On July 23rd, 1992, a man named Samuel Willis sat before a United States Senate subcommittee and told them how to stop the killing. He represented the vice lords. He held the title of chief minister of justice. The senators listened. He had walked out of prison four months earlier. Within weeks, he was on the phone with gang leaders across Minneapolis.
vice lords blood’s disciples souls telling them they were the ones governing the gangs so they had to be the ones to stop the killing they argued eventually they sat down that became the testimony in Washington the subcommittee was called children family drugs and alcohol the hearing was called violence in America’s youth he was the expert witness the senators took notes 63 days later a group of men met at his home in North Minneapolis.
What they decided in that house led at approximately 1:30 in the morning to a police officer being shot in the back at a pizza restaurant on East Lake Street. Officer Jerry Half was 53 years old, 30-year veteran, shot while sitting at a table. He died. Willis was never charged.
What you are about to hear is the public record of a man who organized peace in a city that had run out of options and who has lived for 30 years inside a question that record cannot resolve. What did Willis say in the room on the night of September 24th, 1992? The court documents confirmed the meeting took place at his address. They do not answer the question.
Neither will this. Samuel Willis was born around 1951 on Chicago’s west side into a neighborhood that was in the process of being unmade, not accidentally, by design, federal highways, redlinining urban renewal projects that demolish neighborhoods in the name of improving them. By the time Willis was a teenager, the west side had been gutted by decisions made by people who did not live there.
The tax base left, the schools followed. What institutions leave behind other institutions filled. The conservative vice lords were founded in Chicago in the late 1950s. For a specific window, they were not only a street gang. They ran a cultural center programs for teenagers, for young mothers, for schoolage children.
They painted alleys and planted grass. civil rights organizations had recognized them as a genuine neighborhood power structure. Willis was there for that. He described it himself decades later in his own words. I’ve been a vice lord for more than 25 years. My initial involvement was in the 60s and the early 70s in Chicago when the vice lords had a cultural center, a program for planting grass and painting alleys and were involved with community programs for teenage mothers and school kids.
The ideology and the violence coexisted. They always had. The community programs eventually collapsed. The money dried up. The crack epidemic hit the fractures ran too deep. What remained was the organizational structure, the hierarchy, the chain of command, the territorial logic, the bones of an institution. Willis stayed.
He was convicted of armed robbery in Illinois sometime in the 1970s. One sentence. That is what the record gives this and that is what it deserves here. He committed armed robbery. He was convicted. He served time. He came back. The organization was still there. So was he. He moved to Minneapolis in the early 1980s. The city was in the middle of something that didn’t have a name yet.
Minneapolis had built its self-image around being the progressive Midwestern capital that did not have Chicago’s problems for much of its history that had been accurate enough that nobody challenged it. Then the organizational structures Willis knew from Chicago moved north. The vice lords and the disciples brought their internal logic with them.
Chain of command territorial arrangements, informal systems that resolved disputes without involving law enforcement. Minneapolis had no framework for any of it. The police could respond to incidents after the fact. They had no mechanism to prevent them beforehand. Willis did not arrive as a foot soldier in this process. He arrived and he rose.
Sometime around 1982, he shot a man during a dispute over a craps game. The man died. The record carries the conviction. It does not carry the victim’s name, not in any public document I have been able to find. A man was killed in Minneapolis and the public record decided to remember the conviction and forget the person who died. I noticed that.
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I’m going to note it here and move on because the documentary cannot fix what the record discarded and manufacturing the victim’s humanity from nothing would be its own kind of insult. What the record does give us Willis was convicted of murder in Minneapolis. He served time. He was parrolled in 1989. He came back ranked higher than when he left.
Prison does not remove you from the chain of command. It confirms your seriousness within it. By the time he was organizing in North Minneapolis in the early 90s, Willis held a title that the court documents use with flat bureaucratic precision, the kind of language that appears in court filings, because the court is simply recording what it found without comment on what the words mean.
Chief Minister of Justice. Conservative Vice Lords Minneapolis, highest ranking CVL leader in the city. Read that title again. Chief Minister of Justice. The word justice embedded in a gang rank in the CVL structure. That title was not symbolic. The chain of command was strict and functional.
Decisions about serious matters moved through it. Authority over those decisions sat at the top. Willis sat at the top. He said years later that he understood what crack cocaine had done to the community and he described the causality in a way that was dark and counterintuitive. Then the influx of drugs began. It took about 15 years for the brothers to regain the consciousness of the 60s and start something constructive.
What brought that about was the influx of crack. Devastation can be become a motive. A community can be hollowed out badly enough that starting over starts to seem not just possible but necessary. He was the one who had that idea. He was also the chief minister of justice of the conservative vice lords.
Both things, same title, same man. Somewhere inside a prison in the 1980s, a man held a funeral for himself. The man’s name was Black Sam. That was what the streets knew him as the name the vice lords used the name the people of north Minneapolis would have recognized Samuel Willis the street version the man who had been fighting organizing building a criminal resumeumé since his teens on Chicago’s west side convicted of murder serving time still embedded in the hierarchy even from inside a cell the funeral was mock a ceremony he
stayed age for himself. He changed his name after that. He chose Shahif. In Arabic, Sharif means noble, honorable. A man convicted of murder chose a name that meant honorable. The gap between what a name means and what the man who chose it has done. That gap is not empty space.
It is the entire question this documentary is asking. Inside that prison, he encountered civil rights figures who were speaking to inmates. Gary Saduth, Spike Moss, Mahmood, Elcati, Harry Davis, Ron Edwards, men who had organized in Minneapolis through the 60s and 70s. They talked about history, about culture, about what black men in America had built before and could build again.
Willis listened. He started a school inside the facility with Harry Davis’s help. He said later, “Not only was I remorseful for what I was locked up for, I gained a newfound appreciation for my culture.” Remorseful and educated are not the same thing. And neither of them alone or together necessarily determines what comes next.
The word peace entered Willis’s vocabulary here inside that prison. He discovered it or invented it for himself or put on the language of it the way a man puts on a new name. He was parrolled in 1989. Something sent him back a parole violation. A new charge the record does not say. What the record says is this.
In March of 1992, he walked out of what he called the institution and immediately began making phone calls. Not the next week, the same period, the same breath. He called gang leaders across Minneapolis. He told them, “We have to be the ones to stop the violence because we are the ones governing the gangs.” It took debate. It took arguing.
Rivals who had been shooting at each other for years had to be told by the man with the authority to tell them to sit down at the same table. Eventually, they did. United for Peace was the result. He went from prison to organizing United for Peace in the span of weeks. The funeral for Black Sam may have been real.
Or the funeral may have been a ceremony that let him do what he was already planning to do. Build something under a name that the city might be willing to work with. Both of those things can be true at the same time. The city of Minneapolis had to decide whether to believe one of them. It chose the name. It chose Sharif.
The city of Minneapolis endorsed a peace movement run by the man it feared most. And for a specific window a few months in the spring and summer of 1992, it almost worked. United for Peace was not a theory. It was an operation. Willis had founded it with Reverend Jerry McAfee of New Salem Missionary Baptist Church working under the organizational umbrella of the City, Inc.
run by Spike Moss, one of the same civil rights figures who had spoken to Willis inside the prison years earlier. It required Willis to invoke the CVL title to call enemies who had been trying to kill each other for years and persuade them that the table was worth more than the gun. After a great deal of resistance, they sat down. He described what happened.
After a lot of debate and arguing, several of them vice lords, blood souls and disciples came to the table and that turned into united for peace. Then this opportunity was unparalleled. Individuals who historically opposed each other sat down to dialogue and decided to take some steps toward stopping the violence in their community.
The spirit of that and the honesty of that attempt is something I never believed I’d be a part of. Minneapolis Deputy Police Chief Dave Droka endorsed United for Peace publicly. Worked with it, treated it as a legitimate partner in the city’s effort to keep the peace. When a situation threatened to escalate a shooting, a crowd, the kind of thing that spreads before the police can contain it, they called on United for Peace. Willis sent people.
According to his own account, it worked. The police called upon United for Peace, who they supported, and we were able to bring some calm to the situation. The Minneapolis Police Department, the institution that had watched Willis for years, that understood what the title Chief Minister of Justice meant in practice, that knew the murder conviction, the armed robbery, the organizational rank that institution called him when things got dangerous, and he answered, and it worked.
On July 23rd, 1992, Willis sat before a United States Senate subcommittee. The subcommittee was called children, family, drugs, and alcohol. The hearing was titled violence and America’s Youth. He appeared as a representative of the Vice Lords and the City Incorer Minneapolis. He was that day the expert the United States Senate had invited to explain how American cities could stop killing their children.
The senators listened. I do not have the transcript of what he said in that chamber. The C-SPAN record confirms his presence. The exact words he delivered are not in any public document I have accessed. What I know is that he was there in Washington in July of 1992 being consulted by the elected officials of the United States on how to stop the violence.
He had a framework. He had a functioning coalition. He had the credibility of a man who had pulled enemies to a table nobody else had been able to set. He believed in what he had built. I believe he believed in it. For one summer, Minneapolis believed the man who knew the gangs could stop them. That was July 23rd, 1992.
The planning meeting at his home was September 24th. 63 days. On the evening of September 24th, 1992, Samuel Willis attended a community meeting at North High School. The meeting had been called in response to something specific, an incident on a Minneapolis Transit Commission bus. A blind black man with no bus fair had been removed from the bus by transit police. An altercation had followed.
Someone had punched a transit officer. The neighborhood was already running hot late September in a year that had been violent in a city that had been trying for months to hold itself together through a coalition of gang leaders led by the man now sitting in a school auditorium at a community meeting about a transit incident. The meeting ended.
A group of men went to Willis’s home. What happened next is in the court record state v Ford Minnesota Supreme Court 1995 that is the document it says that AC Ford Jr. a senior figure in a conservative vice lords the man whose name the case would eventually carry proposed at a gathering at Willis’s home killing a police officer.
Ford’s exact words preserved under oath in the court record. You all ready to do this? were going to walk up to the number five bus line and shoot the bus driver. He changed the target to the pizza shack on East Lake Street. He distributed weapons. He assigned roles. The court record also makes a structural observation about the conservative vice lords that is worth quoting carefully.
It describes a strict chain of command in which a foot soldier could not independently make the decision to kill a police officer. Such a decision in the CVL’s organizational structure required authorization from above. The same court record identifies Willis as the highest ranking CVL leader in Minneapolis. I don’t know what was said to him in that room.
The court record places him in the house. It confirms the planning meeting took place at his address. what was said to him, what he said back, whether he directed or approved or refused or said nothing at all. None of that is in any public document I have found. And Willis has stated for more than 30 years that he had no knowledge of what was going to happen.
I am not going to tell you he is lying. I am not going to tell you he is telling the truth. The men left the house at approximately 1:30 in the morning on September 25th, 1992. Muati McKenzie and Shannon BS walked into the pizza shack at 1623 East Lake Street. Officer Jerry Hoff, 53 years old, 30-year veteran of the Minneapolis Police Department on duty and in uniform, was sitting at the officer’s table. He was shot in the back.
Gerald Lubarski, a civilian, was also wounded. Hoff died. When police arrived at Sheree Willis’s home that same night, they found Shannon BS there and outside a Cadillac loaded with clothing, a car packed and ready to leave, parked in front of the address where the planning had taken place on the night a cop had just been killed one mile away.
Someone had packed that car before the shooting. Before 1:30 in the morning, before Emwati McKenzie and Shannon BS walked through the door of the pizza shack, someone in that house had put clothes into a trunk while Jerry Half was still sitting at his table on duty, unaware alive. The car was ready before he died.
A packed Cadillac in a driveway is not a crime. The record notes it and moves on. Willis was not arrested that night. Willis was never charged with Jerry Hoff’s murder. United for Peace. The coalition he had built the framework he had testified about before the United States Senate 63 days earlier collapsed the next morning.
No more police partnership. No more city endorsement. No more This opportunity was unparalleled. just a dead officer, a packed car, and a question that the court could never answer because it never brought charges. He was still talking about peace. In August of 1993, while four men were on trial for the murder of Jerry Half while the police were still investigating while his own home had been confirmed as the location of the planning meeting, Willis gave a long interview to a faith magazine called Sojourers.
The title of the interview was a sanction of peace. He was not hiding. He was speaking. In the interview, he addressed the Hoff murder with the precision of a man who had thought very carefully about every word. Then an officer was killed and it was alleged that members of United for Peace were involved.
The individuals were vice lords, but they weren’t United for Peace. They found an individual guilty. So, I don’t think they’re still saying that I had involvement. It hurt United for Peace for a time, but I believe we’ve rebounded. The death of the officer was a tragedy because we don’t endorse violence of any kind. The distinction he draws is organizational, not personal.
The individuals were vice lords, but they weren’t united for peace. Technically true, and the planning meeting was confirmed to have taken place at his address. Both of those things fit inside the same paragraph. He also said in that same interview that United for Peace still had a formula, we have a formula now that we might be able to apply to other areas of the country.
He said that in August of 1993, four men were serving life sentences. His nephew was one of them. Four men convicted. AC Ford Jr. life sentence. Shannon BS life sentence. Mati McKenzie, life sentence. Montter T. Willis Sharif’s nephew, life sentence. The police had their own assessment. Retired police chief John Lol who presided over the Minneapolis Police Department the year half was killed said this.
Some people reform. I don’t believe he is one of them. I just believe in my heart of hearts he was guilty then and he is guilty now. Retired Lieutenant Mike Sorrowro was one of the first officers at the Pizza Shack that night. I find it hard to believe a bunch of underlings would go out and decide to do it.
Maybe he didn’t plan it, but he didn’t stop it either. He said peace. They said guilty. He kept saying peace. They kept saying guilty. And the word, the same word he had been using since he changed his name in prison was now doing something different. It had a shadow on it now. It would never not have that shadow. The Hoff case left a question.
Willis could live inside. He had never been charged. And the word peace could still be spoken with a straight face. What happened in October of 1994 answers something uglier. Under enough pressure, the old method was still available to him. Someone had taken two decorative wheel ornaments from his Mercedes Benz.
or he believed someone had. On October 21st, 1994, Willis contacted an associate for a ride to the SNS service station in North Minneapolis. He believed people at that station had taken two 24karat gold decorative hub covers, spinners, from his car. He arrived with his codefendant Vincent King Fields. One of them was carrying a 9mm pistol.
There were approximately 12 people inside the gas station. Some of them were children. Willis held at least one person at gunpoint and kept the station under his control. He was looking for gold wheel covers that, as it turned out, the people he had just put at gunpoint had not taken. He had the wrong people. He did not know that when he walked in.
The federal case that followed was straightforward. Police found approximately 33 grams of cracked cocaine in a vehicle connected to the incident. On February 27th, 1995, a federal jury convicted him on all counts. The court’s language was direct. It described what happened at the SNS service station as a senseless display of terrorist tactics.
The sentence 322 months. United for Peace died the morning after Jerry Half was shot. What ended two years later over Goldhe was Willis’s freedom and whatever chance remained of a different story. 322 months. He served his sentence in seven different federal penitentiies released in March of 2017 starting in Illinois.
I don’t know what those years did to him. Truth is, I don’t think anybody outside those seven prisons really knows. There are no letters in the public record from those years. No prison interviews, no documentation of who he was or what he thought or what he decided between 1995 and 2017. The man who walked into federal custody is connected to the man who walked out by a name and a 22-year gap that is almost entirely invisible to the public record.
He walked out of federal prison in March of 2017. He was 66 years old. He went back to North Minneapolis. Within weeks of his release, he was organizing again. He called Reverend McAfee, the same Reverend McAfee from United for Peace 25 years earlier, and they organized a peace summit at New Salem Missionary Baptist Church. Stevie Wonder spoke.
Willis’s first public statement after his release. What has to happen is our community resolve these problems themselves. All of us has to come and sit down at the table because this is bigger than any one person and or group. The same sentence structure, the same logic, the table, the coming together, the communal responsibility.
He had said versions of this before the Senate in the Sojourer’s interview to anyone who would listen. He was saying it again at 66 after 22 years in seven different prisons as though none of that had interrupted the argument. Reverend McAfee said he’s paid his dues. People can identify with him. Willis had a diagnosis for why the violence had not stopped in his absence.
He gave it in 2019. Young people don’t feel they have any relationship with older people and the older people are scared of the young people. That sense of village has eroded. That observation is not new. What is unusual is hearing it from a man who spent 22 years in federal prison and came back to say that the real problem was that nobody was talking to anybody, that the breakdown was relational, that it was fixable in principle if someone was willing to sit at the table.
On February 20th, 2019, police searched the basement of the rented room where Willis was living. They found five 357 Magnum bullets. He was arrested. The Henipin County Attorney’s Office reviewed the evidence. They declined to prosecute. The evidence they said was inadequate. The charges were dropped in the interest of justice.
Five bullets in a basement. Willis was 67 years old. He had been out of federal prison for less than two years. He had been at peace summits and organizing meetings and community work. and the institution, the same one that had watched him since the 1980s, looked at him and found cause to search his room. Willis said this, “I still have that stigma.
My profile is so high in police circles. There is a segment who believe the worst about me. To convince them I’m something different is just a chore.” That quote earns his place not as proof that he was set up and not as proof that he was guilty, but because it describes precisely in his own words with no self-pity and no dramatic performance, just exhaustion what 30 years of peacework has not been able to undo.
The institution heard the name Share Willis and searched his room. The charges were dropped in the interest of justice. A legal formula that does not explain itself that can mean the evidence was thin or can mean something else and the public record does not clarify which. And Willis, I still have that stigma.
The Senate testimony, the sojourer’s interview, the 2017 peace summit with Stevie Wonder, five bullets in a basement, charges dropped. still that stigma. He had also said that same year something he had apparently been carrying for a long time. You take a life that is one of the most horrible things you can do. I used to pray every year for him and his family.
He was talking about the man he shot over a craps game in 1982. The man whose name is not in any public record. He prayed for that man every year. He also said this in 2019 about why he kept going back to the work. I feel a sense of responsibility. There are young people who are hurt and sad and want to strike out.
All it will do is cause more hurt and you end up in the penitentiary. Who’s going to take care of your kids, your mother? Do you think your girl is going to wait 10 or 15 years? He knew the math on that last question better than almost anyone. He had done the time. He understood what 322 months looked like from the inside.
And he was using that to argue against young men doing what he had done in a city that had been hearing versions of this speech from him for 30 years and still didn’t know what to do with the man delivering it. In 2023, Willis took the witness stand at a murder trial in Minneapolis, a case prosecutors alleged was connected to an assault on Willis himself.
The conviction was later overturned on appeal. Willis testified. The conviction stood. Then the conviction fell. Another chapter in his story with no clean ending. Jim Nelson, one of Willis’s closest friends, former executive director of Change, Inc., one of the people who had watched him from the beginning, said it plainly.
The Hoff murder hangs like a cloud over Willis and makes it harder for him to get support. A cloud, not a verdict, not an exoneration, a cloud that has been there since September of 1992 and has not moved. The last public record finds him still in North Minneapolis. He still says the word.
He said this in 2019 near the end of a long interview. If I spend the rest of my life making up for what I’ve done, it isn’t enough. I believe him when he says that. And then there is retired police chief low. I just believe in my heart of hearts. He was guilty then and he is guilty now. And Lieutenant Sorrow. Maybe he didn’t plan it, but he didn’t stop it either.
The remorse might be genuine and the guilt might be real. Those things are not mutually exclusive. The word peace has been through enough by now that it can hold both. Think about what the word has carried. The Senate subcommittee July of 1992, the planning meeting at his home 63 days later. The sojourer’s interview where he talked about the formula while four men were serving life sentences, one of them his nephew.
322 months in federal custody and then back to North Minneapolis, back to the summits, back to the same table, back to the same word. outside a Minneapolis courthouse in 2023 after testifying at a murder trial. He said, “We got to put some of these guns down. The same sentence, a different decade, the same man, or a different version of the same man wearing the same name, still attached to the same word.
The public record does not give this story a clean ending. The last time it finds him, he is still in North Minneapolis, still saying peace.” I don’t know what that word costs him now or what it costs the people who hear it knowing what they know. The Senate heard the word as testimony in July of 1992. The court record heard it as context for a murder investigation that September.
North Minneapolis has been receiving both ever since and 30 years on neither version has finished with him yet.
