March 8th, 1995, a man named Gatis Johnson was taken from his apartment at gunpoint and brought to a building on Chicago’s near west side called the fortress. He would be held there for two days. The men who ran that building had a document. They had written it themselves years earlier. A few pages describing the kind of organization they intended to be.
Islamic in tone. Words like knowledge, responsibility, obligation, a moral framework on paper, signed and certified. What does it mean when a gang writes that down? And what happens when the building where that document is supposed to mean something becomes a place like this? Here is what you need to understand about the near west side in 1968.
This is not a neighborhood the city forgot. This was a neighborhood city policy effectively cut apart, cleared and concentrated. The Eisenhower Expressway went through in the 1950s, not around through entire blocks demolished to build it. Then urban renewal, more demolitions, more displacement slum clearance, the city called it.
And then on the edge of all that cleared land, the Chicago Housing Authority built Henry her homes, a complex that counting original buildings extensions and annex held roughly 1,700 units depending on how you count. Designed on the lowest budget the contract allowed. Later studies called it the cheapest built public housing of its era.
The city stacked people in it and largely stopped paying attention. That is the environment Daryl Abney grew up inside. He was born April 6th, 1954 in Arkansas. His family landed on the near west side because that was where the housing was available. He was physically large for his age. People called him Moose.
By the time he was a teenager, the neighborhood had been cut in half by a highway hollowed out by demolition, packed into towers the city had built as a solution and abandoned as a problem. In 1968, he was 14. He organized a crew at Paulina Street and Washington Boulevard. The Paulina Gangsters headquarters at 1625 West Washington next to Union Park Congregational Church.
Because on the near west side in 1968, the social institutions that were supposed to be there were mostly gone. And what replaced them was whatever filled the vacuum. Co-founders included men called Diablo and Ringo and a teenager named Henry Brown, June Bug Brown. Remember that name? What the city had built was a policy.
What Abne built was a response to that policy. And then in 1969, something happened that no public record has ever fully explained. Jeff Fort, the man who had turned the Southside Street gang into a 5,000 member organization, placed Daryl Abney on his council. Abney was 15. The group was renamed the Maceteer Gangster Stones.
A 15year-old from the near west side at the council table of the most powerful gang in Chicago. How did they meet? Nobody knows. The source that documented Abney’s life most carefully says so plainly. Fort was a southside operator. Abney was a near westside teenager. The gap between those addresses was not just geographic.
And yet Fort gave him a seat. That tells you something about what Abne already was at 15. the kind of person whose presence in a room makes other people want to know whose side he’s on. The crew kept building. On January 20th, 1971, Chicago police raided the GSN clubhouse at 1625 West Washington. They confiscated a 22 caliber revolver.
They arrested 10 members for harboring runaway girls. The Chicago Tribune wrote about it, the earliest confirmed newspaper mention of the group and called them the gangster Peacest harboring runaway girls. That charge sits in the record without resolution. On the near west side in 1971, with urban renewal having destroyed the neighborhoods, housing stock, and social infrastructure, young people were genuinely displaced.
Whether that clubhouse at 1625 West Washington was a refuge or a predatory space, the record does not say. Both possibilities existed. Neither has been ruled out. The document that would arrive in 1977 described an organization with a moral framework and Islamic philosophical tradition and obligation to teach and protect.
The 1971 raid is the first documented test of that framework six years before the document was written. The test is unresolved. By 1977, the answer to a lot of questions didn’t matter as much as what they had built. Fort had a mosque on the south side. He was sending men with a document. And Daryl Abney, now 23, was in a basement in Pullman waiting to see what they were offering.
By the late 1970s, Forts El Rukans were centered around a headquarters at 3,947 South Drexel, a former Southside theater known as the Fort. The El Rukans had won taxexempt status as a religious organization. Fort was running an empire from inside something the government could not touch as easily as a gang. And according to community oral history and gang records of the period, he was sending men to Pullman with a document.
That document was the Cold Soldier Army. The CSA, the streets pronounced it like a title. What the CSA offered in community memory was not camouflage. It was a framework. Islamic in tone about knowledge, about responsibility, about what a member owed to the people around them. a gang that claimed in writing that it had obligations.
That claim was either the most cynical piece of organizational branding in Chicago Street history or it was a genuine attempt to build something with a moral architecture. The document doesn’t resolve which. Neither does 50 years of what came after. What the document did in community accounts, it certified seven BPSN branch leaders as legitimate stone factions under Fort’s authority without requiring them to become Elukans.
The Gangster Stones were one of the seven alongside the Jet Black Stones, the Reubenites, the Future Stones, the PR Stones, the Cornerstones, and the almighty BPSN Corps. Fort called it the seven tribes. The gangster stone’s own symbol, a pyramid with 21 bricks. The number seven in the sun above the point and I behind the pyramid was a direct reference to that certification.
Every time that symbol appeared on a wall, it meant the same thing recognized legitimate on paper. Abne was one of Ford’s closest relationships in the BPSN. The people who documented this history describe it simply. Mooseman respected Jeff Fort so heavily that the decision not to join El Rukans was handled with diplomatic care, not as defiance.
Fort did not send men to Pullman to threaten him. He sent men to offer him something. The distinction mattered. And then came 1979. In community histories, the CSA is remembered as the instrument that protected GSN’s separate status during the late 1970s stone/lruk and split. The account for issued sanctions a decree that any faction claiming BPSN identity publicly would face violent reprisals from the Elukans.
The reason was bureaucratic El Rukan crimes were being attributed to stone factions by police creating legal exposure Fort couldn’t afford. His solution was to make the stone identity dangerous to claim. He drew a line and he told every faction to get behind it or get hurt. Most factions got behind it. The Southside Stone world fractured.
Factions that had operated as independent entities for years, some for a decade, temporarily fled into vice lord and four corner hustler territory, claiming new affiliations to avoid the threat. That migration permanently reshaped Chicago’s southside gang geography. Streets that had been stone territory became something else and stayed something else.
Decades later, you can still trace the borders. The gangster stones were not touched. GSN and the Maniac Peon community histories say were exempt. They served as diplomatic intermediaries between the Elukans and the broader Stone world. Sanctioning them would have destroyed Fort’s only channel to the factions he was trying to control.
They were too useful to threaten. And they had the document, the CSA certification from 1977, the piece of paper ABNE accepted in that Pullman basement was in this account the specific instrument that kept the gangster stones alive while the rest of the stone world scattered. Two years after signing, the document worked. If the account is right, I want to be careful about what that means.
The CSA was not a peace treaty. It was a power arrangement. Fort certifying ABN’s independence because Fort needed Abney more than he needed GSN’s conversion. The Islamic framing around it was real, or at least real enough that Fort built an entire religious organization around the same theological vocabulary. But the reason GSN survived 1979 was not the philosophy.
It was the politics. Both things can be true. The document was a genuine attempt to write down a moral framework. The document also functioned as a political instrument that kept one gang alive and let others scatter. The CSA was both at the same time in the same pages. Back at Henry her while all of this was being signed and certified, June Bug Brown was already running the building they called the fortress.
150 North Hermitage. They called it the fortress. That name is not metaphor. It is a description of what a gang had to become to survive inside a housing project the city built to stack people and contain them. Henry her homes and its extensions spread across a stretch of the near west side that had already been cut apart by highways and hollowed out by demolition.
The gangster stones established their base there by 1969. Henry June Bug Brown took over the Her operation when Abney moved to Pullman around 1970. June Bug Brown, the same teenager who had stood next to Abney at Paulina Street in 1968 when all of this began. He ran it for decades. Community histories describe Brown’s her operation as highly organized.
Public court records confirm his later criminal conviction history, but do not fully reconstruct the drug market structure. The specific operational details, the hierarchy, the logistics were never fully reproduced in any public record. What is documented is this. It ran for years through Fort’s imprisonment in 1983, through the El Rukans federal dismantling, through the slow erosion of everything around it.
What the courts finally documented directly is a drug distribution conviction in 1988, three years in prison. Brown came out and he came back. The building held the contradiction the CSA document had created. The cold soldier army described an organization with Islamic moral structure, knowledge, obligations, a philosophy of conduct, a framework for how members related to one another and to the community around them.
The fortress at 150 North Hermitage is where that document and the drug economy it was supposed to govern occupied the same address for two decades. Understand what Henry her actually was. Alex Kotawitz spent two years embedded with a family there from 1987 to 1989. His book documented drawing on police records that someone at her was shot at, stabbed, or beaten due to gang violence every 3 days.
One person every 3 days in a complex that was also someone’s home. Mothers raising children in those towers. Kids doing homework while that happened outside. The gangs operating there were not one thing. They were the structure the city had left behind when it withdrew everything else. And they were also the violence the remaining residents had to survive.
In June 1985, Shiovana McCann was killed at Henry her homes. Court records document what happened. Freeman was convicted. That is Henry her. That is the address where the Gangster Stones’s philosophy of enlightenment was supposed to be operative. The Gangster Stones were not responsible for Shyvana McCann’s death. This is what the context was.
This is the building. This is the moral weight of the address where the CSA’s framework was supposed to hold. And through all of it, through the violence, through the drug economy, through 1988 when Brown went to prison and his absence weakened, GSN’s grip on the complex, Daryl Abney was in Pullman teaching, building something that people who knew him describe as a genuine mentorship tradition.
generation after generation, a chain of knowledge running across decades. The philosophy did not stop. The fortress did not stop. Both continued in parallel inside the same organization held together by the same document. The demolition started in August 1995. Hood secretary Henrik Cisneros was present for the fall of the first high-rise.
It was a press event, a cabinet secretary watching a building collapse on camera as evidence that the policy of stacking people in towers and forgetting them had been officially acknowledged as a failure. The last midrise came down in 2008. The site was redeveloped as West Haven mixed income housing, new construction, a different name for the same ground.
But what had been built inside those walls didn’t get demolished with the buildings, the drug economy, the mentorship tradition, the operational knowledge, the relationships those moved. And in March of 1995, 5 months before the first building fell, something happened in the fortress that the Cole Soldier Army document had not prevented. March 8th, 1995.
Henry June Bug Brown and his common law wife, Ladrina Stewart, go to the apartment of a man named Gatis Johnson. Brown believed Johnson’s brother had taken a car and $3,500 from him. Brown and Stuart take Johnson from his apartment at gunpoint. They bring him to 150 North Hermitage to the fortress. This is documented in court records.
People versus Brown and the related People versus Beach reviewed twice on appeal. This is what entered the legal record. Inside the fortress with two accompllices named William Beach and Timothy Berlin Brown held Gatis Johnson for two days. Johnson was locked in a closet with a pitbull. Brown bound him, burned him, and subjected him to two days of methodical abuse.
Each detail documented in court testimony. At one point, Brown picked up a phone and called Johnson’s sister so she could hear what was happening to him. $3,500. The CSA had described an organization with Islamic principles, knowledge, responsibility, the obligation members owe to one another and to the people around them.
In March 1995, in the same building where that documents authority was supposed to be operative, a man was held for two days, and tortured for $3,500. Johnson escaped out of the building, passed the elevated tracks to a phone a few blocks away. He called his family. Police arrested Brown. In court, Johnson identified Brown as a Black Peace Stones leader and explained what the gang’s term MO meant as internal code for members.
He had been inside the organization’s most important address. He knew the vocabulary. Brown was convicted at trial and initially sentenced to natural life as a habitual criminal. The appellet court reversed. On retrial, he was convicted again. That conviction was also reversed on appeal. Rather than proceed to a third trial on July 9th, 2009, Brown entered a negotiated guilty plea to aggravated kidnapping in exchange for a determinate sentence.
45 years, two convictions reversed. A guilty plea to end it. 45 years for $3,500. $3,500 is what someone owed him. 45 years is what he agreed to carry. And then in October 2010, a state legislator’s office sent an email to an Illinois Department of Correction staffer inquiring about a transfer for Henry Brown from Lawrence Correctional Center medium security to somewhere more accommodating. The request was denied.
Brown was later moved in the opposite direction to Pontiac Correctional Center, Maximum Security, for disciplinary reasons. A 2012 Chicago magazine investigation documented the transfer inquiry. An elected officials office making calls on behalf of a man convicted of holding someone in a closet with a pitbull and subjecting him to severe abuse.
The organization’s old relationships still seemed to matter. Even after the conviction, even from inside state custody, someone was making calls. According to community accounts, Brown was eventually released. He became born again with Christianity. He retired from gang life. Whether that is true, whether the 45 year sentence was served in full or commuted or simply run out, no index public record confirms it.
What is confirmed is the sentence. What the community says happened after is its own kind of testimony about how these stories end or don’t. I am not telling you all of this to deliver a verdict on the gangster stones. I am telling you this because the gap between the documents language and this room’s reality is not incidental to the story.
It is the story. The CSA was real. The mentorship tradition was real. The people who knew Daryl Abney speak about him with genuine feeling and I believed him. and June Bug Brown ran a torture room in a building called the fortress in the same organization under the same document. Both things are true.
Neither cancels the other. While all of this is happening, the trials, the convictions, the demolitions, Daryl Abney is in Pullman or he is in Robbins. He is getting older. He is still teaching. Consider what that means in context. Jeff Fort, the man who handed Abney the Cold Soldier Army document in 1977, accumulated sentences across multiple federal cases.
13 years federal for drug trafficking in 1983, 80 years federal for the Libya terrorism conspiracy in 1987, conspiring with the Libyan government to commit acts of violence on American soil. an additional sentence for ordering the murder of a rival gang leader in 1988. He is at ADX Florence the Federal Supermax in Colorado. As of the latest public reporting I checked, Fort remained in Federal Supermax custody.
The government denied his compassionate release request in October 2023. The man who certified the gangster stones as enlightened will almost certainly die in a federal prison cell. In the major federal Elukan opinions and public records I reviewed, Abney does not appear as a defendant. Those prosecutions between 1987 and 1997 included a massive 305page 175ount indictment naming 38 defendants.
They dismantled the organization Ford had built piece by piece. What I could find a find a grave memorial, a community documentary, community oral history passed through people who knew him directly, a community that speaks of him in language that does not appear in any court record or newspaper archive. Not a bad word said about him by anyone who worked with him.
a man who taught generation after generation of stones to follow an enlightened and respectable path until the day he died. Whether the absence of a federal indictment means he was innocent of federal crimes or disciplined enough to avoid them or simply never caught the record doesn’t say. Not getting indicted is not the same as not being guilty.
I don’t know which of those is true. That gap is honest. I’m staying in it. What the institutions did manage to record was this. The Chicago Crime Commission classified Daryl Abney as a felon gangster and Elukin. Elukin. The irony is precise enough to hurt. The cold soldier army was designed specifically so Abney would not have to become an Elukan.
The whole architecture of the document, the certification, the seven tribes framework, the terms of that independence existed because Fort offered Abney a choice and Abney chose independence. He declined Fort’s personal invitation to convert. He built a separate philosophical identity on paper officially in a way that was supposed to make the Gangster Stones distinction from the El Rukans legible within Forts World.
And the Chicago Crime Commission, the institution that was supposed to be tracking all of this, wrote down the wrong name, the one thing he spent years refusing to be. The coal soldier army certified him as enlightened within Fort’s power structure. The city’s institutional records spoke a different language entirely. Those were two different systems and the document only reached one of them.
In the 2000s, many North Pullman GSN members drifted away, flipping to become London Town Black Pea Stones. A realignment that happens in gang history when the institutional center weakens and younger members make new calculations. But the gangster stones remained. According to community sources and gang history records, 103rd to 111 street in Pullman, the Mecca, the territory Abney had claimed at 16 was still GSN ground into the 2020s.
Abne moved to Robins, Illinois eventually. He became seriously ill with diabetes. He died on May 12th, 2019. He was 65 years old. He is buried at Oakidge Glenn Oak Cemetery in Hillside Cook County. Survived by six children from two marriages and multiple grandchildren. The community mourned him across gang lines. Gatis Johnson deserves to be named here.
He is the man who survived. He was held for two days in a building called the fortress in a closet with a pitbull. And he found a moment and he got out. He called his family. He gave testimony that the courts would return to for years. After he was gone, Gatis Johnson died in 1997 from causes unrelated to what happened in that building before the trials even began.
He is in the record. He is in the case number. He testified and that testimony outlasted him. He is not in most tellings of this story, not in the gang histories, not in the community memory of the enlightened branch. He should be. Community gang history sources still place GSN around Austin, West Haven, Pullman, and several out ofstate chapters, though current activity levels are not independently verified here or elsewhere in the public record.
50 years after a teenage boy organized the street crew at Paulina and Washington, the organization he built is still there. The old her building at 150 North Hermitage is gone. The ground has been absorbed into the redeveloped West Haven Park area. The building that held all of it, the drug market, the torture room, the documents authority is gone.
The addresses remain part of GSN memory. 1625 West Washington in the origin story, the building where the raid happened in 1971, where the Chicago Tribune first put the name Gangster Stones in print and 104th and Corus and Pulman lure the house where the men from Fort arrived with the cold soldier army, the address that became the center of gravity for everything that followed.
a few pages Islamic in tone written by an organization that was trying in 1977 to put on paper what it intended to be. The physical document has never surfaced in any public record I reviewed. Here is what the document could not do. It could not prevent the torture room. It could not make Daryl Abney legible to the Chicago Crime Commission.
It could not stop the demolitions or the convictions or the slow erosion of the stonew world fort had built. A few pages cannot hold 50 years of a human organization. The ambition and the damage, the mentorship and the violence, all of it running through the same walls, the same address, the same people. What the document did do, what it actually accomplished was give an organization a name for what it intended to be, the enlightened branch.
That name does not appear in any court file, any crime commission report, any newspaper archive. I searched the streets never forgot it. Daryl Abney, 1954 to 2019. The word is still on the paper. The gangster stones are still there. The contradiction is still here. Now you know.
Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
