The Invisible King of Chicago’s New Breeds Built a 4,000-Man Gang — The Last Don HT
- Somewhere in the south suburbs of Chicago, a man dies. No headline in the Tribune, no segment on the evening news, no federal prosecutor standing in front of cameras calling it a significant moment in the history of organized crime in this city. No Wikipedia page, no documentary crew.
And yes, I recognize the irony of saying that while making this documentary, just a man gone. But here’s what happened next. In parts of Chicago, on the west side, in North Lawndale, in the old ABLA project corners, where the buildings had already been reduced to empty lots. Word moved quietly, the way it always moved in this world, and people came.
Not a few people. Gang history accounts say members came out heavily to pay respect. They called him the last dawn. Now hold two other names in your head for a second. Jeff Fort founded the Black Pea Stone Nation. 21 generals, 5,000 members, the most powerful street organization in the history of Chicago. In 2009, Jeff Fort was sitting in a 6×9 ft cell at ADX Florence, a federal supermax buried in the mountains of Colorado. He had been there since 2006.
He was serving 168 years. Larry Hoover co-founded the Gangster Disciples. In 2009, Hoover was in federal prison on a mandatory life sentence, convicted on 40 counts in 1997 after a 17-year investigation. In 2025, President Trump commuted his federal sentence. He continues to serve a state sentence in Illinois of up to 200 years, 168 years life.
And then there’s George Boon Black Davis. No public federal indictment I could find. No major RICO case with his name at the top. No wiretap affidavit making him the face of anything. Nothing. Three men, same era, same city, same business. One difference. Near westside Chicago, late 1940s. Not the Chicago of skyscrapers and jazz clubs that gets put on postcards.
The other Chicago, the one built specifically to keep black families contained west of the river, close enough to work the factories, far enough to not be seen anywhere else. The city drew those lines deliberately in red ink on actual maps. They called it redlinining, and they weren’t subtle about it.
Maxwell Street runs east west through the middle of it. Loud, broke, multilingual, improvised. The kind of place where invisible people learned to move together before anyone called it organization. In a system designed to make black families invisible, some men spent their whole lives fighting to be seen. Boon Black noticed something different.
That invisibility, if you chose it, could be a position of power. The impressionist cobras started on those streets in 1947. And I want to be precise about this because it matters for what comes next. They were not a gang. Not yet. They were a club. A group of young black men from the near west side who moved together, looked out for each other, and went by a name because going by a name meant something in a neighborhood where you could be invisible in every other direction.
George Davis fell in with them in the late 1940s. He was a teenager. The streets gave him a name early, Boon Black. Nobody’s been able to tell me exactly where it came from, which if you’ve spent any time with this story, feels about right. Here’s what we know. By the time the 1960s arrived, Boon Black had already outgrown the Cobras.
He was moving faster than a street club could keep up with. And sometime in the early 1960s, the exact year is not in any public record, which should already be telling you something. He went to prison. Now, most people here went to prison and they hear end of story. Story paused, story interrupted.
That is not what happened here. Boon Black was sent to Stateville Correctional Center and Manar Correctional Center, two of Illinois’s maximum security prisons. And here’s the thing about Stateville and Mana in the 1960s that doesn’t make it into most gang histories. Those were the same walls that held senior members of the Chicago outfit, the Italian Mafia, the organization that had run organized crime in this city since before Prohibition.
murder, extortion, gambling, the whole architecture. Most black men in that system kept distance from the outfit. You either fought them for respect or you stayed out of their ey line and hope for the best. Boon Black did neither. According to accounts that have circulated in gang history and law enforcement research circles for decades, he made himself useful.
The Goon Squad, the crew he would eventually lead on the outside operated as debt collectors and an extortion arm doing business on behalf of the outfit. Muscle dirty work done quietly. I’ll be straight with you. There is no indictment here. No wiretap transcript. What exists is consistency. researchers, law enforcement accounts, and people from those neighborhoods telling the same version.
With Boon Black, that may be the point. A man who lived by not leaving sources was never going to leave a clean paper trail. What is not in question is what he built from inside those walls. While other men were doing their time, Boon Black was conducting meetings. He assembled what he called the Black Gangsters.
Not a gang in the traditional sense, but a prison syndicate. A structure that collected taxes from other groups and forced its own internal code and answered to him from a cell. There’s a word for that kind of operation. Is not a gang is an institution. And by the time he walked out, Boon Black was not a man who had done time. He was a man who had used it.
Law number one, silence. Not don’t talk to the police. Not be careful what you say around strangers. Silence as a law written down, codified. Right there at the top of the list above 15 other rules that cover everything from personal hygiene to theft to what happens if you put your hands on a woman in the organization.
We know this because the document exists, a creed and knowledge book, the internal governing text of the new breed gangsters put together by the faction operating out of 104th in Princeton beginning in 2008. Seven pages, it reads like a combination of a constitution, a catechism, and a sentencing guide. It is, as far as I know, one of the only documents of its kind that has ever surfaced publicly for this organization.
Law number two, loyalty of silence. They wrote it twice, two separate laws, just to make sure nobody missed the point. The structure laid out in that document is not what you’d expect from a street gang. There are no loose affiliations, no informal pecking orders. There is a formal hierarchy. At the top, godfathers.
Below them, dons who handle the business of the nation. Then enforcers who handle violations, then soldiers. Then foot soldiers. And at the bottom, non-members, homies of the nation in the document’s own language. Violations of the laws don’t result in fines or demotions. According to a 1996 gang profile published by the Office of Justice Programs, violations result in death, not suspension, death.
Three men held the title of Godfather. Godfather number one, George Boon Black Davis, his territory listed as Old ABLA and 16th Street breeds. Godfather number two, Roger Collins, known on those streets as Coochis, operating out of Harold Icks homes and the 29th Street corridor. A man whose name almost never comes up in anything public, which in this story is basically a credential.
Godfather number three, Samuel King Ram Lawrence, Pocket Town Breeds. Three men, three sections of Chicago, one structure above all of them, the colors of the nation, black and gray. Black for the organization, gray, and I’m quoting the Creed document here directly, gray for the concrete and street roads we use every day.
I have read a lot of gang literature over the years and I genuinely cannot think of anything more Chicago than choosing your organizational color to match the pavement you grew up on. The document names three kings above even the godfathers. King Larry Hoover, King Shorty Freeman, King David Barksdale, and Folk KS folks nation is defined inside those same seven pages as follow our last kings steps.
follow our last king’s steps. Whoever wrote that was not playing around. Now 1981 is the year the name New Breeds becomes official. And 1981 is also the year, according to accounts circulating in gang history circles when Boon Black and Larry Hoover came as close to killing each other as two men can get without one of them actually dying.
The story told in those circles goes like this. Boon arrives back inside Stateville. He finds that Hoover has been absorbing Black Gangsters members into the gangster disciple structure. Boon reads this as disrespect. He orders a hit on Hoover. Hoover survives. Hoover retaliates. Boon gets stabbed. The number that gets passed around in every account of this is 27
times. 27. He survived. And then, this is the part I find genuinely strange. The part that tells you more about both men than any case file ever could. They sat down. They made an alliance. The Black Gangsters, the royal family, the Goon Squad, all of it consolidated into the Black Gangster nation. Boon retained control of the prison system.
Hoover got the organized street structure. Two men who tried to kill each other, building something together. the following week. The golden rule of the new breeds written directly into the creed document. What we do as individuals reflect upon as a collective whole. Apply that sentence to a prison yard in 1981.
One attempted murder, one retaliation, both men nearly dead, and at the end of it, not a war that drags on for a decade, but a structure. That is not the behavior of men who are simply violent. That is the behavior of men who understand that violence is a tool, not the point. The tool. One account drawn from street level reporting, not a court record, places Boon Black at the center of a shooting on May 6th, 1981 in North Lawndale.
The address given is 1,440 South Kenzie. The dealer named in that account is Lex Leaks. The transaction per that account involves a small drug transaction, the kind that happened a hundred times a day on those blocks. The dispute starts overweight, somebody thinks somebody shorted them, and ends with Leaks dead and his roommate wounded by gunfire.
Boon Black, per the same account, flees the scene. Police give chase. An attempt is made to destroy evidence, but it is consistent with the violent turning point that year became in the story told about him. What I could not find is what usually follows a case like this, a public federal indictment, a major prosecution, or a case file that made Boon Black the face of the incident.
The record goes quiet the way it always goes quiet around this man. I want to stop here for a second because it is very easy in a story like this to move past a name like Lex Leaks without registering that he was a person. He was not a rival boss. He was not a general of anything.
He was a man running a $100 drug deal out of his own apartment who ended up dead on the floor of it. His roommate took a bullet she had no part in earning. Those are real people. In a story this big, the names that don’t make it into the history books tend to be the ones who paid the most. 1981, the year that came at Boon Black from every direction simultaneously.
He survived all of it. By the mid 1980s, the new breeds have moved fully into the ABLA projects. Robert Brooks, Grace Abbott, Lumis Courts, Jane Adams, entire city blocks of stacked concrete where the elevators stayed broken for months. The heat failed in January and nobody walked the stairwells alone after dark.
The city put its poorest black families there, then stopped showing up. Someone else filled the vacuum. That is not a justification. It is just what happened. The new breeds become the dominant presence across ABLA and they do not share through the 80s and into the 90s. The projects are a war zone. Conservative vice lords, traveling vice lords, new breeds, three factions, same crumbling hallways.
The people who actually live there, mothers, children, elderly residents with nowhere else to go, absorb every shot. They always do. Then 1992 arrives and while Boon was still in prison, something unexpected happens. His own son breaks ranks. Prince Spoony, Boon Black’s own son, takes a younger faction of black gangsters and splits off.
He calls the new group New Breeds, Black Gangsters, Triple Lreeds. They run a seven-point star. They answer to nobody. Not Folks Nation, not People Nation, not their own father. They expand fast. 16th and Cosner, West Garfield, Austin, into the suburbs. By every account, Boon is not pleased. But here is what does not happen.
Boon Black does not go to war with his own son. I’ve spent more time thinking about that than almost anything else in this story. The man who ordered a hit on Larry Hoover. The man who built an organization where violations result in death. That man watches his son walk away with a faction of his people build a rival structure under a different star and lets him go.
There is no law in the creed document for what to do when your own son walks. That is not weakness. That is not sentiment. Sometimes the most powerful thing you can do is nothing. Or maybe it was the one place where the machine stopped being enough. 1997 Boon walks out of prison. He sits down with the splintered factions and pulls them back together under one name.
Black gangster, New Breeds. No more Folks Nation affiliation. No more six-point star. Independent answering to nobody outside the structure he built. The name changes. The machine does not. There are two ways to build power in this world. The first way becomes so large, so visible, so undeniable that the system has to acknowledge you exist.
You put your name on the organization. You hold press conferences. You negotiate with city hall. You become the face of something so big that even the people trying to stop you have to say your name first. The second way, build something real and then disappear behind it. Jeff Fort chose the first way. By 1968, Jeff Fort was 21 years old and running the most powerful street organization in the history of Chicago.
The Black Pea Stone Nation, 21 generals, 5,000 members. A confederation of 21 formerly independent gangs unified under one name. All of it answering upward to one man. At 21 years old, Fort did not just run a gang. He negotiated. He lobbied. He testified before government bodies.
He made himself legible to power because he believed legibility was the point. And in 1969, this is the detail that still makes me stop every time, the federal government handed Jeff Fort $1 million, a grant from the Office of Economic Opportunity, ostensibly to run youth programs on the South Side, $1 million in 1969 to a man who everyone in law enforcement already knew was running the most powerful street organization in Chicago. He took the money.
He remained Fort and the federal government, having now officially written his name into their budget, spent the next 15 years building the case that would bury him. 1983, drug trafficking, 13 years. 1987, conspiracy to commit terrorist acts on behalf of Libya, coordinating attacks on American soil in exchange for weapons, and $2.5 million.
80 years than a murder charge for an assassination he ordered back in 1981. 75 more years. 13 plus 80 plus 75. 168 years. The man who negotiated with city hall and took a million-doll federal grant is now sitting in a 6×9 foot cell at ADX Florence, a supermax buried in the mountains of Colorado, one of the most isolated prisons on Earth.
He has been there since 2006. He cannot see the sky from his cell. Larry Hoover built something almost as large, the Gangster Disciples. eventually tens of thousands of members across multiple states and chose the same theory, visibility, scale, the kind of organization so enormous it became its own mythology.
In 1995, after a 17-year undercover investigation, federal indictment, 1997 convicted on 40 counts, mandatory life sentence. Now, while Jeff Fort was taking federal grants, while Larry Hoover was building an empire visible from orbit, Boon Black was running his organization out of the same city during the same decades and leaving almost no federal record at all.
Not because he wasn’t operating. The organization grew to more than 4,000 members. It controlled the ABLA projects. It fought and won territory wars across the near west side. The structure godfathers, dons, enforcers, the full hierarchy written into a creed and signed in the organization’s own language was running continuously for decades.
The difference is not scale. The difference is visibility. Fort’s theory of power required people to see him. Every negotiation, every grant application, every public facing move created a paper trail. And every paper trail is an invitation. Once the system has your name on a document, it does not let go. It files it. It cross-references it.
It hands it to a grand jury 16 years later and asks 12 people to read it carefully. Boon Black’s theory required the opposite. The organization could be large. The territory could be real. The machine could run at full capacity. But the man at the top had to stay behind it. Not in front of it, not above it, behind it.
Invisible to everything and everyone outside the structure. Law number one, silence. Jeff Fort is not a cautionary tale about excess. He’s a mirror. He shows you exactly what happens when you let the world see you coming. Boon Black made sure it never did. The real test of any organization is not what it looks like at its peak.
The real test is what it looks like when the person who built it is no longer in the room. By 2004, about seven years after Boon Black had pulled the factions back together, 5 years before his death, federal investigators began mapping a drug operation running out of a cluster of eight three-story buildings on Chicago’s west side.
They called it the square, bounded by 18th and 19th streets, Keeler and Carlo avenues. Section 8 housing, a self-contained fortress of subsidized apartments operating as a 24-hour open air drug market. Revenue, more than $15,000 a day, every day. Narcotics of every kind. The full menu of the open air drug market. All of it moving continuously around the clock.
Rain or January or whatever the Chicago Police Department had going on that week. What federal investigators found inside the square was not a loose crew. It was a hierarchy. Runners, shift supervisors, pack workers, rotating shifts, revenue moving upward through the same chain, a street level distribution company.
This does not appear out of nowhere. Someone designed it. And that is how you know Boon Black built more than a crew. He built a machine that could keep running even when his own name disappeared from the paperwork. The FBI got inside through an undercover agent named Mark Horton, who spent years embedded in the operation as a business associate purchasing product.
What he documented led to 56 defendants charged federally, part of an operation that ultimately targeted up to 67 alleged leaders, members, and associates of the organization. What he described in later accounts is the detail that doesn’t make it into any press release. At one point, according to Mark Horton’s account of the investigation, the body of a member of the Black Souls gang was left inside the square, not hidden, left there.
And for three days, three full days, not a single resident of that housing complex called the police. Not one person in a building full of families, children, elderly residents, 72 hours, nothing. That is not fear of retaliation alone. That is a community that has been conditioned over years to understand exactly where the real authority in that space lies.
That is infrastructure. The kind that accumulates when the same organization holds the same ground long enough that the ground itself starts operating by its rules. The Coven family ran the square during those years. Terrell Coven as the operation’s current leader, his brother Treville, and their cousin Lavell, alongside a close associate named Ronald Turner, who helped organize the enterprise.
Brothers and cousins inside the same criminal structure, answering to the same chain of command, which is remarkable in its own right. Someone built the conditions that made it possible. Dana Bostik, known on those streets as Bird and also as Melo, controlled the largest New Breeds faction operating on the west side in the years after Boon.
He ran a 12b block narcotics operation near Pilaski Avenue and Van Burren Street, generating between $4,000 and $10,000 a day. At his sentencing hearing in 2012, federal prosecutor Megan Kuniff Church said this directly. Bostic is responsible for violence, intimidation, and murders. Bostic controlled his territory and his organization through violence and intimidation.
She also said, “Of all the defendants in this case, only Bostik himself appears not to recognize who was in charge.” Bostic was sentenced to 38 years in federal prison. He was 33 years old. The organization did not dissolve. It fragmented, regrouped, and kept moving the way it had kept moving through every arrest, every indictment, every leadership transition across every decade since Boon Black first assembled it behind the walls of Stateville.
I keep coming back to that. A man dies quietly in 2009. No orbituary, no federal indictment unsealed, no news segment. And the thing he built from a prison cell in the early 1960s is still generating tens of thousands of dollars a day on Chicago’s west side 40 years later. A machine that outlives its maker is not automatically a testament to genius.
Sometime it is just harm made durable. 2009, a man dies. No headline, no federal case unsealed. You already know this. We started here, but now you know what was behind the silence. Jeff Fort, $168. His name in indictments going back to 1983 in terrorism case files in a federal budget line.
$1 million signed, dated, filed. The system wrote his name down and did not stop writing for 40 years. Larry Hoover, 40 federal counts, a mandatory life sentence, later commuted in 2025 by a presidential order. Every document, every wire tap, every surveillance log, his name at the top, George Boon Black Davis, godfather number one, the man who made himself invisible inside a structure that did not need him to be seen.
Almost nothing in the federal record. Almost nothing. Law number one of the new breeds, silence. Whether Boon Black wrote that law, enforced it, or simply became the man most associated with it, he lived closer to it than anyone else in this story. Jeff Fort left a federal file. Larry Hoover left a federal file.
George Boon Black Davis left a question. And maybe that was the point.