In March of 1997, police pulled a body from Wolf Lake on the Illinois Indiana border, red t-shirt number 23, missing three weeks. When they pulled him from the water, they identified him by the tattoo of fiveointed El Rukane star. His name was Antonio Fort. He was 31 years old. Nobody was ever prosecuted for it.
The title Antonio held the title the organization called Prince came open the day his body came out of that water. A man named Kinyatta White eventually carried it. Chicago police called White the second highest ranking black peace stone leader on the streets. He was 44 years old when he entered the Illinois Department of Corrections on March 17th, 2006.
First-degree murder, 55 years. Projected parole January 24th, 2061. He would be 99 years old. Was Kenyatta White a killer or was he the man a title needed to punish? The record doesn’t close that out. 5 years after White went in Chicago, police raided the home of a man they called the new prince of Terror Town.
13 vehicles, 10 guns, a substantial quantity of heroin, and in his home, a shrine to Jeff Fort, the man who had started all of this in 1959 in federal prison for decades, whose son’s body they’ pulled from that lake. The title was still there. The shrine was still there. This story begins with Jeff Fort.
Jeff Fort was 12 years old when he started organizing street kids on the south side of Chicago. He met Eugene Haristen at a juvenile detention facility downstate. When they got out, they built what they had been doing separately into something with structure and reach. They named it after the street where they organized Blackstone Avenue in Woodlon.
1959, Ford was convicted in 72, again in ‘ 83, again in ‘ 87 for accepting payment from a foreign government to commit domestic terrorist acts that sent him to ADX Florence, the federal supermax in Colorado. He is still there. Each time Fort went away, the organization was supposed to die with him. It did not.
The corners didn’t care who was in a federal cell. The trade continued. The name changed, the leadership changed. The title at the top, the position, the organization’s internal logic called prince changed too by necessity each time it had to. But the corners didn’t change. The corners just waited.
You can’t lock up a corner. You can lock up whoever’s running it. Corner just waits. They took the man. Didn’t change a thing about the corner. Antonio Fort’s authority was inherited before it was earned. His name was Fort. That was the credential. He was the son of the man who had built the organization, survived three federal prosecutions, reconstituted itself after the demolition of its own headquarters, kept running.
Antonio Fort went by Prince Aniel. Not a general who had risen through the ranks, not a strategist who had proved himself under fire, but a prince, the inheritor given the title before he had done anything to deserve it because being born to the founder was close enough. He served a prison sentence from 1992 to 96 for conspiracy to purchase cocaine.
When he came back out, he imposed terms on the drug operations beneath him. His generals paid into it. The people below them paid into it until they didn’t. The gang history sources describe one piece of the record with particular weight. Jeff Fort from inside federal custody had ordered his own son beaten drumed in the organization’s internal language not once at least twice for perceived disloyalty for failing in force judgment to be what the position required.
The man who had built the organization, who had named his son Prince before the boy knew what the word meant, had twice instructed the organization to physically punish that son for falling short. What Antonio did or failed to do in those specific instances, the record doesn’t say.
What it does say is that the generals who moved against him had grievances of their own. Contemporary journalism confirms his death. The internal motive is less firmly documented than the outcome. His wife had reported him missing three weeks before his body came out of Wolf Lake. When police pulled him from the water, the cause of death was ruled a homicide.
He was wearing a red t-shirt bearing the number 23. The emblem of his father’s organization, a five-pointed El Rukane star, was tattooed on his body. They identified him by that mark. He was 31 years old. Gang history sources identified Jabari Brown as a primary organizer of the killing.
Brown had run BPSN operations in the south suburbs in Harvey and Dixmore through a close working relationship with Antonio Fort. Whether there were grievances layer beyond what those accounts describe, the record does not say. Jeff Fort was behind federal walls. He had ordered that son beaten twice. And when Antonio’s body came out of Wolf Lake, the man who had built the thing that killed him could not make a single public statement.
His family declined comment to the press. No account has surfaced of how or when he was told. That’s not what the record gives us. It gives us a red t-shirt, a tattoo, a lake on the state line. The title that had been Antonio’s came open. In the same year Antonio Fort died, another of Jeff Fort’s sons went to prison.
Prince Wakita, known inside the organization as Venuela. Fort was charged with cocaine offenses. 1997, two Forts gone in the same calendar year. The organization had built a succession logic around Jeff Fort’s bloodline. In 1997, that bloodline ran out of bodies to offer. Those details about Prince Wakita come from gang history sources, single source unverified.
What is not in dispute is what those events produced. Jabari Brown, the man those archives identify as organizing Antonio’s killing, faced the consequences. The BPSN hierarchy, issued an internal order against him. his suburban operation collapsed. Brown was later convicted of murder in a separate case and sent to prison.
That left Terror Town without its architect and without the man who had cleared the field. Those blocks, 75th to 79th Streets, Yates to Kfax remained. The blocks did not care about the leadership structure that managed them. The trade continued. The workers continued. The money continued because it was already there, already in motion.
And it didn’t stop because the man who held the title was dead. What evaporated was the center, the organization in Terror Town fragmented along black lines, subfactions, organizing themselves around their own corners, their own sense of what the territory owed them. The disputes no longer routed through a single person whose word was final.
No charter, no election, no paperwork, nothing the outside world would recognize as a process for deciding who comes next. That’s how it got settled. Same way it always did. Somebody steps into the gap. The gap closes around them. And now that’s who it is. The blocks were still there. The organization was still there.
The money was still there. What wasn’t there was a prince. There is one public photograph of Kenyatta White from before the title. a mug shot. It was taken in the early 1990s and the person who maintains a Chicago gang history website captioned it with two words, Prince Kenyatta, not Kenyatta white gang member or Kenyatta white arrested. Prince Kenyatta.
He had the designation before the position was open before Antonio Fort was dead. Before the vacancy in Terror Town was a vacancy. before anyone in law enforcement was calling him the second highest ranking black peace leader on the streets. One photograph, one caption. The rest of what we know about who he was before 1997 is the record the state kept.
The record before 1983 is blank. He was born September 10th, 1961 on Chicago’s south side. Whatever he wanted, whatever he feared, whatever he understood about the world, by the time he was 21, the documents do not contain it. His family, his neighborhood, the years before the first arrest, none of it is in the public record.
The record doesn’t start before the machine clocked him. In the early 1980s, he accumulated a criminal record that confirms what the organization already knew about him. He was already inside this world, already operating at a level that drew serious charges. In 1984, he enter state custody on an attempted murder conviction, a class X felony, the most serious category in Illinois for non- capital offenses.
He served 10 years. He came back out and continued. By the early 1990s, he had acquired additional drug convictions, controlled substance charges, the kind of record that marks a man not as someone who stumbled into this world, but as someone who had built a life in it.
What the record does not give us is the interior. We do not know from any document the courts or law enforcement produced what Kenyatta White thought was happening when Antonio Fort died in Wolf Lake. We do not know whether he moved deliberately toward the vacancy or whether the vacancy moved toward him, whether he made a decision or whether the logic of the territory, the logic of being the senior man still standing simply produced the outcome without anyone choosing it.
The record doesn’t say what Chicago law enforcement eventually concluded the designation they gave him was this second highest ranking black peace stone leader on the streets not in the city on the streets which meant something specific out there operating directing things that moved on those six blocks from Yates to Kfax the heroin trade the disputes the structure that turned a corner into revenue his lawyer denied the designation said the label was law enforcement’s frame, not the organization’s truth. There were at that point three accounts of who Kenyatta White was. The organization called him prince. Law enforcement called him second highest ranking. His attorney said he was neither or at least not what they were making him into. The record does not give us a fourth account whites own. what he understood himself to be, whether he wanted the title or
the title found him, whether he knew what it cost before it started costing him, the documents do not contain that either. He was 35 years old when Antonio Fort’s body came out of Wolf Lake. Not a young man grasping at something, a man who had been inside this world for over a decade already, who had served 10 years for attempted murder, who had come back out and stayed.
The people who knew him called him yada. Not prince, not the designation law enforcement would spend years using against him yada. The shorten name that the street uses for someone it has known long enough to stop saying the full name. The attorney for the Brown family years later told the press that the Browns and many others with ties to White’s gang were afraid of him and with good reason.
That is what the record offers for a portrait. Not habits, not relationships, not what he wanted from any of this. A reputation, a nickname, a fear. He stepped into it or it stepped around him. Either way, same result. He held the title. The problems those blocks generated, the rivalries, the disputes over who was getting what, the accusations, the violence that accumulated around large amounts of money in a world with no legal mechanism for resolving disagreements, all of it ran through him. Now, the organization had a word for whoever it ran through like that, prince. Not a rank in any official sense, not a position with a job description behind it. A word that told the people who mattered on those blocks who the territory ran through. Antonio Fort had been called it and inherited it from a name. Kenyatta White
was called it because he was there. The general already in place, the man already withstanding the person, the territory needed somebody to be. The title made him visible in a way that generals are not visible. It made him the face of the operation, the point of accountability, the person law enforcement focused on.
The feud with the Brown family was a consequence of the position, but it was also already personal. In 2002, a year before Arame Brown was shot at that gas station. Sundiata Brown, a third member of the Brown family, killed Kenyatta White’s nephew. He was charged with the murder. He was awaiting trial.
The feud between the whites and the browns had already crossed into blood before the wire accusation, before the drug dispute, before any of it. What happened at 79th and Yates in January of 2003 did not begin with a business disagreement about heroin money. It began before that in a different killing, in a different year, in a different part of this same world.
When you hold the title in an organization that controls heroin at 79th and Yates, the disputes that come to you are the disputes about 79th and Yates. Armain Brown and his brother Ajani ran in the same territory. There was heroin money. There was the kind of dispute that heroin money generates in a world where disagreements cannot be resolved by a lawyer filing a motion where the only enforcement mechanism is the one the territory itself provides.
And there was something else. The accusation that moved faster and heavier than almost anything else in this world. the accusation that someone was carrying the conversation to federal investigators, wearing a wire, taking what happened on the corner and bringing it to the people whose job was to end what happened on the corner.
The title made White the person that accusation had to go to, not because he was involved in the specific transaction, whatever it was, because he held the territory. Because in the organization’s logic, the territo’s problems were the title holders problems. The Brown family’s potential cooperation with federal law enforcement was a problem for the territory, which meant it was a problem for the prince.
Whether Aramean or a Johnny Brown had any actual arrangement with federal law enforcement, the record does not definitively answer. The postconviction record shows that a Johnny Brown years after the murder directed a witness to report information to federal authorities. Whether that reflects something that existed before January of 2003 is unresolved.
The accusation that someone is cooperating with federal investigators in this world carries the weight of a death sentence. Justified or not in the logic of the territory, the title required a response. At approximately 10:30 in the evening on January 6th, 2003, Aramman Brown was shot at the Amoko gas station at 79th Street and Yates Avenue, Chicago’s Southshore, Terror Town, White’s Corner.
Sherry Collier was standing at a nearby public telephone with her 5-year-old grandson. She was not connected to Kenyatta White. She was not connected to Araine Brown. She had no stake in what was about to happen. No reason to be watching for anything in particular. No relationship to either side of whatever dispute had put Armen Brown at that gas station on that night.
She was a woman making a phone call while holding a child’s hand. She saw a van pull up to the gas pumps. She saw a woman get out and go inside the store. She saw a man approached wearing a matching black outfit, black pants, black jacket, hood pulled up. She watched him pull the hood back from his face. She watched him produce a weapon.
She watched Araine Brown run. She watched the man pursue him across the forcourt and fire again. She watched the body fall. Then the man trotted away. Sher Collier identified Kenyatta White from a photo array. She identified him in a police lineup. She walked into a Cook County courtroom and identify him in open court.
The Illinois appellet court that reviewed her testimony three years later described it as consistent and unequivocal. She said what she saw. Martina Brewer had also been at the gas station that night. She was Ara Brown’s girlfriend. She was present on February 27th, 2003. She appeared before a grand jury and identified the shooter as Yata White’s street name, the shortened form the people who knew him used.
She described the shooting in terms consistent with what Collier had described. She put him there. Kenyatta White fled Chicago. He was arrested February 20th, 2003 in East St. Lewis, Illinois, 6 weeks after the shooting across the state line on a warrant for the Ramain Brown murder. He said what he had been doing the night of January 6th.
He was at the home of Annie Handy, known in the family as Mother Evans at 63rd and Laughlin. He had been there with family eating dinner, watching television, and playing cards. He had not been at that gas station. His alibi witnesses were family members who testified to the timing and sequence of events.
Their accounts were consistent on the core facts, but were challenged by the state on minor discrepancies in the exact minuteby-minute timeline. He was released on bail following his arrest, initially set at $1 million, later reduced to $500,000, 50,000 cash to walk. This was not in law enforcement’s framing a murder case that happened to involve a gang member.
This was a gang war case and the man at his center was the person whose title made him responsible for the war. Then on December 14th, 200310 and a half months after Brown was killed at the gas station, a Johnny Brown, Araman’s brother was shot multiple times while sitting in his car. Someone had boxed him in.
so he could not drive away. He survived. White was arrested again in late December of 2003, this time for the attempted murder of a Johnny Brown. He was held without bail. On February 6th, 2004, Judge Leo Holt reduced his bail to $100,000, 10,000 cash to walk. Chicago Police Superintendent Philip Klene called the decision publicly in the press very frustrating.
Chief of Detectives James Malloy put numbers around what frustrating meant 20 of 598 Chicago murders in the prior year had been confirmed retaliation killings. The police’s concern was not abstract. Their concern was that releasing the man holding the prince’s title while charges were pending for one murder and a second shooting still under investigation would produce more bodies.
Klene stated explicitly that White’s release risked inflaming violence between black peace factions and with the rival gangster disciples. The attempted murder charge was eventually dropped. White maintained he had been in Los Angeles, but the pattern of what had been built around him was now complete.
Two shootings, one dead, one who survived, both in the same territory, both in the same feud, both downstream of the same title. The trial commenced January 24th, 2006. It was a bench trial, no jury, one judge, one person whose finding of fact would determine whether Kenyatta White went home or went to prison for the rest of his life.
The record does not explain why he waved a jury. It does not give us the conversation with his attorney, the strategic reasoning, the calculation of whether 12 strangers could hear the word prince and still see the man underneath it, or whether one trained judge might. The record doesn’t say the judge was Diane Gordon Cannon.
She had been a Cook County Assistant States Attorney before she was appointed to the bench. In Justice Watch found that she sent 35% of probation violators to state prison compared to the county average of 13%. Defense attorneys sought to avoid her more than any other judge in Cook County. The Chicago Sun Times in its obituary after her death on October 31st, 2020 described her as known for harsh treatment toward defendants and verbal outbursts. She died of cancer.
She presided over the state of Illinois versus Kenyatta White. At trial, Martina Brewer recanted. She took the stand and told the court that the identification she had given to police at the hospital and then to the grand jury was false that a Johnny Brown had told her White was the shooter and had threatened her and her family if she refused to say so.
She said she had been coerced. She said her grand jury testimony was not the truth. Now I sit with that. The victim’s girlfriend, who gave the ID at the hospital the night her man was killed, who testified before a grand jury six weeks later, walked into open court three years later and said, “The person who told me who did it was Armen’s own brother who needed me to say a particular name and who threatened my family if I didn’t.
” She said her grief got used as a weapon against somebody else. That’s either the truth of what happened or that’s what somebody who’s also being threatened says. The court had to decide which one it was. Judge Cannon did not believe her. The court found Brewer’s original statements, the identification made at the hospital on the night of the murder, the grand jury testimony given six weeks later more credible than the recantation at trial.
The court found that Sherry Collier, the disinterested woman at the public telephone with the 5-year-old grandson, was the spine of the case. The appellet court that reviewed the record in 2009 described the evidence as overwhelmingly favoring the state. White’s defense argued a third party guilt theory that two other men had gone to the gas station to shoot a Johnny Brown, not Ara, and had shot the wrong person.
Courts would consider that theory five times across nearly two decades. Each time it was not found sufficient. Whether Kenyatta White is the man who shot Araine Brown on his own corner or whether he is the man whose title made the case need to land on somebody, the record lays the facts out and doesn’t close it for you.
It gives you Sherry Collier. It gives you Martina Brewer’s grand jury testimony and Martina Brewer’s recantation. It gives you alibi witnesses whose timeline the state tore apart piece by piece. A Johnny Brown, the man who allegedly coerced Martina Brewer, who allegedly directed witnesses to implicate White with federal authorities who survived the shooting in his car.
Was never prosecuted for any of it. Not for the witness intimidation, not for anything connected to this case. After 2003, he does not appear in any public record. The research located whether he is alive in prison for something else or dead, the record does not say. He is another absence, the case produced.
In February of 2006, Judge Cannon convicted Kenyatta White of firstdegree murder. The court had found the evidence overwhelming. In March of 2006, she sentenced him to 55 years. His projected parole date, January 24th, 2061. He was born in 1961. He was sentenced in 2006. Work the numbers.
On March 17th, 2006, Kenyatta White entered the Illinois Department of Corrections. He was 44 years old. His projected parole date was January 24th, 2061. His projected discharge date was January 24th, 2064. He would be housed at Lawrence Correctional Center. The blocks were still there. In November of 2009, three and a half years after White began his sentence, the FBI Chicago field office announced the arrest of four Black Peace Nation members on federal charges of conspiracy to distribute crack cocaine in Terror Town.
The press release identified the geographic area 75th to 79th Streets Yates to Kfax avenues, the same six blocks. The FBI’s assessment of what it had found there was stated plainly in the release, the Black Pea Stone Nation largely controls drug trafficking in the area.
Then in June of 2011, five years after White entered Lawrence Correctional Center, the Chicago Police Department ran Operation Terror Town 2. 15 or more arrests. The significant arrest, the one the press conferences focused on, was a 32year-old man named Eric Gothro, nephew of Jeff Fort. The same Jeff Fort who had started organizing street kids in Woodlon in 1959 who had been in federal custody since 1987 who was serving 168 combined years in federal prison.
Gothro also went by Eric Fort. He used the surname as an alias the name of the man who had built what he was running. Chicago police identified him as the prince of terror town. The operation he ran was generating $15,000 a day. Nicholas Roachi, the chief of the Chicago Police Department’s Organized Crime Division, said it on the record.
$15,000 per day on six blocks. When police went to Goldthrow’s home during the arrest, they found a shrine to Jeff Fort. Jeff Fort had been in federal prison for 24 years at that point. Had not set foot on Chicago’s Southside since the 80s, would not leave adx Florence for the rest of his life, every tool gone, every resource gone, every mechanism the outside world calls power gone.
Man was locked away from all of it. And in the home of the man currently running the territory he had built in the home of the man the police were calling the prince of terror town. There was a shrine to him. What the organization believed it owed him. It had been paying for decades.
Not in tribute money, not in a formal structure anyone could produce paperwork for. In the maintenance of the title, in the reproduction of the geometry, the five-pointed star, the colors, the hierarchy, the word prince assigned to the person who ran the territory he had built. In the image placed in the home of that person, as if to say this position belongs to him, the men who hold it are temporary.
The position is not. Over nearly two decades, state and federal courts repeatedly reviewed pieces of the case. The Illinois appellet court in 2009, the Illinois Supreme Court in 2011, postconviction proceedings in 2014 and 2020, and a federal habius corpus petition in 2024. Each time the conviction stood, the title was still there.
The founder is still alive. Jeff Fort has been in federal prison since 1987. He will almost certainly die there. Kenyatta White is at Lawrence Correctional Center in Sumar, Illinois. He has been there since March of 2006. His projected parole date is January 24th, 2061. He will almost certainly die there, too. In 2011, Eric Gothro was arrested in the same six blocks White had run.
He was called the prince of terror town and his home police found a shrine to the man who had started all of this in 1959. Jeff Fort built the machine. His son inherited the title before he earned it and was killed by the machine for the taxation it required. Kenyatta White stepped into the vacancy and held the title for six years until the title made him the body the prosecution needed.
Eric Gothrow ran the same six blocks and kept the shrine. Here’s what the record can’t close out for you. Did Kinyatta White possess the title or did the title possess him? Did Antonio Fort inherit something real or just a name that came with a debt he couldn’t pay? Did Eric Gothrow build his own authority or receive a crown the organization had been holding in trust for the man in the shrine? Did Jeff Fort behind the walls of a federal supermax still own something that men had been carrying in his name for decades? The shrine don’t answer any of that. It just holds the questions. In a world without a law of inheritance, the title doesn’t die with the person who holds it. It waits.
