Jeff “Angel” Fort: How Chicago’s Most Powerful Gang Lord Ended Up In America’s Deadliest Prison – HT

 

 

 

Somewhere in Colorado, there is a room made entirely of concrete. The man inside has been there for 20 years. He is 79 years old, and the United States government intends for him to die there. The place is called ADX Florence, administrative maximum facility. That’s the official name. What the inmates who survived it, the rare few who actually made it out, call it is something closer to a burial.

One former prisoner put it this way, “Nothing living, not so much as a blade of grass anywhere.” 22 hours a day, alone, near total isolation, not a handshake, not a real conversation, nothing. All right, y’all. I’ve read about a lot of prisons. Alcatraz, Rikers, Pelican Bay, Marion, the kind of places that make your skin crawl just looking at the floor plan.

But ADX Florence, that’s something else. Whole different category. A hole that wasn’t built just to punish you, it was built to erase you. Slow, quiet, complete. And trust me, that difference matters more than most people realize. He has been erased from public life since 2006. He has completed over 100 educational courses behind those walls.

 He has grandchildren he has never met. His name is Jeff Fort. To understand how he ended up here, you have to start with a phone call. The year is 1984. Jeff Fort, former street king of the South Side, a man who once commanded 7,000 soldiers from a single neighborhood, is sitting inside Federal Correctional Institution Bastrop, Texas, serving 13 years for drug trafficking.

Most men in that position accept their irrelevance. The streets move on, the phones stop ringing, new names take the corners. Damn, that’s how it always goes. Jeff Fort kept calling. Every day from behind those walls, using a telephone system he knew was being recorded. Fort ran El Rukns like a CEO who just relocated to a less desirable office. His lieutenants reported in.

Business continued. And somewhere in the course of those daily calls, in 1985, Fort heard something that changed everything. Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam, one of the most prominent Muslim figures in America, had received $5 million from the Libyan government. An interest-free loan, technically, but $5 million from a government the United States had already designated a state sponsor of terror, flowing to an American citizen.

Fort was recorded responding to this news on the prison phone. Not with outrage, with jealousy. The El Rukns, him reasoned, had something Farrakhan didn’t. They weren’t preachers, they were soldiers, and soldiers could offer something far more useful than speeches. What Fort proposed from behind those walls was this.

El Rukns would carry out violent acts on American soil, whatever the Libyan government needed done, in exchange for two and a half million dollars. Just sit with that for a second. A gang leader in a Texas prison cell trying to sell his organization as hired muscle, soldiers for pay, to a foreign government the United States had already designated a state sponsor of terror.

On March 11th, 1986, three El Rukn members, Leon McAnderson, Rico Crenshaw, and a man named Charles Knox, boarded a flight to Tripoli and sat down with Libyan military officials. See, the offer was formally on the table. Then it got stranger. Fort’s general on the outside, a man named Melvin Mays, set up a three-way phone call.

One end, Fort inside his prison cell in Bastrop. The other end, Tripoli, Libya. According to testimony given at trial, Fort opened the call the way he opened everything since his conversion to Islam. Salame alaikum. “Peace be with you.” Libyan officials, Gaddafi referred to in El Rukn coded communications as young friend, received that greeting from a Chicago gang leader sitting in a federal prison cell.

On a line he knew was being monitored. The code El Rukns used was a mix of Arabic and Chicago street slang. Plans to blow up an airplane were discussed in it calmly during recorded calls. Federal agents recorded over 3,500 hours of those calls as the key recordings were eventually played for a jury. A key government witness on the coded conversations was Tramell Davis, 34 years old, a senior figure in Fort’s organization.

He turned witness in exchange for $10,000 for his family. In one recording, Mays discussed using military-grade weapons against law enforcement. Fort, on the other end of the line, could be heard laughing. Just laughing. A man in a prison cell laughing on a line the FBI is recording. Either that’s the most reckless thing you’ve ever heard, or it’s something more unsettling.

 A man who had genuinely stopped recognizing the phone line, the prison, the federal government on the other end as a legitimate authority over him. Not untouchable, something closer to sovereign. But none of that explains how he got there. That it doesn’t tell you how a boy who dropped out before 10th grade from a neighborhood called Woodlawn on Chicago’s South Side became the kind of man who could pick up a federal prison telephone and dial Libya.

For that, you have to go back, way back. Aberdeen, Mississippi. Then a train north, then Chicago. The Fort family arrived in Woodlawn in 1955. Jeff was 8 years old. His father had found work at US Steel, one of hundreds of thousands of black families making the same calculation during those years. The South had nothing left to offer.

The North had factories, wages, brutal winters, and at least the theoretical possibility of a different life. Woodlawn, when the Forts arrived, was in the middle of becoming something else. In 1950, the area was still a mixed neighborhood, roughly 40% black, still carrying traces of a working-class stability it would never quite hold on to.

16 years later, by 1966, it was 98% black with 21% of residents on public assistance, three times the city average. That transformation didn’t happen by accident. Landlords illegally subdivided apartments into what they called kitchenettes. One room partitioned into two, two into four. Rents doubled, maintenance abandoned.

The University of Chicago, a few blocks north, was expanding. Urban renewal projects cleared the way for it. And in Chicago, urban renewal projects always seem to clear the same kinds of neighborhoods, the ones that couldn’t fight back. Now, let me be clear, none of that excuses what came later. None of it. But something was happening in Woodlawn during those years that matters if you want to understand what Fort built afterward.

Every institution that was supposed to protect that neighborhood, the city, the landlords, the university, the law, had already shown people exactly what side it was on. And Fort was the kind of kid who noticed that early. 12 years old and already paying attention. Already keeping score. The conclusion he drew and kept drawing for the next six decades was this.

Official authority does not protect, it manages. And if you cannot trust it to protect you, then you build protection yourself. Structure by structure, title by title, chain of command by chain of command. At some point, that stopped being strategy and became something more instinctual. Safety and control were the same thing.

And to be without control was to be erasable. That equation, formed in a dissolving neighborhood before he was a teenager, would become the operating system of everything that followed. Jeff Fort dropped out of Hyde Park High School after ninth grade. He was not slow, he was not illiterate. By every account, even then, he was unusually perceptive.

 The kind of kid who read rooms the way other people read books. He just had no particular reason to stay in one. The place was called Illinois State Training School for Boys at St. Charles, built in 1902. Originally designed as a rural farm, a place where troubled boys would learn discipline through agriculture and fresh air. That vision aged about as well as you’d expect.

It was there, sometime around 1959, that Jeff Fort met Eugene Bull Hairston. Fort was 12 years old. What they built together inside that institution started with a name, the Blackstone Rangers, after the street back in Woodlawn, where Fort’s family lived. It started as protection.

 Two kids in a facility full of bigger, older, harder boys deciding it was better to organize than to be picked off alone. There’s nothing romantic about that. I want to be clear. It wasn’t ideology. It wasn’t politics. It was arithmetic. But, here’s the part that surprises people every time. The thing Jeff Fort turned out to be uniquely, almost unnervingly, gifted at was not violence. It was diplomacy.

Back on the streets of Woodlawn, as the Rangers grew through the early 1960s, Fort built alliances. He mediated between gangs that had been going at each other for years. And he brought rivals to the same table. He negotiated. That’s how they started calling him Angel. Not because he was gentle, but because he could make people stop swinging long enough to see the bigger picture.

 He gave shoes to kids who didn’t have any. When he walked past elementary schools in Woodlawn, children ran to the fence just to watch him go by. By the mid-1960s, that skill had built something no one had seen before on Chicago’s South Side. When the Rangers came back to Woodlawn, they were different. Hairston led. Fort followed.

That was their arrangement, at least on paper. But, what was becoming clear even then was that Fort had something Hairston didn’t. And it wasn’t toughness. It was patience. Through the early 1960s, while rival gangs fought over corners and parking lots, you know, Fort was doing something nobody else on the South Side was doing.

He was talking to them. Sitting down with the leaders of gangs that had been enemies for years. Finding common ground. Building alliances that should not, by any logic, have held together. By 1965, the Blackstone Rangers had absorbed 21 separate gangs into a single organization. 5,000 members. To put that in perspective, the Chicago Police Department at the time had somewhere between 10 and 12,000 officers.

 Fort had nearly half that number operating under a single chain of command on the South Side alone. They started calling him Angel during this period. Not as a joke. As a title. The man who could end a war with a conversation. The man other gang leaders trusted to broker peace. That reputation and the network it built one would turn out to be the most dangerous thing Jeff Fort ever created.

In 1966, Eugene Hairston went to prison. Fort took the wheel. And what he inherited was already massive. What he built from it was something Chicago had never seen. By the early 1970s, the Black Peace Stone Nation, renamed, reorganized, Fort’s in every meaningful sense, had over 7,000 members under his direct command.

Estimated annual income, $4 million a year from extortion, trafficking, and what you might generously call protection arrangements. One of the largest street gang organizations in American history. And then, the federal government found out about him. And instead of arresting him, they wrote him a check. This is the part of the story I genuinely could not have invented if I tried.

1967. While the federal Office of Economic Opportunity, the engine room of Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty, approved a grant for a job training program in Woodlawn. Administered through a community organization called the Woodlawn Organization, run by Reverend Arthur Brazier. The grant was just under $1 million.

$957,000 to be exact. The man hired to run it at $6,000 a year as center chief was Jeff Fort. Let that register. The United States federal government, knowing full well who Jeff Fort was, looked at him and decided the best use of nearly a million dollars was to put him in charge of a youth jobs program. Mayor Richard J. Daley was furious.

 He blocked the program for over two months. Refused to sign off on the director’s appointment. Stalled at every turn. Daley had his faults, um, and there were many, but he read this situation correctly. He was overruled. What followed was exactly what you would expect. Time sheets were falsified. The program facilities became gambling operations.

 Substance abuse went unaddressed. And the extortion that had been running before the grant kept right on running. $5 to $8,000 a week collected from dealers and vendors in Stone territory, while federal poverty dollars sat in the same organizational account. By the summer of 1968, a Senate subcommittee had seen enough. Senator John McClellan, a man who had built his career going after organized crime, convened hearings on the Woodlawn program.

Jeff Fort was subpoenaed to testify. He showed up on July 9th, 1968, with his attorney, Marshall Patner. The committee asked his name. You Fort answered. They asked for his address. Patner instructed him not to respond without the right to cross-examine witnesses. The committee chairman denied the request. Fort looked at the room. He stood up.

 He raised his fist. And he walked out. There is a photograph of that moment. Fort at the table, fists clenched, jaw set, eyes forward. No speech. No statement. Just a raised fist and a man who had decided this proceeding had nothing to offer him. I’ve looked at that photograph more times than I can count. What I keep coming back to is this.

He didn’t storm out. He raised his fist first. That’s not anger. That’s a statement. The statement of a man who had already decided, long before that room, that the legitimacy of everyone in it was a performance. And he wasn’t going to perform back. In 1972, you he was convicted of contempt of Congress and misusing federal funds.

Five years. He served them. He came back. And when he came back, he was someone else entirely. When Jeff Fort walked out of prison in 1976, he went to Milwaukee. He joined the Moorish Science Temple, a movement rooted in black nationalism and Islamic doctrine, active in America since the 1920s. He took a new name, Chief Abdullah Malik Kaaba.

Then he rebuilt the organization from the name up. The Black Peace Stone Nation became the El Rukn Tribe of the Moorish Science Temple. El Rukn, an Arabic word, the cornerstone, the foundation. He recast the hierarchy from scratch. Imam at the top, himself, with generals below, and officer muftis, ambassadors, soldiers at the base.

 He was not swapping labels. While he was replacing one entire symbolic system with another. Gang language, gang titles, gang identity translated wholesale into a theological framework. One that was considerably harder to prosecute. In early 1977, Fort purchased the old Oakwood Theater at 3947 South Drexel Avenue.

 Rechristened it the El Rukn Grand Major Temple. A French Renaissance movie palace, empty for years, converted into the headquarters of the most structured criminal organization in Chicago’s history. A building designed to make ordinary people feel like they were somewhere grand. Re-purposed by a man who had been engineering that feeling since he was 12 years old.

Those who entered addressed Fort by title, not name. What Fort was building was not a gang. It was a counter-state. Complete with theology, titles, one in a chain of command that answered to one man. The only thing it lacked was the one thing all states require. Legitimacy that exists outside the person who declared it.

That was the flaw in the architecture. And it would take another decade for anyone, including Fort, to see it. In 1981, he ordered a killing. A charge he would later be convicted of in Cook County State Court. In 1983, federal agents arrested him again. Drug trafficking. 13 years. They sent him to Bastrop, Texas.

 And that, as it turned out, was exactly where the worst of it began. The trial lasted 7 weeks. When they handed the case to the jury in November 1987, 12 people walked into deliberations with thousands of hours of recorded phone calls. You know, they coded language only one government witness could fully translate.

 And a story so strange that even the prosecutors, by that point, sometimes seemed like they couldn’t quite believe what they were describing. The jury deliberated for 5 and 1/2 days. Throughout the trial, the courtroom had been packed with El Rukn members, Islamic garb, sunglasses indoors, filling every available seat. At one point, when a federal marshal tried to get Fort to move at the end of a session, Fort ignored him.

 The marshal repeated himself. Fort ignored him again. When the marshal finally put a hand on Fort’s shoulder, Fort turned and stared at him. His followers stood up. Some of them yelled, “Yeah, let’s do it the hard way.” A sergeant named Daniel Brannigan, a man who had been clashing with Jeff Fort since their school days, stepped forward.

 This he said quietly, “Jeff, don’t do this. If you do, a lot of people will get hurt.” Fort looked at him and called it off. That is a federal courtroom. In 1987, a man whose calls had been recorded for 3 years, whose own security chief had just finished testifying against him, and he was still commanding a room. The jury came back with guilty verdicts on all major counts.

 The judge sentenced Fort to an additional 80 years, consecutive to the 13 he was already serving. They weren’t done. In 1988, Fort was convicted of a separate charge, ordering a killing back in 1981. 75 more years stacked on top. 13 + 80 + 75 = 168 years. He could send three men to Tripoli from a prison cell in Texas, like he couldn’t outlast the authority of the institution writing that number down. That’s the distinction.

 It’s written in consecutive sentences. Jeff Fort was 40 years old when that final number came down. It was, in every practical sense, a death sentence. In 2006, federal authorities transferred him to ADX Florence, near total isolation. No meaningful contact with other inmates. Guards who watch but do not speak.

 The conditions that have broken other men in a matter of months. Fort has been living under them for 20 years. By late 2025, advocates reported that Fort has suffered a serious medical incident inside ADX, a fall that reportedly required emergency surgery. By December, they were still pushing for a transfer to a medical facility. In 2023, he applied for compassionate release under the First Step Act.

 He was 76 years old. In his filing, he wrote that most of his immediate family were gone, that he wanted to reconnect with his children, that he had grandchildren born after he was taken away, that he had never once met. US District Judge John Tharp denied the request. In his ruling, he described Fort’s bid as quixotic and noted that Fort had coordinated international terrorism plots from inside a Texas prison through daily collect calls to gang headquarters.

In 2026, Jeff Fort is 79 years old. He is in a room made of concrete. He has been in federal custody continuously since 1983. In some form of a cell for most of his adult life. Since 2006, all of it has been this room specifically. He has completed over 100 educational courses behind those walls. He has never given a media interview from inside those walls, not one on record.

The silence at this point is its own kind of answer. The El Rukns, the organization he built from a vacant movie theater on Drexel Avenue, the one with the Arabic name and the theological hierarchy, and the whole architecture of a reborn identity, ceased to exist as a street organization long ago.

 The Black P Stone Nation, the thing he built before that, still operates. Chicago, other cities. It does not need him. It has not needed him for a very long time. He built something so durable, it outlasted his ability to run it by decades. His daughter, Amina Matthews, uh became one of Chicago’s most well-known violence interrupters, walking into the neighborhoods where shots had just been fired, talking people down before they could retaliate.

She does with words what her father was called Angel for doing. On the outside, whether that is a legacy or a punishment, depends entirely on where you’re standing. No one is sending a card to Colorado. No one is pressing any clothes. After 20 years of concrete and silence, there are grandchildren he has never met.

Jeff Fort is one name. There are others. People the news cycle swallowed whole. Stories where the official version and the real version don’t quite line up. Names that ended up in rooms history stopped paying attention to. That’s what this channel is for. If this one earned it, leave a like. It helps more than you think.

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