King Ram: The Ghost King Who Built Chicago’s Black Gangster Nation — Then Left No Name Behind
In 1979, a newspaper published a photograph from inside Menard prison. Two men were in the frame. One was named, the other was not. The named man was Earl Mongoose Good, the convicted killer serving a life sentence. The unnamed man was Samuel King Ram Lawrence. The caption gave him a category instead of a name, a big time Supreme Gangster or Black Gangster Disciple, two rival factions, which tells you how well the newspaper understood what it was photographing.
Even the archive that preserves the photo cannot decide what to call him. Two years later, King Ram became one of three founders of the Black Gangster Nation, a structure that would eventually claim over 4,000 members across Chicago and beyond. He established a territory on Chicago’s South Side called Pocket Town, listed as founded in 1981, still listed as present.
He held it for at least a decade. He left almost no other public record. The caption is still the most specific thing the archive has to say about him. His co-founders are a different story. One of them generated court records, newspaper coverage, a death sentence, and a corruption scandal that reached the Cook County judiciary.
Another built a prison syndicate, survived a stabbing that should have killed him, and died in 2009 with a large turnout from the New Breed’s community to pay respects. The archive on those two men runs long. The archive on King Ram is a photograph with a wrong caption and an address on the South Side.
One of them left almost nothing. That one has the territory still standing. We started Pocket Town. There is a piece of Greater Grand Crossing on Chicago’s South Side called PocketTown. 71st to 75th Street. South Chicago Avenue to Kimbark. That is King Ram’s. That is the only thing in the public record that is definitively, unambiguously his.
The neighborhood itself is not a gentle place to plant a flag. Greater Grand Crossing shifted from 6% black to 86% black in a single decade, redlining the Dan Ryan Expressway, a quarter million manufacturing jobs gone from Chicago between 1967 and 1982. When King Ram established PocketTown in 1981, he was not moving into a vacuum.
He was moving into contested ground. 72nd and Woodlawn inside PocketTown’s own borders was already shared with the Gangster Disciples from day one. The BGN’s mortal enemies were already on the corner when King Ram arrived. And yet, PocketTown is listed in the Chicago gang history database as established 1981, and it is the only New Breeds entry in Greater Grand Crossing still present.
That is an unusually long run for an unusually quiet founder. January 1979. King Ram is documented at Menard prison, a maximum security facility in downstate Illinois. He has not yet built anything. He is at this point a man in a photograph with a caption that doesn’t know what to call him. Two years separate that photograph from the founding of PocketTown.
The record does not say what happened in those two years, how King Ram got out of Menard, or when, or what he did between the photograph and the day he established a territorial claim on the South Side of Chicago. The record simply shows one photograph, 1979. One address, 1981. And then the archive on King Ram closes except for one secondary source that places him still active a decade later.
Now, hold up, 2 years? That ain’t a gap in the record. That’s a man making a deliberate choice. Most people in this life can’t stay off the radar for 2 weeks. Somebody always talking. A cellmate, a cousin, a dude who saw you at a liquor store and can’t keep his mouth shut. Two full years and King Ram left nothing.
Bro, you got to practice that. That’s a whole philosophy, not just a habit. Stay quiet. Stay off paper. Let everybody else be the one they write the story about. And the wild part? It worked. Whatever he was doing between that prison photo and the day he pulled up to Pocket Town, the streets didn’t tell on him, the courts never touched him, and the archive came up completely empty.
That’s a man who understood something early that most people in his position never figured out. The goal was never to be the one they remember. The goal was to still be standing. The men around him in 1980 and 1981 were leaving a very different kind of record. The men who would found the Black Gangster Nation with King Ram had been building records for decades.
Court records, newspaper records, arrest records, the kind of paper trail that tells you exactly who someone is and what they did. King Ram’s co-founders had all of it. King Ram had a photograph. George Boone Black Davis was born in 1938. By the early 1950s, he was running with the Impressionist Cobras on Chicago’s Near West Side.
By the late 1950s, he was doing violent work for the Chicago Outfit, the Italian Organized Crime Syndicate that ran the city’s vice operations. By the early 1960s, he was incarcerated and he was building. Inside prison, Davis assembled what he called the Black Gangsters, a syndicate that collected taxes from multiple gang factions behind bars.
He described his debt collection methods himself in an interview given shortly before his death, methods that by his own account left permanent marks on anyone who refused to pay. That is a man who gave the archive everything it needed to find him. Roger Cochise Collins had a different kind of record. Collins took over the Royal Family criminal network in 1972 after its founder was killed.
He gave himself the title Godfather. He cultivated a direct connection to the Chicago Outfit through Robert Cruise, a man whose cousin was the Outfit’s chief hit man and whose uncle was his chief enforcer. Collins established that connection in 1971 while he was still incarcerated. Under his leadership, the Royal Family was implicated in approximately 30 murders between 1972 and 1974.
13 members were arrested in a sweep that summer. The sentences were light. Collins eventually went to prison, was released in August 1979, and immediately rebuilt the Royal Family. 4 months after his release, he had a drug operation running at the Harold Ickes housing projects on the near South Side sparking gang wars with the Gangster Disciples over the turf.
He did not reenter the world quietly. He reentered it with both hands on the wheel and King Ram across multiple research sessions and multiple public databases, his name does not surface in a single filing indictment or news article from this period. His co-founders were filling dockets. He was somewhere else leaving nothing for the record to find.
The contrast does the work without any narrator having to explain it. Davis is documented in interviews and newspaper coverage and gang history with his own words attached. Collins is documented in Tribune articles and court cases and outfit connection charts tracing his family ties to organized crime. The paper trail on those two men is extensive enough to build a documentary around each of them individually.
King Ram’s trail ends at the photograph. That asymmetry is not an accident of research. It is the shape of the man the record cannot tell you why. November 12th, 1980. Roger Collins and two associates drive three men to a viaduct at Roosevelt Road and Clark Street in Chicago and execute them. Three men, one viaduct.
The record on this is unambiguous convictions, death sentences, court documents that run to multiple volumes. Collins is in the record. The two associates are in the record. The three victims are in the record. That is November 7 weeks later, December 31st, 1980, New Year’s Eve. Three men enter a home in Phoenix, Arizona on a murder contract worth $10,000.
William Bracy, Murray Hooper, and Edward McCall, a former Phoenix police officer. The contract was allegedly brokered by a man named Robert Cruz, who prosecutors alleged wanted control of a local print shop called Graphic Dimensions, a business he intended to use to secure Las Vegas hotel printing contracts as a cover for moving money.
William Redmond and his mother-in-law, Helen Phelps, were killed. Redmond’s wife, Marilyn, was wounded and survived. She identified all three men. A former police officer, a New Year’s Eve, a family in Arizona, $10,000. That is December. Bracy, Hooper, and McCall were all convicted and sentenced to death in Arizona.
Bracy and McCall died in prison before their sentences could be carried out. Murray Hooper was executed by lethal injection in Arizona on November 16th, 2022, at the age of 76, 42 years after the crime. Hooper maintained his innocence until the end. His attorneys contested the identification evidence and argued no physical forensic evidence tied him to the scene.
The Arizona courts upheld the conviction through every appeal. 76. Let that land for a second. 76 years old on a table in Arizona for something that went down when he was 34. That’s 42 years of waking up every day knowing today might be the day. And the whole time, the whole 42 years, the man they said called the hit is out here beating case after case after case. Five
trials. Five. And Hooper’s the one who ends up on that table. I’m not saying he innocent. I wasn’t in that house on New Year’s Eve, and neither were you. But, I am saying the math looks real funny when the guy at the top of the food chain walks every single time, and the guys who supposedly did the work catch everything.
Cruz had outfit ties and real lawyers with real resources. Hooper had one witness pointing at him across the courtroom. That was never the same fight. From day one, that was never the same fight. And the courts just called it justice and moved on. Robert Cruz, the man prosecutors alleged ordered it all, was tried multiple times and ultimately acquitted.
His name now appears in the National Registry of Exonerations. Collins was not among the three men who entered that house. He was convicted separately in Chicago for the November triple murder. Two proceedings in two different states. Death sentences handed down on both sides of the country, both connected through different routes to the same network.
The record on that network’s founding year is extensive. Roger Collins is in the record. Murray Hooper is in the record. Edward McCall is in the record. What the archive produced from November and December 1980 is substantial. Two criminal proceedings, multiple convictions, death sentences, appeals that stretch for decades, a former police officer on death row, a man executed in his eighth decade of life.
Collins generated more court paper in those two months than most people accumulate in a lifetime. King Ram’s name does not appear in any record connected to any of it. Not in a single line of the court record generated by the founding year of the organization he helped create. The record has a word for that.
The word is absent. What the record does not have is an explanation. May 1981. George Davis is arrested in North Lawndale after a cocaine dealer named Lex Leaks turns up shot. Davis heads to Stateville Correctional Center. What happens at Stateville is the most improbable part of this entire story. Davis arrives at Stateville and finds that Larry Hoover, the leader of the Gangster Disciples, the BGN’s most direct rival, has been pulling Black Gangster members into the Gangster Disciples structure.
Davis views this as a direct disrespect. He arranges for a hit man known as Nissan, pronounced Nee-Sun, to kill Hoover. Hoover is stabbed multiple times. Fellow inmates pull him back from the edge. Then Hoover retaliates. George “Bonnie” Black Davis is stabbed 27 times. I need you to hold that for a second. Two men arrange to kill each other in a maximum security prison.
Both survive multiple stab wounds and then become close friends, allies. Hoover transfers the Village Disciples, an entire gang, from the ABLA Projects on the Near West Side to Davis’s control. An entire operation handed over. A photograph exists of the two of them together in prison in the 1980s standing side by side looking like men who never tried to kill each other at all.
One of them gives the other a gang. Out of all of this, the triple execution in November, the New Year’s Eve murders in Arizona in December, the prison stabbing war in May, the unlikely reconciliation that followed, the Black Gangster Nation is formally established in 1981. Three founding organizations merge into one structure, the Royal Family, the Goon Squad Gangsters, and the Black Gangsters.
Colors black and gray. Symbol, the triple L. The BGN affiliates with neither the Folks Nation nor the People Nation. It operates under its own seven-point star, its own hierarchy, its own chain of command. This is not a small operation being described. What gets built in 1981 will eventually grow to over 4,000 members.
Federal law enforcement will spend years and significant resources dismantling pieces of it. A joint undercover investigation led by the Chicago Police Department and the FBI with DEA support under the OCDETF framework known as Operation Impunity will eventually reach deep into the organization’s successor structure lasting several years and producing numerous convictions.
What begins in 1981 is not a local street crew. It is a structure. Three original decks, three men at the top. George “Boonie Black” Davis holds ABLA and the Village Roosevelt to 15th Street, Ashland to Racine on the Near West Side. Roger “Cochise” Collins holds Harold “Ikes” and Dearborn Homes on the Near South Side.
And Samuel “King Ram” Lawrence holds Pocket Town, 71st to 75th Street, South Chicago Avenue to Kimbark. Greater Grand Crossing. Three men, three decks, the original L’s. For the first time in this story, the record places King Ram at equal weight with the other two. Not an absence, a name in a founding structure alongside the men with the largest paper trails in Chicago criminal history.
The equilibrium does not hold for long. Collins’ sentencing for the triple murder under the viaduct comes that same year. The founding and the fracture happen simultaneously. Thomas J. Maloney, that is the name of the judge who sentenced Roger Collins to death. In April 1993, Maloney is convicted of accepting bribes in murder cases, the first and only Cook County judge in history convicted of fixing murder cases for cash.
Federal courts in examining the full scope of his conduct concluded that Maloney was deliberately harsh in cases where no bribe was paid in order to disguise the leniency he showed in cases where one was. He was running a calculation, be brutal enough in the unbribed cases that the pattern in the bribed ones looks like judicial discretion rather than corruption.
Roger Collins, sentenced to death for the triple murder under the viaduct, drew a judge who was himself a criminal. Maloney served 12 years in federal prison and was released in 2007. The death sentence was commuted. On January 11th, 2003, Governor George Ryan commuted the death sentences of all 167 inmates then on Illinois death row in a blanket commutation, not because the defendants were innocent, but because the system that sentenced them could not be trusted.
The governor who signed those commutation orders had spent years raising questions about the integrity of Illinois’ death penalty machinery, citing a pattern of wrongful convictions and flawed prosecutions across the state. Collins was among the 167. His sentence became natural life without the possibility of parole.
He simply did not die at the state’s hand. Governor Ryan was convicted of corruption in 2006 and sentenced to 6 and 1/2 years in federal prison. The man who decided Collins should live rather than die was by federal jury verdict himself a criminal. The corruption at every level of this story is not incidental. It is the structure.
He Then there is Robert Cruz, the man prosecutors alleged ordered the New Year’s Eve contract in Phoenix. Cruz went to trial five times and was acquitted at the fifth. His name is now in the National Registry of Exonerations. He was shot and killed in 1997, his body not found until 2007. Wait Wait Wait. Run that back.
Cruz, the man who beat five separate trials, whose name is literally in the exoneration registry right now, gets bodied in ’97 and they don’t find him until 2007. 10 years, bro. That’s not dying, that’s being erased. The courts couldn’t get him. Five different prosecution teams couldn’t get him.
Whatever Cruz knew about who really ordered what on New Year’s Eve 1980, all of that went into the ground with him, stayed buried for a decade before anybody even found where he was. And here’s the thing about moving at that level. Nobody wants to say out loud there’s no exit. There’s no retirement plan, no gold watch, no quiet life in Florida.
You either die in prison like a lot of these guys or you die out here like Cruz did, quietly, completely, in a way that erases even the questions. The streets always write the last chapter every single time. The man who allegedly ordered the contract was acquitted and then murdered. The judge who sentenced Collins for the Chicago murder, not the Phoenix one, was himself convicted of corruption.
The governor who commuted Collins’ death sentence was himself later imprisoned. These are separate cases, separate judges, separate courts. But the pattern holds across all of them at every node where the criminal justice system intersected with the BGN’s founding circle, the system’s own integrity was in question.
Collins accumulated all of this because Collins was visible. A conviction produces a docket, a docket produces appellate filings, a death sentence produces decades of appeals, commutation petitions, clemency hearings, journalism, a corrupt judge produces a federal investigation, a conviction, a press release. Every piece of paper generates the next, every layer of the system that touched him produced more archive, more reach.
His visibility made him reachable by the crime, by the corruption, by the correction. During all of this, King Ram was somewhere holding Pocket Town leaving nothing for the record to catch. The system, corrupt or otherwise, had nothing on King Ram because it had nothing of King Ram. Whether that was disciplined calculation or luck so extraordinary, it strains belief, the record does not say.
What the record says is Pocket Town established 1981 present. Our review while Collins was on death row, while Boonie was in and out of prison while the organization they built was fracturing and expanding and sending members to cities no one had mapped yet. Pocket Town was still there. One source, a single secondary account from a Chicago gang database, places King Ram still active around 1991, a decade after the founding establishing BGN presence at 63rd and Ashland on the South Side.
The account is one entry on one website unconfirmed by any court record or journalism. But if accurate, it means King Ram was operationally active for at least 10 years after Pocket Town’s founding during the entire period when Collins was on death row and Boonie was cycling through prison. He was never charged. Bro, a whole decade.
Collins on death row. Boonie in and out the pen like it’s a revolving door. Feds watching. CPD watching. DEA out here naming operations impunity like they already clocked the energy and King Ram just moving quiet. Setting up at 63rd and Ashland like it’s a regular Tuesday. 10 years running an operation in one of the most surveilled, most infiltrated cities in the country.
And his name don’t hit a single wire. Not one CI drops it. Not one piece of paper got his government on it anywhere. On God, that ain’t luck. That’s a man who decided from jump that staying off paper was the actual job. The real job. Everybody around him was making noise, catching cases, making the news, making the history books.
He was the one who figured out that in this life the most dangerous thing you can be is known. So he stayed unknown for a decade in Chicago during all of that. I’m going to say what a lot of people won’t say. Either this man was the most disciplined operator this city ever produced, or somebody with a badge had a reason to keep his name out of the reports.
I lean toward the first one, but in a story where the judge was dirty and the governor was dirty, and the man who allegedly called the hit walks five trials acting like law enforcement was running clean and King Ram’s direction takes a kind of faith I just don’t have. The organization around him fractured and rebuilt.
In 1992, a younger faction broke away under Bouny’s own son known as Prince Spoony forming what became the New Breeds Black Gangsters, more aggressive, less anchored to the original structure. By 1997, Bouny was released from prison and moved to consolidate the factions. The Black Gangster New Breeds officially combined.
He died in 2009. Chicago called him the last Don. A large turnout from the New Breeds community came to pay their respects. The record on Bouny Black runs to obituaries, tributes, gang histories, federal case filings referencing his name, a self-given title that stuck. The record on King Ram in those same years has not grown on a photograph, a corner in Greater Grand Crossing, and the entry in the Chicago gang history database that says Pocket Town established 1981 present.
In 2022, a federal superseding indictment named nine Gangster Disciples and three United States Army soldiers stationed at Fort Campbell in Kentucky in a firearms trafficking operation. They were moving more than 90 firearms from Kentucky and Tennessee into Chicago. The gang named in that indictment is the Pocket Town Gangster Disciples.
The territory King Ram planted his flag in the corner he established in 1981 against GD resistance that he held for at least a decade now carries the Gangster Disciples name in federal court. The BGN’s mortal enemies, the faction that was sharing that corner with King Ram from day one, absorbed the address entirely.
King Ram did not build Pocket Town to hand it to the Gangster Disciples, but that is what the record shows. 40 years on a territory named after the New Breeds founding chapter, now in a DOJ indictment under a rival’s colors. His name is not in that indictment, either. George Booney Black Davis died in 2009 at the age of 71. Roger Collins is serving natural life, the death sentence commuted in 2003 by a governor who was himself later convicted of corruption.
Murray Hooper was executed at 76 in Arizona 42 years after the crime. And Samuel King Ram Lawrence, the man in the photograph whose caption couldn’t identify him, the founding leader of Pocket Town, leaves no further record. Three men, three decks, one structure, three very different outcomes. Booney’s archive includes interviews in his own words, gang histories built around his biography, a death attended by a generation of people who moved through what he built.
Collins’ archive includes court cases, death row appeals, commutation orders, a corrupt judges, federal conviction, a governor’s clemency. Their paper trails are long enough to reconstruct a life from date the arrests, trace the outfit connections back to 1971, map the dockets. The record gives them shape. The research behind this documentary found no public record of him in any database.
The only confirmation that Samuel King Ram Lawrence existed as a person with the name and a role comes from two sources, a Chicago gang history website and a secondary criminal database. Both give him the same founding credit. Neither gives him anything else. That adds up to a photograph, an address, and a decade-old secondary account.
Then the archive closes on him. The caption in that 1979 newspaper said a big-time supreme gangster or black gangster disciple. Nearly half a century later, that is still the most specific thing the public record has to say about him. The caption still doesn’t know who he is. Whether that was luck, discipline, or something else entirely, the record doesn’t say.