In 1960, a group of teenagers in Woodlon wrote a constitution. A constitution bylaws, a governance structure, a founding document with branches and obligations, and a symbol they drew themselves. They called the symbol a pyramid. It had 21 bricks. Each brick was a gang that had agreed to stop being a separate thing and become part of something larger.
Four sides earth fire air water four times 90° 360° a number that means you have covered every direction that there is no outside the men who drew that pyramid were 13 and 16 years old. Within six years, they governed approximately 5,000 people across a stretch of Chicago Southside that reached down past 79th Street and extended into the suburbs Robins, Harvey, Dicksmore, Ford Heights, Chicago Heights, Markham, administered from street corners in Woodlon, governed by a document that no journalist has ever published a single line from. 5,000
people governed by teenagers who started with two rival gangs and a decision to stop fighting each other. They called the council the main 21. The main 21 was not a gang name. It was a governing body, a parliament of 21 branch leaders, each one holding a seat at the table because their people had surrendered their independence to the nation in exchange for the protection and resources of something larger than a corner.
Each branch kept its own territory, its own money, its own internal hierarchy. What it gave up was the right to act alone. What it received in return was standing inside a structure that no single branch could have built or defended by itself. That structure had a symbol, the pyramid. Each brick a branch, each branch a seat, not decoration, a diagram of the agreement.
That is what they built in 1960 in a neighborhood the city of Chicago had already decided to leave behind. What the city did with what they built and what those teenagers eventually did to it themselves, that is the rest of the story. The main 21 was the ruling council of the confederation. Each seat was held by the leader of a member branch, which meant each seat represented people, territory, and resources that the branch had committed to the larger structure.
The Atlantic Monthly sent a journalist named James Allen McFersonson directly into the organization in 1969. He wrote, “The Ranger Nation is headed by a group of young men called the main 21 until 1968. The president of the organization was Eugene Bull Haristen. The vice president was Jeff Fort, also called Angel and Black Prince.
and the warlord was George Rose, also called Watusi and Mad Dog. The Rangers spiritual leader was Paul the Preacher Martin. And the rest of the main 21 was made up of leaders of the minor gangs who had joined with the Rangers. That is a description of a government, president, vice president, warlord, spiritual leader, and a parliament made up of the heads of every subordinate jurisdiction.
McFersonson didn’t call it that. Nobody called it that. But that is what it was. By the time McFersonson filed that article until 1968, had a specific meaning. Haristen had been convicted on murder conspiracy charges and was serving time. The co-founder, the man who had helped to draw the pyramid, who had been president while Fort was vice president, was gone.
Fort inherited the presidency alone. The branches had names. The cobra stones run by a man named Mickey Cogwell who had come in from the Egyptian cobras. The four cornerstones out of Oakland on 39th Street. The Titanic Stones, the Apache Stones, each one held a seat earned through negotiation, not conquest.
When the Egyptian cobras joined the nation in 1962 and Cogwell took his place in the council, that moment was itself an act of governance. The main 21 deliberating over who entered the structure and what obligations they accepted. A new brick, the pyramid growing outward, what each branch owed the nation, dues paid into a common treasury.
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Soldiers provided when the nation went to war. Loyalty, which meant that a branch’s fight was not just its own fight, and the nation’s fight was everyone’s fight. What the nation owed the branches in return protection resources standing. The structure, the pyramids weight carried by all 21 bricks together. The model came from somewhere.
Leonard Callaway, one of the Vice Lord’s original founders, was a relative of Eugene Haristen, which meant Harston had grown up watching the Vice Lords governing architecture from the inside. The Constitution the Rangers drafted was modeled on the Vice Lord’s bylaws. They called the Vice Lords their first cousins.
That was an acknowledgement of intellectual debt, the way a constitution cites its precedence. By the mid 1960s, the branches multiplied. The seats filled. The treasury grew. The pyramid was working exactly as it was designed to work. 21 bricks, 21 branches. One nation bound by a written agreement in a neighborhood that no other institution had bothered to organize.
The government hadn’t noticed yet. Woodlon did not produce the Rangers. What Woodlon produced was the vacancy. The Rangers were what filled it. By the late 1950s, nearly 90% of the white residents had left Woodlon. What remained was a neighborhood without the tax base to repair its own streets, without city services that tracked his problems, without a political machine that needed his votes badly enough to answer his phone.
What remained were buildings and people, and no institutional structure that connected the two. The city had not been violently expelled from Woodlong. It had simply stopped showing up. Into that vacancy before the Rangers, before the main 21 came the adult African-American syndicates, the men who ran numbers, the pimps, the policy racket operators.
They had already established informal governance over the street economy, and they were careful to keep their distance from serious criminal jeopardy by using younger men as their labor. When Fort and Haristen began organizing their blocks, the syndicates did not resist. They adapted. They appointed Haristen Big Chief and Fort Little Chief.
The Rangers first external legitimacy came not from the government, not from the church. It came from the criminal economy that already governed the neighborhood. Before the Rangers arrived, two other organizations had already found the same vacancy, the Devil’s Disciples and the Egyptian Cobras.
The vacuum did not favor any particular group. It favored whoever filled it first with the most structure. The Rangers filled it better than anyone. By 1965, the churches had noticed. Reverend OH Wilson Snottnack at Woodlon Emmanuel Lutheran Church started bringing rangers in for basketball activities, job connections. Reverend John Fry at First Presbyterian Church on South Kimbark Avenue developed a relationship with Fort through a youth worker named Charles Leaglia.
The church recognized the Rangers as a community institution before the government did. The institutions that arrived first, the institutions that engaged the Rangers on their own ground were the churches, not the city. In 1966 and 67, the Rangers and the police negotiated a peace arrangement. The Rangers would voluntarily surrender weapons to First Presbyterian Church.
The police would store them in the church safe and in exchange protect the Rangers against a rival gang. Both parties agreed on the terms. Both parties agreed on the number. 58 weapons. Christianity Today reported it in July of 1968. Both sides agreed that 58 weapons were stored in the church safe last year.
William Griffin, a negro who commands Southside police, said Fry reneged on a deal to turn in the arsenal within 30 days. So, police raided the church. Fry replies that police broke their agreement to protect the Rangers against another gang if they turned in their guns to the church. The police then staged a discovery of the same weapons they had agreed to store.
They used those weapons to manufacture a scandal about the church. The police had negotiated with the Rangers as a party, acknowledging in practice their quasi sovereign standing, and then when the politics shifted, pretended the negotiation had never happened. What they could not do was say so publicly. Then on April 4th, 1968, Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis.
The west side of Chicago burned. The south side did not. Fort personally stopped his stones from attacking a bus of white students at Mount Carmel School. For weeks after King’s death, the Southside remained calm. No major violence between the Rangers and the disciples. No rioting. The government noticed. In early June of 1967, Lynden Johnson’s war on poverty reached Woodlon.
The federal government awarded a grant of approximately $957,000 through the Office of Economic Opportunity to the Woodlon Organization, which hired the Blackstone Rangers and East Side Disciples to run job training programs for approximately 800 unemployed young men. Members were paid $45 a week. Jeff Fort was paid $6,000 a year as center chief.
Eugene Haristen was paid $6,500 a year as assistant project director, $957,000. The summer of 1967 passed without a riot on the south side of Chicago. Membership held at 3,000. Men who had never held regular employment held it. the program by the measures available to the people running it worked.
Now, here is the accounting that the Mlelen Senate Subcommittee chose not to emphasize when it investigated two years later. Approximately $200,000 of the 957,000 was returned to the federal government unspent. of the money that was spent, approximately $1,4679 went directly into Jeff Fort’s personal pocket. $1,467.79. Out of nearly a million dollar, the subcommittee was not interested in that math.
The subcommittee was interested in something else. But before the subcommittee, before the prosecution, before the indictment, came the invitation. Senator Charles Percy, Republican of Illinois, publicly called Jeff Fort a bright young man who should enter politics. He put it in writing. He sent Ford an invitation to Richard Nixon’s presidential inauguration.
Ford declined to attend personally. He sent two of the main 21 instead. One of them was Mickey Cogwell. The Atlantic Monthly’s James Allen McFersonson was reporting on the Rangers at the time and recorded what happened. Early this year, Jeff Fort was invited, it is said, by certain Illinois politicians to attend one of the inaugural balls given for President Nixon in Washington.
Characteristically, Fort did not go himself, but sent two of the main leaders to represent the Blackstone Ranger Nation. One of the two men who dressed in tails and who mingled with political dignitaries was Mickey Cogwell. Tales. Mickey Cogwell stood in formal dress at a Nixon inaugural ball and mingled with the people who ran the country.
While he stood there, Chicago police drove to his home to arrest him. The police acting for the city that had refused to recognize the Rangers as anything other than criminals went to arrest one of the men. the federal government had just admitted to a presidential ball. Ford had already understood something the state could not admit that the government’s behavior toward the main 21 was not coherent.
The state could not simultaneously use the Rangers organizing capacity praise their leader as a future politician, invite them to inaugurations and prosecute them for being what they were. At some point the contradictions would have to resolve. They resolved in July of 1968. The Mlen Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations called Fort to testify.
He entered the hearing room. When his name was called, he rose from his chair, clenched his fist, and walked out of the chamber, having given the senators the opportunity to ask him only his name. He was subsequently convicted of contempt of Congress. His attorney described this not as a guilty man hiding, but as a refusal, a refusal to submit to the jurisdiction of a body he regarded as adversarial.
I think that is the correct description. Fort did not flee. Fort made a sovereignty claim. He said in the language of his body rather than in any words the Senate transcript could record, “I do not recognize your authority over me any more than you have recognized mine.” The Senate did not appreciate the argument.
In 1967, before the Senate hearing, before the inauguration, Ford had been arrested on murder charges, jailed in July, facing additional charges by October. He was held for several months in Cook County Jail. In early 1968, the charges were simply dropped. No trial, no name victim, no explanation. Mayor Richard Daly’s gang intelligence unit had used criminal jeopardy as a political instrument.
When the instrument was no longer needed, it was put away. In March of 1971, the Nixon administration’s US attorney for Northern Illinois, James R. Thompson, indicted Fort and others for fraud in the OEEO grant more than two years after Fort’s lieutenants had attended Nixon’s inauguration. In 1972, Fort was convicted of misusing federal funds.
The same funds Percy praised him for using. Five years at the United States Penitentiary, Levvenworth, the question is what exactly the government thought it was doing in 1967 when it handed a gang with its own written constitution nearly a million dollars of federal poverty money. whether it believed it was converting the main 21 into a civic institution or wanted the street level organizing power without the obligation of calling them legitimate or was offering recognition with one hand and preparing prosecution with the other. Um I don’t know which of
those it was. Mickey Cogwell was the man Fort trusted most with the things that look legitimate. He was born in 1945. He came up through the Egyptian Cobras, one of the organizations that had filled the same vacancy as the Rangers before the Rangers arrived. And when the Cobras joined the Blackstone Nation in 1962, Cogwell came with them.
He held the second highest rank in the main 21. After Jeff Fort, he was the most consequential man in the organization. He was also the proof the pyramid needed most, that the structure could arrive somewhere beyond the corner, that it could produce a man who belonged in rooms where governments were made. Among the main 21, Cogwell was recognized as the leader with the most business ability.
Fort put him in charge of westside business operations of the Blackstone Nation. what that work looked like in practice. Cogwell and the Cobra Stones organized free breakfast for children in the Fuller Park area. Before the Black Panthers made it famous, before the public school system made it policy, the Cobra Stones were feeding children in a neighborhood where nobody else was feeding them using a structure that preceded the government’s version by years.
The absence of a newspaper article about a gang feeding children tells you something about what journalists in that neighborhood were paying attention to. He also organized a union on the south side, a labor union representing workers in an area where formal labor organization had historically been resistant to black membership.
And he stood in formal dress in the ballroom of a Nixon inaugural celebration. Ford had sent him as the nation’s representative to the presidential inauguration. Not because Cogwell was the safest choice politically that night proved that he was not, but because he was in fort’s assessment the man who could be trusted to represent the organization in rooms the organization was not supposed to be able to enter.
Cogwell walked into that room and mingled with the political class of the United States. At that same hour, Chicago police were at his door. They were not coordinating with the federal government, which had just admitted Cogwell’s organization to a presidential ball. One hand did not know what the other was doing or did not care.
That is the brick the pyramid depended on most. a man who fed children organized workers, represented a street organization at a presidential inauguration, and was simultaneously building the architecture of something that would become very dangerous. In 1969, Cogwell and Charles Rico Crrenshaw were among the first main 21 members to move the organization into direct heroin distribution, a decision for authorized in the autumn of that year, not out of ideology, but out of fiscal desperation he needed $80,000 for bail money, and the nation had no other way to raise it
quickly. The pyramid which had been built as a governing structure was now being used to fund what governing structures use taxes to fund except the revenue came from heroin. A government without a legal tax base will find an illegal one. What that revenue financed was the same structure that had run the breakfast programs and organized the union the pyramid now operating on the logic it had been built to replace.
Cogwell continued his civic work alongside his role in the drug trade. Both things were true. The documentary tradition in this genre tends to want these facts to be sequential. First the good, then the bad, then the fall. The history is not sequential. In April of 1976, Jeff Fort held a large meeting.
He had just been released from Levvenworth. He was a different man, a different name, a different religion, a different structure in mind. He dissolved the main 21. And among those he declared an enemy at that meeting, the man he named as someone the new organization could not accommodate was Mickey Cogwell. Cogwell refused to become an El Rukan.
His refusal was understood as a political act. Cogwell reportedly favored continued engagement with legitimate institutions, the kind of engagement that had defined his role in the main 21. Fort had decided that was no longer the project. On February 25th, 1977, at approximately 3:45 in the morning, Mickey Cogwell was dropped from a car in the Auburn Gresham neighborhood.
He was walking home. He was shot multiple times on that street. The number of shots and the manner in which they were fired tells you something about what kind of message was being sent. He did not survive. No one has ever been publicly charged with his murder. His followers refused to join the El Rukans. They named themselves the Mickey Cobras.
They are still operating today carrying the name of the man who was killed because he refused to dissolve into someone else’s structure. The pyramid’s best argument for itself was murdered in the dark on a street in Auburn Gresham in February of 1977. Nobody went to prison for it. The state that had once invited him to a presidential inauguration took no official notice of his death at all.
Jeff Fort came out of Levvenworth a different man. The question was whether the nation could survive what he had become. He had entered Levvenworth in 1972 as Jeff Fort vice president turned President Angel Black Prince. The man who clenched his fist at the United States Senate and walked out. He was released in 1976 as Prince Malik Abdul Malik Cabba.
He had converted to Islam inside the federal penitentiary. He had joined the Moorish Science Temple of America upon his release in Milwaukee. Whatever else four years at Levvenworth had done to him and federal penitentiaries are designed to do specific things to specific people. It had convinced Fort that the organizational model he had built was wrong. Not wrong as in criminal.
Wrong as in insufficiently centralized. The main 21 had been built on a specific principle that the structure was the thing not the person. 21 branches, 21 seats, 21 voices in the council. The power was distributed by design Haristen and Fort had modeled it on a confederation, not a monarchy. The constitution gave authority to the pyramid.
No single brick was the pyramid. Fort came out of Levvenworth having decided to become the pyramid. The federal indictment that would later document that April meeting places the location at a site the organization called the camp at 4,233 South Indiana Avenue in Chicago. Every branch of the Black Pea Stone Nation was represented. Ford announced that the organization would henceforth be known as the El Rukans Arabic for the pillar or the foundation.
He declared himself sole leader and then he abolished the main 21, the ruling council that had governed 5,000 people across Chicago’s southside. The parliament that had given 21 gangs 21 seats at a table was dissolved by the man who had helped build it. He replaced the 21 generals with five handpicked allies.
Law enforcement analysts would later speculate that the conversion to Islam was at least partly motivated by the legal restrictions on surveilling religious organizations. I don’t know whether that’s true. Fort has never said so publicly. The effect dissolving the main 21 and replacing it with a tightly controlled inner circle under a religious structure made the organization significantly harder to penetrate.
Whether that was the design or a side benefit, the result was the same. Fort purchased a former movie theater at 3,947 South Drexel Avenue. He renamed it the fort. It became El Rukan headquarters. The men who had held seats in the main 21 had a choice. Become El Rukans under Fort Sole authority or become something else. Most became something else.
Cogwell was dead by February of the following year, killed 10 months after the April meeting where Fort had named him an enemy. The Titanic Stones Eugene Haristen supporters who had maintained a faction within BPSN since Haristen’s imprisonment also separated. This was the second time Fort and Haristen had gone in opposite directions.
The first was in 1968 when the law removed one and left the other in charge. This time no one removed anyone. Fort dissolved the structure himself and the people who still believed in what Haristston had helped build refused to follow him into what replaced it. The pyramid had been built through a series of negotiations and agreements.
It was being unwound the same way, one brick at a time. Fort walked out of the Senate in 1968 because he refused to submit to a jurisdiction he did not recognize. In April of 1976, he dissolved the jurisdiction he had built. Those two acts eight years apart are the same claim made twice in different directions.
In 1968, I do not recognize your authority over me. In 1976, I am the only authority that exists here. What it left behind was a set of organizations that had been bricks and were now loose, reorganizing themselves around what remained. Mickey Cobras, Titanic Stones, surviving branches of BPSN, still using the pyramid symbol, still wearing the black and green and red, still calling themselves stones, but no longer governed by the council that had given the symbol its original meaning.
The republic ended in April of 1976. The police hadn’t dismantled it. The federal government hadn’t prosecuted its leaders into oblivion. One man, the co-author of the Constitution, the man who had refused to speak to the Senate, the man who had come out of prison under a different name, decided it was over. The governing experiment lasted 16 years. It ended from inside.
The main 21 was dissolved in April of 1976. Nobody in Woodlon noticed because the corners were still there. Eugene Bull Haristen, the president, the big chief, the 16-year-old who helped write the Constitution in 1960, was murdered in 1988 outside the Ida B. Wells public housing projects on Chicago’s Southside. His murder initially triggered suspicion that the Puerto Rican Latin Stones were responsible. They were cleared.
No individual was ever publicly identified. No one was ever charged. The co-founder of the main 21 died with his murder unsolved in the shadow of a housing project 28 years after he had helped draw the pyramid. Mickey Cogwell’s followers named themselves the Mickey Cobras and still operate today. The brick that Fort tried to remove from the pyramid became its own pyramid.
Jeff Fort, now 79 years old, is at the ADX Florence Supermax in Colorado under a no human contact order. He holds a total sentence of 168 years across three separate convictions. In late 2025, advocates reported that four had been hospitalized after collapsing at ADX Florence and calls were made for a medical transfer.
He remains at ADX Florence. The man who wrote a constitution at 13 years old, who built a governing body that administered 5,000 people, who clenched his fist at the United States Senate, who dissolved his own republic, will spend what remains of his life in a concrete cell in the Rocky Mountains without human contact, without a horizon.
The Constitution he co-wrote in 1960, the bylaws, the pyramid, the governance structure has never been published. Not a single line of it has ever appeared in print. It may exist in a church archive in Philadelphia in a 2500page Presbyter investigation file that no journalist has fully examined or at the Newberry Library in Chicago in a collection of First Presbyterian Church records. It may exist nowhere.
A governing document that administered the lives of thousands of people for 16 years and no one has read it in public. You can find it in tattoos and in gang history pages and in the names of organizations that trace their lineage back to the 21 branches. That pyramid drawn by teenagers in Woodlon in 1960 to mean there is no outside to mean we have covered every direction.
to mean the agreement is the structure and the structure is the agreement is still being used 60 years later by people who may or may not know what it originally meant. Here is the question. The documentary does not answer because answering it is not the documentary’s job. If a community builds its own governance in a space the state has abandoned, writes a constitution, drafts bylaws, builds branches, administers thousands of people, negotiates with law enforcement as a party, feeds children, organizes workers, represents itself at
a presidential inauguration, and the state simultaneously funds it, praises it, and prosecutes it without ever deciding what to call Who gets to name what that governance was? The main 21 ended the same way it began. Nobody outside the pyramid made it stop. The man at the top decided it was over. Whether that means he understood something or lost something.
