at birth.
He accepted it. He ran with it until the federal government took 30 years of his life in return. Wateta Valenuela is in the record. Court documents, FBI files, tribune coverage. A federal case with the case number you can look up right now on any legal database. The system saw him. The system processed him.
The system wrote him down in full. And yet when the people of Mottown talk about who built that hood, who co-founded it, whose ideology still divides it today, they are not talking about Wita. They are talking about someone the system never once looked at. His name, as far as the streets are concerned, is Papa Stone, also called Chief Papa, also called Gman Papa Stone, also called Papa, also called Chief of the Town.
The oral history has several names for him. The publicly available archive has none. There is a thread on a Chicago street history forum. The title reads, “Papa, one of the co-founders of Mottown, not posted by a journalist, by someone who knew.” All Scoops Media, a channel that has documented Black Pea Stone history in more detail than most mainstream outlets ever attempted, described the Papa Heads faction this way.
One faction known as the Papa Heads dominates the area from Aberdine through Low. They have consistently aligned with the ideologies of Chief Papa, one of Mottown’s co-founders. A man who documents stone history under the name Big Money D, wrote something that stopped me. He wasn’t citing a document. He was remembering a neighbor.
The oldest stone, he wrote, lived in my building at 1310 East 64th Street. They called him Papa Stone. 1310 East 64th Street. Not a corner, not a block, a building, a specific address. An old man who lived there long enough to be called the oldest stone in the city. Remembered not by any court, not by any newspaper, but by someone who walked the same hallway.
That is the most concrete thing the record has on Papa Stone. A building number, a neighbor’s memory, just where he lived, and what someone called him in that hallway. That is the record Papa Stone left. Not a document, a structure that is still standing. And yet, this man’s name anchors one half of a 50 block hood that has been divided over his ideology for longer than most of the people currently living in it have been alive.
WATA Venuela has a case number, a federal docket you can pull up right now, an FBI investigation, a tribune article, a sentencing transcript. The system built an entire architecture around documenting what he did because that is what the system does with the people it catches. It catches you and then it writes you down.
Every line that exists about Wakita and any official record exists because the system wanted to prosecute him. Papa Stone was never prosecuted. As far as the institutional world is concerned, Papa Stone was never even seen. Wita’s documentation is a product of his arrest. The prince has a paper trail because the paper trail is a trap.
And he walked into it at full speed, running his operation through a neighborhood until the federal government built a case thick enough to take 30 years of his life in return. Papa Stone never gave them anything to use. That is not nothing. That is a choice or a series of choices made over years that kept them out of every database, every court filing, every file the system builds on people it considers worth watching.
Whether by design or by discipline, he moved through this city differently than Wakita did. He helped build one of the largest stone hoods in Chicago, shaped something that half of Mottown still organizes itself around today. and left no evidence that the institutional world could ever pick up and carry into a courtroom.
The man with no record became the record people live by. The prince has 30 years in federal prison and a file the length of this city. The co-founder has a faction of people who have held his corner for decades. You tell me which one built something that lasted. The rift that Papa Stone’s name anchors runs down the middle of Mottown to this day.
The particular kind of tension that only forms when two people who built something together could not agree on what that something was for. Two chiefs, one hood, and a park in the middle that became the line. That is how Mottown settled into itself after Wakita’s return. Not in peace, but in partition. Papa Stone held the east side, Aberdine through low.
His people called themselves Papa Heads. The ideology they carried traced back to him, to whatever Chief Papa stood for, whatever he built, whatever philosophy he handed down to the people on his side of that park. Wakita held the West. 54th and Laughlin down to Paulina and May. His people ran under the banner of Kea crazy, key crazy, Y CK, Keahheads, depending on who you asked. Sherman Park was the line.
East of the park, Papa. West of the park, Kea. Further west of Ashlin, a third faction, the Rubes, the Reubenite Stones holding their own ground, carrying their own friction with both sides. Three subsections inside one hood. Three sets of loyalties running in parallel, occasionally crossing, rarely aligning cleanly.
The geography preserves the disagreement. Sherman Park is still the line. That is the only evidence that two different things were believed here, and it has been standing for decades. Jeff Fort had written a document called Malik’s lessons. Six requirements for a proper life that every Elukin member, every Mo was expected to follow.
A code of conduct rooted in the Islamic principles he adopted in prison. The rules were real. The expectations were real. And for most people in the organization, they were manageable. For some, they were not. There was a man the streets called Kabar, Kbar in some tellings. He was a stone general from Mottown, high ranking, embedded in the organization at a level most people on those blocks would never reach.
In the early 1990s, Cabal flipped not to another stone set, not to neutral ground, to the gangster disciples, specifically to no love city, the GD territory at 59th and Hallstead, Mottown’s most significant rival on the map. He is remembered, and this comes directly from people who track this history closely, as the highest ranking stone to ever flip in Chicago.
The reason he left, he could not follow the religious rules. No pork, no alcohol, the requirements Jeff Fort had built into Malik’s lessons, the code that was supposed to give the Moe’s their identity and discipline. Kabar could not keep them. And rather than pretend, he walked all the way to the opposition. The glue was also the blade.
Kabar is not a side story. He is the fracture made visible. And what happened to Kabar is in miniature exactly what happened to Mottown itself. Two co-founders, same flag, same word. And underneath the word, something that could not be reconciled. That division never healed. It just waited for the right moment to show itself again.
The rift that Papa Stone and Wakita left behind. The one that ran down Sherman Park and split Mottown into east and west into two belief systems that could not fully coexist. Did not disappear when they did. It went dormant. That is the word for it. Not resolved, not healed, dormant.
The way a fault line is dormant between earthquakes. And then something hits the right frequency and the line reasserts itself as if no time has passed at all. September 4th, 2016. A date that lives in street memory but not in any mainstream newspaper archive or public court record. A man known as General Nook was killed on Sangaman Street.
Sangaman Street is key to territory. Mottown in the days and weeks that followed tore itself open again. The same two factions, the same line, the same park dividing the same east side from the same west side. Papa Heads on one end, Kea Crazy on the other. Two names, the same ones that had been intensioned for decades, resurfacing as if no time had passed.
The people who watched it happen called it history repeating itself. But what happened in Mottown in 2016 was not a rhyme. It was a replication. The same line, the same sides. The split that Papa Stone and Wita had built into the foundation of that neighborhood did not need anyone to maintain it. Did not need anyone to explain it deliberately to the next generation.
It was already in the architecture. That is what 2016 revealed. Not a new conflict, an old one, the oldest one coming back through the same seams it had always occupied. 2016 is a quarter century after Wikita returned to Mottown. It is more than 40 years after the name was first planted in back of the yards. And the line that divided the hood was in exactly the same place it had always been.
Some things once built into the foundation of a place do not change. They become the place. Mottown is still there. 50 blocks give or take. back of the yards into Englewood. More than 20 sets, all still flying the Black P stone flag. The buildings are different. Some of the corners are different. The people holding them are younger than the rift that divides them.
But the rift is still there. Two sides of Sherman Park. Two factions carrying two names, standing in 2026 in the same positions they have always occupied. Everything else lives where it has always lived. In the people who were there, in the corners they still hold. In the name of a park that still means something specific to everyone on both sides of it.
In a building on East 64th Street that a man still remembers because of who used to live there. Mottown is still there. Papa Stone, whoever he was, wherever he is, is still there, too. The city never wrote him down. It never does.