Sam Mahdi: “King Solomon”, the Man Who Held 3,700 Vice Lords Together and Left One Sentence Behind – HT
His name was Sam Mahadi. He was also known as King Solomon. He was one of the senior leaders of one of Chicago’s most significant street organizations through the worst decade it ever faced. And for much of that decade, the only one still standing and almost no one outside those walls knows who he was.
Not a newspaper, not a book, not a Wikipedia article. In a city where power always leaves documentation, this man left almost none. I found him in one sentence. Sam Motti is also known as King Solomon. No context, no explanation, just a name that clearly meant something to the people who gave it to him and almost nothing to anyone looking from the outside.
Mahi in Islamic theology is the one guided by God, the figure who comes when everything else has failed. King Solomon built the temple. He was the wisest ruler three religions ever agreed on. One man in North Lawndale, Chicago, claimed both of those titles at the same time. The question isn’t why he chose those names.
The question is, what kind of world do you have to be living in for those names to be the only thing that makes sense? In 1960, North Lawndale had over 120,000 residents, churches on every corner. Roosevelt Road intact barber shops,armacies, lounges, intact commercial strips that told you a neighborhood was still alive. An old pharmacy owner remembered it this way.
There were a lot of jobs in those days because there was a lot of construction. Guys would get paid on Wednesday and get spruced up on Friday because there were five lounges. The conservative vice lords were founded in 1958, not on the street, but at the Illinois Youth Center in St. Charles, a state reformatory, by a teenager named Edwin Perry, who had looked the word vice up in a dictionary and decided it fit.
By 1964, CVL had absorbed more than 10 rival gangs and grown to roughly 10,000 members across 26 branches on Chicago’s west side. By 1967, they incorporated as a nonprofit, opened a teen center, a restaurant, an art gallery, received hundreds of thousands of dollars in foundation grants, Rockefeller, Ford, the Department of Labor.
They marched alongside Martin Luther King Jr. in the same North Lawndale neighborhood where they were headquartered. For one brief window, an organization born in a reformatory looked like it might become something else entirely. Then April 4th, 1968, King was shot in Memphis. The west side burned.
75% of North Lawndale’s businesses closed by 1970. The city didn’t rebuild them. It demolished the ruins and left the land empty. After that, the employer started leaving. International Harvester gone by 1969. Sears began its departure in 1974. Zenith Sunbeam gone before the decade was out. Unemployment in North Lawndale climbed from single digits to over 20%.
One in four properties became a vacant lot. In 1969, Bobby Gore, the man at the top of CVL, was convicted of murder and sentenced to 10 years. He would claim until his deathbed that he had been framed. That law enforcement had targeted him because of his power. Maybe that’s true, maybe it isn’t.
What is certain is that the gang, in the words of one account, openly reverted to violence the moment he was gone. On March 25th, 1970, Willie Johnson, known as Minister Rico, the third ranking leader of CVL, was arrested for fatally shooting his brother-in-law on the west side. He was 23 years old. He would spend the next 42 years incarcerated. 42 years. Long enough.
If you started at birth to become a person, have a career, raise a family, and watch your children become adults. By 1974, Alonso Alford, who had been CVL’s dominant president through the mid60s, was shot near his home and stepped down. Edwin Perry, the founder, was dead. Bobby Gore in prison, Rico in prison, Allfort gone.
CVL still had over 3,700 members. And no one from the founding generation was left standing in the room except one man. His name was Sam Mahadi. In the CVL hierarchy through the 1970s, he was the number two man. Bobby Gore was number one. Minister Rico was number three. Both number one and number three were in prison for most of the decade.
Which means that for the better part of 10 years, while North Lawndale was losing its employers, its population, its grocery stores, its structural bones, the senior active figure in an organization with over 3,700 members was Sam Motti. That’s not a footnote. That’s a decade. He was there for 10 years. I can’t tell you exactly what that looked like. Nobody wrote it down.
What I can tell you is the organization didn’t fall apart and he was the senior figure in the room while it didn’t. Gore had a film documentary made about him in 1970, the year after he went to prison, Lord Thing shot inside CVL’s world shown at film festivals. Rico would eventually have a sociology professor write an entire book about his life.
Gore has a Wikipedia article. Rico has court records, newspaper profiles, documented interviews. Sam Motti has a single line in a gang research database. In a city where power always leaves documentation through indictments, through news profiles, through the institutional paper trail that follows a man wherever he goes, I’ve started thinking the absence of that documentation isn’t a gap in the research. It is the research.
The fact that this man left almost none keeps telling me something about how he operated, what he avoided, what he understood about what happened when you made yourself too visible. Bobby Gore made CVL visible. He incorporated it as a nonprofit. He put it in front of cameras. He marched it alongside the most recognized civil rights leader in America.
He wanted the world to see what it could be. And the world responded by convicting him of murder and sending him away for 10 years. Whether that conviction was just or not, and Gore said until the end that it wasn’t, the lesson it delivered was unmistakable. Maybe Motti was paying attention. The only window we have into how he understood his own situation is the name or names. Motti doesn’t mean powerful.
It means guided. It’s a name that locates a person inside a larger purpose. Not I am strong enough to take this but I am here because this is what the moment requires. The theology doesn’t promise the mahi survival. It doesn’t promise recognition. It promises only that he appears when called when the institutions have failed completely when there is no other option.
King Solomon is a different register. A builder, yes, but specifically a man who ruled through complexity, who made deals, who understood that what was visible, the temple, the court, was only the surface of something harder to name. Not a conqueror, someone who knew how to construct permanence out of complicated circumstances.
Together, the names don’t say, “I am the strongest man in the room.” They say, “I understand what this moment requires, and I am the person for it.” North Lawndale in the 1970s was not a place that rewarded visibility. The neighborhood that had been home to over a 100,000 people in 1960 was at 60some thousand by the time the decade was over and still falling.
The factories were dark. The commercial strips were gone. The city’s response to the burning had not been investment. It had been demolition and absence. And CVL, the organization that had briefly touched the possibility of becoming a community institution, was now an organization reverting to the only structure that still worked.
The one built on force and proximity, on knowing your block and being known on it. Somebody had to hold that. Somebody had to keep it from fracturing completely from 3,700 people going in 3,700 directions during the worst stretch of years the neighborhood had ever lived through. His name was Sam Maddi and where his biography should be, there is almost nothing.
I don’t think that’s an accident. While Minister Rico was sitting in prison through the early 1970s, Sam Motti was standing outside carrying a name that would eventually define the entire organization. But the name didn’t fully make sense. Not the weight of it, not the argument it was making until the 1980s arrived and the last thing holding North Lawndale together stopped holding.
Rico was parrolled around 1980. He didn’t stay out. He was back inside shortly after. More crimes, more time. But something had already shifted. In prison, he had converted to Islam. He had met Larry Hoover, who would go on to lead the gangster Disciples, and the two of them had talked about brokering peace among Chicago’s gangs.
His influence over CVL didn’t require freedom. It moved the way influence in those places always moves through men cycling in and out of the same sales carrying his voice back to the street. By the mid 1980s, the area around CVL’s headquarters at 16th in Palaski had a name. People called it the holy city. Not ironically. That’s what it was.
a place with its own internal logic, its own laws, its own conception of order, and a neighborhood the city had stopped providing order for. By the mid90s, CVL had produced a document called the Lords of Islam, a set of organizational rules drawn from Islamic theology, rewriting the gang’s codes in the language of faith.
In the same decade, crack cocaine arrived in Chicago. sometime in the early 1980s. What it did to neighborhoods like North Lawndale in the years that followed is not complicated to describe. It is just very hard to sit with. Homicide rates for black males between 14 and 17 more than doubled between 1984 and 1989.
Doubled in 5 years. Those are years when a mother on a specific block on a specific street could not let her children outside after a specific hour because the probability had shifted in a direction that made caution the only reasonable response. Mai the one guided by God to restore justice when every institution has failed. That’s the theology.
But here is the thing about theology. It only makes sense as a claim when the circumstances are extreme enough to require it. You don’t call yourself the guided redeemer in a functioning neighborhood. You call yourself that when the evidence around you is nothing is coming and someone has to hold the line anyway. King Solomon, the builder, the man who constructed something permanent in a place that had every reason to remain rubble.
In North Lawndale in the 1980s, an organization CVL’s size running on CVL’s block called its headquarters the holy city. The man who had been the senior active figure in that organization through the previous decade had named himself after the wisest builder king in three religions and the Islamic world’s prophesied redeemer.
You can choose to read that as performance, as street theater, as branding, or you can read it as a man telling you exactly what he thought he was doing and why in the only language that was large enough to hold it. When Minister Rico took over CVL in the 1980s, his number two was a man named Pierre Elbert Mahoney, not Sam Motti.
That’s it. That’s the whole sentence. Mi’s name disappears from the organizational structure entirely. No documentation of a departure, no public record of an arrest, no announcement. The man who had been the senior active figure in CVL for the better part of a decade, gone from the record without a trace of how or why.
I think about what that looks like from the inside. You spend 10 years as the person the organization runs through when the people above and below you are both in prison. You’re there for all of it. Whatever decisions got made, whatever it took to keep 3,700 people from going in 3,700 directions.
And then a new decade comes and your name simply isn’t there anymore. not stepped down on record, not removed publicly, just no longer named, Rico names Pierre. The organization grows to over 30,000 members by the 1990s, expands to 27 or 28 states, becomes the center of something much larger than what you inherited. Pierre runs things until his death in 2000.
After Pierre, Kenny Shannon, and your name is nowhere in it. Sam Motti. Nothing except for one thing. CVL had developed over the years a concept the researchers called family royalty. If your blood connected you to the top of the founding leadership, you were granted inner circle status automatically.
You didn’t go through standard initiation. The hierarchy recognized what your last name already said. Edwin Perry Pepalo, the founder, left a son. Ti Juan Moa known as Taiwan. Minister Rico left a son Thurman Frasier, his Islamic name Kadir Muhammad, a name that carries the same theological current as his father’s.
And Sam Motti left a son named Daniel Cole known as Duke. Not a name that carries what his father carried. Not a theological title, not a designation that points back to anything. Duke, a word in a database listed alongside the sons of the founder and the man who replaced his father, but carrying none of the name.
In an organization where inheritance was the only form of memory, the only document Sam Maddie left was his child. And even that document doesn’t say his name, Duke. The thing about the strategy of invisibility, if that’s what it was, is that the cost only becomes clear at the end. Gore was visible and paid immediately.
He was seen, targeted, convicted. The record of his destruction exists because his presence was recorded. Rico was visible and paid 42 years. But both of them in being destroyed visibly became legible. Mahadi, if he survived by staying invisible, if that was the calculation, succeeded at it so completely that we can’t even document what he survived.
The protection and the eraser were the same thing. And there’s no way to know from where we’re standing whether that was a choice or a consequence. That’s not biography. That’s a shadow. Willie Johnson spent nine years at Tam’s Correctional Center, the supermax. He described it as dehumanizing, solitary confinement, designed as a matter of policy to reduce a person to the minimum.
No programming, no movement, no human contact beyond the absolute procedural. nine years of that. Before that, 33 years in other facilities, 42 years total, in and out of cells from the age of 23 until his mid to late60s. When he got out, he became a ceasefire violence interrupter. He refused to name his former role in CVL.
Called himself a former influencer. He was feeding 150 families a day. He said the thing that people who have lost the most sometimes say that he didn’t want another kid to become another Rico Johnson spending 42 years in a cell. You have to survive long enough to say that sentence. Rico survived. He allowed himself to be written about.
Gave interviews. Let a professor document his life. He chose in part what the record would say about him. Bobby Gore died on February 12th, 2013. He was 76 years old. After his release, he worked at the Safer Foundation, helping people coming out of incarceration. He never returned to CVL. By all accounts, the organization he came back to was not the one he had tried to build.
That was his choice to name that to decide what his ending looked like. Both men got to write something about how they had be remembered. With what they had left, they each made a decision about the record. Sam Mahadi. We don’t know if he got that. We don’t know if he’s alive. We don’t know if he ever sat somewhere and decided this is how I want this to end.
What Rico paid is documented. What Gore paid is documented. A conviction, a decade in prison, a life recalibrated around what the organization had cost him. Both of them have legible destructions. Mi’s destruction, if there was one, and there almost certainly was, because there always is, has no record.
We can’t name what it cost him. And an undocumented cost is its own kind of wound. Not just for the historical record, but for the question of whether his life meant what he thought it meant. We just know that the man who stood in the room when no one else was standing there left without writing anything down. King Solomon built the temple.
That’s what people remember about him. But the temple was destroyed twice. And Solomon is still Solomon, not because the building is standing, but because the record survived. The Book of Kings documented him. The Quran named him. Three religions agree on what he had built even after the building was gone. Sam Maddie is in doubt.
We don’t know what year he was born. We don’t know if he’s alive. We don’t know what he was charged with, if anything. We don’t know if he aged out of the organization quietly or was pushed out or simply disappeared into a city that was very good at making people disappear. We looked for him in court records and didn’t find him.
We looked for him in newspapers and didn’t find him. We found one sentence, one alias. His son’s name in a research database listed alongside the sons of men who left more behind. That’s all. Every answer we found opened something else. We looked and he’s still not fully there. The video itself has done what his life did.
There is something that bothers me about that. Bobby Gore got to decide, at least in part, how his story ended. He chose the safer foundation. He chose to say, “The organization I came back to was not the one I tried to build.” That sentence is a judgment. It required surviving long enough to make it.
Rico got to sit with the professor and say, “Here is what I did and here is what it cost and here is what I think it meant.” That sentence required 42 years of paying the debt before you could put it into words. We don’t know if Sam Motty got either of those. We don’t know if he had the time to decide what it meant.
What kind of world do you have to be living in for those names to be the only thing that makes sense? We asked that at the beginning. I’m still asking it now. His name was Sam Mahi. He was also known as King Solomon. And the fact that we still can’t answer the question, maybe that is the answer.