On October 13th, 1992, a seven-year-old boy named Dantrell Davis was shot by a sniper while walking to school at Cababrini Green on Chicago’s near north side. That story made national news. People marched through the Cababrini Green courtyard. Politicians flew into O’Hare.
Camera crews lined up along Division Street. And for most of America, that was the story of Chicago public housing. What almost nobody outside Chicago knew was that 2 miles south on State Street, a different housing project had been producing casualties like Dantrails for 30 years straight, and nobody was coming to march for any of them.
28 identical 16story concrete towers ran down South State Street. They were designed for 11,000 people, but were crammed with 27,000. Six of the poorest census tracks in the entire United States sat behind one set of walls. A cracken heroin market pulled in $45,000 a day inside the Robert Taylor homes.
and a gang leader named Larry Hoover ran all of it from a state prison lunchroom in Vienna, Illinois using coded phone calls and visitors he kissed on the cheek. Then a federal investigation called Operation Headache brought him down using a method no law enforcement agency had ever tried before. This is that story. Chicago, 1949.
75% of the city’s black population was still living in kitchenet apartments on the south side. Whole families packed into single rooms in Bronzeville walkups with shared bathrooms down the hall. The Federal Housing Act of 1949 had just opened the door for cities to clear what Washington called slums and build modern public housing with up to 90% federal money.
In most American cities, this was supposed to mean progress. In Chicago, it meant something else entirely. The man running the Chicago Housing Authority at the time was Robert Roshan Taylor. His father, Robert Robinson Taylor, had been the Massachusetts Institute of Technologies first black graduate of the School of Architecture back in 1892.
The younger Taylor spent his entire career fighting for one idea. Build public housing in small clusters. Spread it across the city, integrated into white and black neighborhoods alike. Scattered site housing. That was the plan the Chicago Housing Authority brought to the Chicago City Council.
The white aldermen in city council chambers killed it. They refused to allow a single unit of public housing in their wars on the north side or the southwest side. Mayor Richard J. Daly’s Democratic machine needed black votes, but wanted black residents contained east of Wentworth Avenue. So, the council forced the Chicago Housing Authority to build exclusively inside the existing black belt on the south side of Chicago.
Taylor resigned from the Chicago Housing Authority in protest in 1950. He died in 1957. Two years later, the city broke ground on the largest public housing project in American history and named it after the man who would have fought against every square foot of it. Shaw Mets and associates drew up the blueprints for the Robert Taylor homes.
28 identical 16-story towers grouped into U-shaped clusters of three buildings each. The site was a 95 acre strip running two miles along State Street from Persian Road at 39th Street down to 54th Street, wedged between the Dan Ryan Expressway on the west and the Rock Island Railroad tracks on the east.
Daly had routed the Dan Ryan Expressway specifically to wall the southside off from his own neighborhood of Bridgeport. The Robert Taylor project was hemmed in on every side before the first family moved in. On March 5th, 1962, Mayor Daly handed the first set of keys to a Robert Taylor tenant and the Chicago Tribune called it the largest public housing development in the country.
4,415 apartments, clean plumbing, children with their own bedrooms for the first time in a city where most black families were still living in crumbling kitchenets. Barbara Moore moved into her apartment at 5,266 South State Street in 1967 with her two young sons and remembered the optimism. Neighbors cooked together in the hallways.
Kids played in the grass between the towers. For a few years, the Robert Taylor homes worked. That window of hope closed fast. By January 1964, less than two years after opening, the Chicago Tribune was reporting assaults in Robert Taylor’s laundry rooms and elevators serious enough to trigger rent strikes. A teenager fell through a broken gallery railing that same year and died.
The architecture of the Robert Taylor homes itself was the first crime. Shaw and Mets designed the elevators on the outside of each Robert Taylor tower. They open onto outdoor walkways called galleries, chainlink fence corridors running along every floor in front of every apartment door exposed to Chicago wind and winter.
The Chicago Housing Authority considered enclosing them too expensive. So, every apartment entrance opened onto an outdoor catwalk where a man with a rifle could rest his barrel on the chain link fencing and shoot straight down into the playgrounds and parking lots below. Inside the Robert Taylor apartments, the walls were drywall so cheap that burglars kicked through them from neighboring vacant units.
The 28 buildings occupied just 7% of the 95 acre site. The other 93% was treeless, windswept open space between the towers that nobody could supervise. Broken elevators froze solid in the Chicago winter. One reporter in 1972 described being trapped alone in a Robert Taylor elevator that ran up and down all 16 floors without stopping for over 30 minutes.
The Chicago Housing Authorities neglect was total. Under Charles Swibble, a daily loyalist who ran the Chicago Housing Authority for 19 years, the AY’s financial records were so disorganized that the Department of Housing and Urban Development could not audit them for three straight years in the late 1980s. Rent rolls at Robert Taylor sometimes ran under $50 a month, even in the 1990s.
Buildings rotted faster than CHA maintenance could repair them. Vacant units became crack dens and stash houses. The youth to adult ratio inside Robert Taylor hit 2.8 children per adult, nearly three times the Chicago city average. Buildings designed for working families had become unsupervised vertical neighborhoods full of children with no jobs, no services, and no way out of the southside.
By the late 1980s, the population inside the Robert Taylor homes had swelled to roughly 27,000 people inside a development designed for 11,000. About 96% of residents were black. Roughly 95% of working age adults were unemployed or on public assistance. 40% of households were headed by single mothers earning under $5,000 a year.
Six of the poorest census tracks in the entire United States, all with populations above 2500 sat inside the Robert Taylor footprint along State Street. Residents of Robert Taylor had a roughly 1 in 10 annual chance of being the victim of a violent crime. That was more than 13 times the national average.
And into that vacuum stepped the gangs. The Egyptian Cobras were the first major gang to move into the Robert Taylor homes when the buildings opened in 1962. They took the cluster of towers at 45th and Federal Street and the buildings at 53rd and State Street. By 1969, after an Italian organized crime connection brought heroin into the 53rd Street buildings, that cluster earned its name.
Former Robert Taylor resident beauty Turner, who later became a journalist and activist at the Residents Journal, explained it simply. They called it the hole because once you got in, you could not get out. By 1981, the two-mile strip along State Street had a clear geography of control. Gangster disciples under Robert Cole Black Dhies ran all the Robert Taylor buildings between 39th Street and 43rd Street.
Black disciples under Mickey Bull Johnson held territory south of that line. Mickey Cobras kept the hole at 53rd. Heroin gave way to crack cocaine in the mid 1980s and the money multiplied across every floor. The Chicago Housing Authority estimated $45,000 worth of drugs was sold inside the Robert Taylor homes every single day.
That is roughly $16 million a year passing through the towers along State Street. In two of the most violent buildings, 77 murders were recorded between 1989 and 1992. In one weekend alone, more than 300 separate shooting incidents were reported in or near the Robert Taylor development. In 1989, Dohis ordered every resident in his eight buildings near 41st and Federal Street to be inside their apartments by 1000 p.m. or be shot.
Gunman enforced the curfew on anyone caught in the Robert Taylor lobbies after dark. On August 15th, 1991, a sniper inside Robert Taylor killed Chicago Housing Authority Police Officer Jimmy Haynes with a high-powered rifle just before midnight. He died 2 days later at Mercy Hospital. In February 1993, a Robert Taylor maintenance worker was beaten to death by gang members after he let police officers into a building during a gang meeting on November 13th, 1995.
34year-old Angela Young, a single mother, was found stabbed 65 times in her 13th floor apartment at 4331 South Federal Street. The murder was later tied to a gangster Disciples marijuana operation inside the building. Children in the Robert Taylor homes were trained to duck and run home from school along State Street.
Chicago Police Department officers told Tribune reporters that gang shooters stationed in the towers were called the Clay People after the Flash Gordon villains who melted into walls. You could hear the shots from the upper floors of Robert Taylor, but you would never see where they came from. A 1996 federal indictment described a typical setup at 4429 South Federal Street inside Robert Taylor where drugs were sold under the brand names Green Monster and Pink Panther.
A single corner in a single building pulling six figures a month for one gangster Disciples faction. Residents lived under siege. A Robert Taylor mother identified in the Chicago Reporter as Mrs. Cyrunk told the paper that three of her children had been shot in separate crossfire incidents inside the development.
Gang members killed her nephew in 1992 after she identified a shooter to police. The infant Vignette Teague was abducted from a Robert Taylor hallway on June 25th, 1983 after her grandmother left her alone for a moment. In October 1976, 22-year-old Denise Doier was thrown from a 15th floor window inside Robert Taylor and somehow survived.
This was daily life in the Robert Taylor homes. Not one bad weekend, not one headline, 30 years of it. The man who turned this concentrated misery along State Street into a hund00 million a year drug empire was Larry Hoover. Born November 30th, 1950 in Jackson, Mississippi. Hoover moved to Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood at age 4.
By the age of 13, he was running with the Supreme Gangsters on the south side. In 1969, Hoover merged his crew with David Barkstdale’s Black Disciples to form the black gangster Disciple Nation. When Barksdale died of kidney failure in 1974 from complications of a 1970 assassination attempt, Hoover became the sole leader of the organization.
In February 1973, Hoover ordered the murder of William Pooky Young, a 19-year-old neighborhood dealer accused of stealing from the gang. Young was abducted and shot in an Englewood alley. Hoover was convicted of the murder and sentenced to 150 to 200 years in the Illinois State Prison System.
He never lost control, not for a single day. From inside Stateville Correctional Center, then Vienna Correctional Center in Southern Illinois, then Dixon Correctional Center. Larry Hoover built the gangster disciples into the largest street gang in the Midwest. In 1978, he formed the Folk Nation from inside prison walls, an umbrella alliance pulling in the Maniac Latin Disciples, Spanish Gangster Disciples, Simon City Royals, 22 Boys, Latin Eagles, and more.
The organizational chart was corporate. Hoover sat at the top as chairman of the board. Two boards of directors sat beneath him, one for street operations and one for prison operations. Below the boards were governors, each running a geographic region of Chicago and the surrounding suburbs.
Below the governors were regents overseeing retail drug sales at specific sites, including specific buildings inside Robert Taylor homes and the adjacent stateway gardens. Federal prosecutors estimated the gangster disciples were moving roughly $100 million in narcotics a year across Illinois alone with around 6,000 active members in Chicago and as many as 30,000 affiliated across 35 states.
By the mid 1980s, Larry Hoover had been moved to Vienna Correctional Center, a minimum security facility in southern Illinois. DEA agents later described the Vienna campus as more like a college than a prison. Hoover greeted visitors in a lunchroom at Vienna where inmates and guests were free to roam.
He kissed his lieutenants on the cheek when they arrived at the Vienna visiting area. Coded phone calls handled long-d distanceance orders from the prison. Every direct command was wrapped in business language. moving inventory, tightening shop, expanding territory became opening new franchises. Hoover projected an image of reform from inside the Illinois prison system.
He wrote a manifesto called the blueprint of a new concept from gangster disciple to growth and development. He organized food giveaways on the south side. He ran voter registration drives. He launched a political arm called Growth and Development that held rallies in Chicago parks and told CBS Chicago in a 1993 interview that he had paid his debt to society.
Behind the handshakes and the rallies at those Southside community centers, Hoover was directing assassinations, setting street taxes on non GD dealers across the city, and ordering hits on anyone who cooperated with Chicago police. The gangster disciples had an internal enforcement unit that ran informal courts inside Illinois prisons.
Members suspected of talking to law enforcement were tried and the sentence was almost always the same. The organization was so tight that federal investigators spent three full years trying to find a single person inside the GD willing to cooperate. They could not find one. In late 1992, a federal investigation that had already burned through three years with nothing landed on the desk of assistant US attorney Ron Safer in the Northern District of Illinois.
His supervisor Dan Guggley admitted the gangster disciples case was dead. The organization was famously paranoid. Members who flipped got killed. There were no informants inside the GD. Then in early 1993, a gangster disciples officer named Charles Jello Banks was arrested on a drug charge on the south side of Chicago.
Banks did something almost nobody in the gangster disciples ever did. He talked. Banks laid out the entire GD hierarchy for federal prosecutors for the first time. the two boards of directors, the governors overseeing each region, the regents running each drug corner. He gave the government enough to get wiretap authorization from a federal judge.
Now, the problem became how to bug Larry Hoover himself inside the Vienna Correctional Center. Ron Suffer wanted to tap the telephones in the Vienna visiting room, but DEA Supervisor Rick Barrett explained that Vienna did not work like that. There were no phone banks in the visiting area. Visitors and inmates sat together in a prison lunchroom.
One day in Barrett’s DEA office in Chicago, an agent walked in still wearing a visitor’s badge from a different prison case. Barrett made a joke. He said the badge was transmitting everything back to the US attorney’s office. The joke became the operation. DEA technicians in a federal electronics lab built radio transmitters thin enough to fit inside a standard prison visitors badge.
The signal from the badge was relayed to a transceiver hidden inside the Vienna Correctional Center, then sent to a wire room in Chicago where DEA agents listened and recorded in real time. On October 29th, 1993, the chief judge of the Northern District of Illinois authorized the badge wiretap under federal surveillance law.
DEA agents followed gangster Disciple Street boss Gregory Shorty G. Shell and enforcer Daryl Pops Johnson on the 6-hour drive from Chicago’s Southside down Interstate 57 to Vienna, Illinois, where Larry Hoover held court in his prison lunchroom. The badges worn by Hoover’s visitors picked up everything.
Hoover, captured on the DEA recordings inside Vienna, ordered a street tax on every nonG dealer in Chicago. He directed drug distribution across the south side. He approved hits. He spoke in coded language, but with the organizational chart Jello Banks had already provided, federal prosecutors could decode every sentence Larry Hoover spoke in that Vienna lunchroom.
The recordings ran from late October 1993 until December 19th, 1993 when one of Hoover’s visitors at the Vienna Correctional Center discovered the radio transmitter hidden inside their badge. On June 9th, 1995, Jello Banks was assassinated on a gangster Disciples drug corner on the south side of Chicago.
Four gunshots to the face. Ron Safer has said publicly that he blames himself for not pulling banks into witness protection sooner. IRS agents had also raided a rap concert promotion company run by Hoover’s common law wife in Chicago. Inside the office, they found a folder labeled LH, Senior Personal.
It contained a 27page gangster disciples organizational chart naming every leader by rank, region, and rival territory. On the morning of August 31st, 1995, Larry Hoover was woken up in his cell at Dixon Correctional Center by DEA agents. He was flown to Chicago on a government plane, the first time the man had ever been on an airplane.
He was moved to the Metropolitan Correctional Center in the loop downtown. He was charged with 40 counts, including conspiracy, money laundering, extortion, and running a continuing criminal enterprise from inside the Illinois prison system. 38 other high-ranking gangster disciples were also indicted in the Operation Headache federal sweep.
More than 250 federal, state, and local officers participated in the raid. across Chicago. A federal jury in Chicago convicted Larry Hoover on all 40 counts on May 9th, 1997. US District Judge Harry Lannen Weber sentenced him to six life terms in 1998, telling Hoover in the federal courtroom that he had misused a gift from God.
Hoover was shipped to ADX Florence in Colorado, the same federal supermax prison that held Ted Kazinski and El Chapo Guzman. He spent nearly 30 years there at ADX Florence, most of it in solitary confinement. In May 2025, President Donald Trump commuted Hoover’s federal life sentences. His Illinois state murder conviction for the killing of William Puki Young remains intact.
That conviction carries a sentence of 150 to 200 years imposed in 1973. As of this video, Larry Hoover is still in custody. If you are finding value in this video, subscribe to Street Archives. We cover the stories that deserve to be told. Right. While Larry Hoover went down, the Chicago Housing Authority itself was collapsing from the inside.
In May 1995, the Department of Housing and Urban Development seized direct control of the Chicago Housing Authority, the largest federal takeover of a housing agency in American history. Former Department of Housing and Urban Development Assistant Secretary Joseph Schulener was installed to run the agency at Chicago Housing Authority headquarters in Chicago and he laid off 3,500 or 4,000 CHA employees.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development admitted the problems inside Chicago’s public housing were worse than anyone had projected. The CHA was running a $52 million deficit, and the crime rate inside its buildings was 60% higher than the rest of the city. CHA chairman Vincent Lane had already tried a harder approach years earlier, starting at Rockwell Gardens in September 1988.
Lane launched Operation Clean Sweep, warrantless room by room raids for drugs and guns inside CHA developments. Photo IDs were issued to legal residents at their apartments and everyone else was escorted out by CHA police. The American Civil Liberties Union sued the CHA in 1991 over warrantless searches of public housing apartments and the authority entered a consent decree to stop the sweeps.
Lane reinstated them anyway after two more shooting deaths inside the developments. In June 1994, President Bill Clinton himself flew to the Robert Taylor homes on the south side to defend the sweep policy, telling residents inside the community room that the right of the community to exist outweighed individual search and seizure objections.
Lane lost the federal lawsuit. The Robert Taylor buildings kept rotting. In 1996, federal law required a viability test on every major public housing development in the country. Repair costs for Robert Taylor homes were estimated at more than $500 million. Vacancy rates inside the towers had passed 50%.
Robert Taylor failed the test. On October 1st, 1999, Mayor Richard M. Daily announced the plan for transformation at a press conference in Chicago. The most ambitious public housing demolition in United States history. 18,000 public housing units were demolished citywide. 25,000 were to be built or rehabilitated across Chicago.
The promise was mixed income communities on the south side and a right of return for displaced residents. The first Robert Taylor buildings to come down were three towers at the hole at 53rd Street beginning in 1998. Demolition rolled north along the State Street Strip through the early 2000s as wrecking crews tore through tower after tower.
By the end of 2005, every resident of Robert Taylor was gone. On March 8th, 2007, the very last Robert Taylor Tower fell. It was 5,135 South Federal Street, the building where Barbara Moore had raised her sons. She watched the demolition from across the street as the concrete came down. What the city of Chicago promised those 16,800 displaced families of the Chicago Housing Authority and what they actually got are two very different things.
A Chicago Sun Times and Better Government Association investigation tracked the roughly 16,800 families who had been living in Chicago Housing Authority buildings across Chicago at the end of 1999. 24% about 4,100 families were living in Chicago housing authority mixed income or traditional public housing by 2015.
21% about 3,500 families were using section 8 housing choice vouchers. The promise was that the vouchers would let families scatter across the city of Chicago and into better neighborhoods. Instead, they clustered in just 10 majority black Southside and Westside communities. Southshore, Grand Boulevard, Auburn, Gresham, Washington Park, West Englewood, Austin, Roseland, Woodlon, Greater Grand Crossing, and Englewood.
36% about 6,100 families had died or been evicted for lease violations. And the Chicago Housing Authority simply lost track of roughly 3,100 families, plus thousands more who have been doubled up under other people’s leases inside the old developments. On the land along State Street, where 4,415 Robert Taylor Apartments once stood, the Chicago Housing Authority built the Legend South development.
About 2,500 mixed income units total. Of those, only 851 were reserved for very lowincome public housing residents. A 2022 ProPublica investigation found that the Chicago Housing Authority quietly declared the plan for transformation complete in an obscure report, but reached that number by counting vouchers, senior housing, and units for veterans and disabled residents that were never part of the original promise.
The agency ended up with roughly 2,000 fewer family units than the plan had called for. Today, long stretches of the former Robert Taylor Homes footprint are still vacant lots running south from 39th Street along the Dan Ryan Expressway. The violence didn’t disappear when the Chicago wrecking crews brought the towers down.
Researchers documented crime displacement from the old second police district on the south side where Robert Taylor once stood into the seventh district covering Englewood. The poverty moved. The shooting moved. The families just had different addresses on the same south side. Ethnographic research by Susan Popkin at the Urban Institute and Sudir Venites at Columbia University tracked adult outcomes for displaced Robert Taylor residents and found the results were mixed at best.
There were modest improvements in safety and mental health, but persistent unemployment and isolation in their new neighborhoods. Youth outcomes were slightly better, though nowhere close to what Daly had promised when he said he wanted to rebuild their souls at that 1999 press conference.
The families who left Robert Taylor didn’t move to Lincoln Park. They didn’t move to the Northshore suburbs. They moved to Englewood, to Roseand, to Austin, to Southshore. The same neighborhoods that would later become the center of Chicago’s gun violence crisis in the 2010s. different buildings, same poverty. There was a woman named Beauty Turner who lived in the Robert Taylor homes on the south side of Chicago for more than 14 years.
She became a journalist and editor at the Residents Journal newspaper and a columnist for the Hyde Park Herald. In 1999, she started something she called the Ghetto Bus Tours: Greatest History Ever Told to Our People. She took outsiders on buses into the Robert Taylor towers before they fell so someone would remember what was really there, not just the gangs and the body counts.
She used to say she was a writer and a fighter from the boughels of the ghetto from Chicago’s Robert Taylor Holmes. She said the tour was designed to really give a voice to the voiceless and that meant the residents in public housing in the city of Chicago. Beauty Turner died on December 18th, 2008 at 51 years old of a brain aneurysm at Rush University Medical Center.
The Chicago Defender called her the Ida B. Wells of our times. The Robert Taylor Holmes on the south side of Chicago produced Mr. T, Hall of Fame outfielder Kirby Pucket, future Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, and comedian Cory Hulcom. The development produced 27,000 people who lived inside six of the poorest census tracks in America, survived a daily war along State Street, and then got scattered across the same Southside with a voucher and a promise nobody kept.
The project that bore the name of a man who fought against concentrated segregation became the single greatest monument to concentrated segregation in American history. Robert Roshan Taylor resigned from the Chicago Housing Authority in 1950 because he refused to build what they built anyway. Then they put his name on it.
The towers along State Street are gone. The land along the Dan Ryan is mostly empty. The families are still out there. Subscribe to Street Archives.
