There’s a man who protected children in building 9. He also helped to build the system that kept them there. You have probably never heard his name, which is strange because almost everything that happened inside that building for the next 30 years started with a decision he made.
One meeting, one ride back across the city, one message he sent to the people who were already there. His name or the name people called him was Don Bo John. His building was 6:30 West Evergreen Avenue, Cababrini Green, Chicago, less than one mile from the Magnificent Mile, closer to the Gold Coast than most conversations about this place will acknowledge.
No real name in any public record, no obituary, no indictment with his name at the top, no story long enough to contain what he built. The man who helped organize an operation that stretched from Cababrini to West Humble Park to East Garfield Park, who trained kids in a yard, kept people fed, and sent word that changed a block in a single afternoon, left behind almost nothing you can find on paper.
What does exist? A building, a floor, a decision made in 1978 and the people who still remember what it felt like to grow up in that place while he was in it. That building is gone now. What replaced it and what happened to the people inside it? That’s where this ends up. But the question that building left behind is still open.
People who grew up in that building don’t describe him the way you’d expect. They don’t start with the power or the operation or the violence. They start with the boxing gloves. This is how people who remember him tell it. He ran sessions in the yard at 6:30 Evergreen. Not classes. Sessions. There’s a difference. Classes have a curriculum.
Sessions have a person at the center. And the curriculum is whatever that person decides you need that day. What he decided the kids needed was discipline. Not the word, the thing itself. The ability to stand in front of something that could hurt you and hold your ground without making a performance out of it.
He taught boxing. He taught you that if you were going to be somebody in that building, you had to be able to back it up. And according to the man who describes himself as Bo John’s godson, one of the only people who has put these memories on record, Bo John enforced that standard personally with his hands when he had to, with his time when he didn’t.
He organized skating parties near the building at 660. He ran sessions in the sideyard at 6:30 Evergreen. He looked after a woman named Betty, who he called his mother and who the kids in that building called Mama Einstein. She was the kind of woman who held the floor together just by being on it. The kind of person you checked in with, the anchor.
He made sure she had what she needed and made sure nobody forgot to make sure he dressed well. Cold dresser, people say. There’s a photograph him standing beside a Rolls-Royce late 1970s outside those towers. The older guys in the building pointed to him. They told the kids, “That’s somebody. That’s what it looks like. He made sure, as the godson puts it, that his people didn’t want for nothing.
” Now, here’s the part people don’t tell first. The part that tells you more than all of that. There’s a story about an elevator. A young boy, maybe 12, 13, starts carrying himself a certain way, loud in the wrong direction. Performing for people who aren’t worth performing for. The kind of behavior that in another neighborhood you’d call growing up and it’d be fine.
But in Cababrini Green in the early 1980s, that kind of visibility had a specific cost that boys that age didn’t always see coming. Bo John found him in the elevator. What happened next? The narrator doesn’t soften it. He was put in his place hard. And then the man who did it laughed as if to say, “Now you understand something.
” The boy who tells that story now describes it as his first violation. He doesn’t tell it with anger. He tells it the way you tell a story about someone who saw something in you before you could see it yourself and use the only language available in that moment to say so. That’s hard to sit with. I know. But don’t move past it too fast because that story is not a footnote.
The same man who organized parties for the kids in that yard. The same man who made sure nobody in his circle went without. The same man who stood beside a Rolls-Royce and let young boys see what was possible. That same man put his hands on a boy 12, maybe 13, in an elevator and called it an investment. Both of those things are true.
That’s what protection looked like in building 9. But here’s the thing about protection in a place like that. It was never free. The building at 6:30 West Evergreen was not peaceful before Bo John. It was never peaceful. He didn’t create the violence there. He inherited it and then he organized it before any of that.
A question not about Bo John, about the building itself. Cababrini Green was not a place the city abandoned overnight. It was a place the city built, then underinvested in, then diverted resources from, then watched deteriorate. And then, when people had nowhere else to go, blamed for what it had become, maintenance deferred for years.
Schools that got less than schools one mile away, police who mostly showed up after someone was already down. What that produces over time is not just poverty. It produces a power vacuum, not an abstract one, a daily, visible, felt one. And power vacuums get filled by whoever shows up. Go back to 1961. A man named Richard Strong, people called him Champ, moved into Cababrini Green and brought the disciples with him.
Not the gang you know today, the beginning of it. the first version moving into public housing and planting roots. He was among the first to bring that structure into the project. He would not be the last. 1970, the King Cobra Stones arrived. They moved into the towers at 1157 through 1159 North Larabe, a stretch that residents started calling the Pimp Palace.
Cobra Stones and Disciples on opposite ends of the same project. And almost immediately the conflict started. That same year, 1970, two Chicago police officers were shot and killed by sniper fire from the Cabrini Towers. Sergeant James Severin, Officer Anthony Rosato, July 17th, 1970 at Sewitt Park baseball field, standing in the shadow of those buildings.
That was the moment the rest of the country heard of Cababrini Green for the first time. Not because of anything that happened to the people who lived there, because two officers died. That tells you something about whose pain gets counted. But that is a different conversation. June 8th, 1972, Champ Strong was shot and killed. The man who started all of this was gone before he saw where it went.
Ernest Wilson, Don Smokey, took over. He built the insane disciples out of what Champ left behind. Added structure to it, added discipline, added territory, and he brought in someone to stand at his right hand. A man from the sixth floor of 630 West Evergreen, a man who at that point didn’t have a name anyone bothered writing down.
For the next six years, Smokey ran it and Bo John enforced it. They were not building from nothing. They were building on top of something that had been growing since 1961. A hierarchy that was already in the walls of that building before either of them walked in. They gave it shape. They gave it direction.
They gave it a name that would outlast both of them. He organized it, not created, organized. The violence was already there. He just gave it a schedule. And then in 1978, Don Smokey went to prison for a violent crime. And Bo John had a choice. He could hold what they built. He could keep the operation stable, keep the structure intact, wait for Smokey to come back and pick up where they left off.
That would have been the careful choice. The choice that keeps your head down and your name out of any decisions that can’t be taken back. He didn’t make that choice. Bo John went. He took a man with him. Junior Hope, 6’4, more than 250 pounds. The kind of presence that communicates something before anyone speaks. What happened to Junior Hope after that summer, after that ride, after that room? The record doesn’t say.
He exists in this story for that one trip in that one cell block in the summer of 1978. Then he’s gone. The two of them traveled to see Larry Hoover, a prison visiting room, fluorescent light, concrete on every side. Whatever was said, it was said there. Bo John, across from the man who still had the room, Junior Hope beside him, the summer heat somewhere outside, the riot charges still fresh.
Larry Hoover was not easy to get to that summer. He had been transferred from Stateville Correctional to Pontiac Correctional Center. and Pontiac that summer was not a quiet place. On July 22nd, 1978, a riot broke out inside those walls. The public record from that riot is specific. Three correction officers died that day.
Their names are in the historical record. William Thomas, 49, Robert Conl, 22, Stanley Cole, 47. Robert Conl went to work that morning like any other morning. He didn’t come home. Three people who went to work at Pontiac Correctional and did not come home. Hoover was accused of organizing that riot. The charges were serious.
The potential sentence was significant. And then nobody would testify against him. The charges were dropped. He still had the room. Peep that for a second. Robert Conl was 22 years old. Went to work that morning like it was just another day. never came home. That is not backdrop. That is the cost. Somebody paid for what happened at Pontiac that summer.
And the man accused of setting all that in motion walked away from those charges, kept giving orders from a prison cell, and still had enough weight for Bo John to get in a car and go see him. What Hoover offered, according to the oral history that survives around this story, was the authorization to build what he called the biggest drug trade the BGDs and all Chicago gangs could ever be involved in.
That phrase, that specific framing, not you can sell drugs, not here’s a territory, the biggest operation any of them could ever be involved in. And Bo John came back to Cababrini with that and started building toward it. Bo John went. Bo John came back. Bo John sent word. The word went to the King Cobra Stones, the gang that had been in those Cababrini Towers since 1970 that had held their end of the project for nearly a decade.
The message was not a negotiation. It was not an offer. Stay inside one day or be killed. That was it. The entire message. Some of them stayed inside, some of them didn’t. Oral histories describe what followed. The ones who stayed out didn’t make it. By the end of that day, according to the oral histories, the Cobra Stones as a force inside Cababrini Green were finished violently and quickly.
The exact count has never been confirmed, but the people who were there agree on one thing. It was over fast. The ones who survived had a choice. Fold into the insane gangster disciples or leave the project entirely. Most flipped, some left. Nobody stayed on the Cobrastone side.
By the late 1970s, the group that had been known as the Insane Disciples was being called something else, the Insane Gangster Disciples, the IG. Exactly when that name settled into place is difficult to say with certainty. But what happened in that building that year is where the shift began. A new name, a new authorization, and a new set of instructions that had come directly from a man serving time at Pontiac.
And then Bo John kept moving. According to the accounts that have been passed down, Bo John personally blessed new sections of the IGD across the city. West Humbult Park, Ohio and Homeman, East Garfield Park, Kedzy and Homeman, Rockwell Gardens. These were not random expansions. These were deliberate. He went to those neighborhoods, established the structure, and brought them into the fold.
The operation he had just built in Cababrini was now replicating itself across Chicago’s west side, neighborhood by neighborhood, block by block. All of it traceable back to one meeting, one ride to a prison in the middle of a summer that had already left three people dead. He came back to 6:30 West Evergreen with a permission and a plan.
And what he built with both of them is what we need to talk about next. on the roof. Men watching the street in the yard, children playing. Same building. Both of those things at the same time. On the roof, rotating shifts of men watching who came in and who went out. At the entrance, a security operation that controlled access to the building.
If you belonged there, you got in. If you didn’t belong there, or if the men at the door decided you didn’t, you didn’t. Anyone who challenged the security, who pushed back, who got in the way, didn’t get a warning. They were removed. That was the rule. Shifts were mandatory. Miss one and you’d pay for it.
The children who grew up in that building knew which men were on which floor. They learned which hallways you moved through and which you didn’t after a certain hour. They knew the difference between a face that meant you were safe and a face that meant something else entirely. That knowledge wasn’t taught. It was just there.
Absorbed the way children absorb everything by watching, by learning what questions not to ask. People inside that operation describe the money moving through that building at a rate of more than a million dollars a month. Those figures come from oral accounts. They have not been verified by independent sources, but the structure they describe was discipline.
A split, a larger share to the organization, a smaller cut to whoever was doing the selling directly, a building with a playground on the ground floor. Discipline maintained the split. The split maintained the discipline. Now hold that picture. Same building, same man, same years. The skating parties in the yard at 660.
the boxing sessions in the sideyard at 6:30 Evergreen. The woman he called his mother taken care of, protected, the kids in that building pointing at him and understanding that he was somebody. In January of 1981, a gang war broke out in Cababrini Green, gangster disciples, and IGD against Mickey Cobras. By March of that year, 11 people were dead and 37 more were injured.
Mayor Jane Burn responded by moving into the project into a unit at 11:50 to 1160 North Sedwick and staying for 3 weeks. 3 weeks. Then she left. The violence paused briefly and then resumed. Bo John was still in that building. He dressed well, intentionally well. He and Smokey were seen in cars that people in those towers had no business being near.
A photograph exists. Bo John standing next to a Rolls-Royce late 1970s somewhere near those buildings. That image circulated. The older men showed it to the younger ones. That visibility was not careless. It was a message. This is what this can become. This is the ceiling. Come up here and we’ll show you how far it goes.
In a place where the city had stopped showing up, where maintenance was deferred, where schools were underfunded, where the police mostly arrived after someone was already down. Bo John built something that people feared and something that people depended on. Sometimes simultaneously, sometimes the same people.
That does not excuse him. It explains why people made room for him. He wasn’t just running a gang. He was running a substitute coach because the school wasn’t enough. Provider because the city wouldn’t judge because the precinct arrived late and left early. The same logic ran through all of it. Loyalty, discipline, punishment, belonging.
In another zip code, those functions belong to different institutions. The school, the church, the police, the city. Inside 6:30 West Evergreen, they collapsed into one body, his body. And that is the thing no one who grew up in that building can fully separate. The man who looked after them and the system that was quietly closing around them.
The people closest to him remember the parties and the boxing gloves. The record remembers the shifts and the rooftops. Both of those things are true. That’s the problem. Here is what the system Bo John built could not do. It could not follow him out the door. The official record on what happened that afternoon is thin.
There’s no news coverage, no court documentation that has surfaced publicly, no police report that’s been made accessible. What exists is oral history. One person who was close to him, who has put his memory of this on record. I want to be clear about that before I tell you what he said. This is how people who were there remember it.
Bo John was moving through the neighborhood with a man called Speedock. Speedok. That’s almost everything most accounts give him. A name and a way of dying. Who he was inside the organization. What he meant to B John. What kind of man he was when nobody was watching. That’s another thing the record didn’t keep. The two of them were on their way somewhere, an apartment nearby.
What happened before they arrived? Speedok had put his hands on a woman. Her family found out. They were killed moments later when they got ambushed by Andrew Taylor, a 16-year-old boy, his mom, and his aunt, a family, all three of them. There are two versions of what led up to that afternoon.
One account holds that Speedok had assaulted a woman in the neighborhood. That the family who found them that afternoon had come to answer for that. Not to a court, not to a precinct, to him directly. The other says it was a drug deal that went wrong. Those two versions do not entirely contradict each other. They may both be partially true.
What they agree on is the ending. Bo John didn’t make it out of that apartment. Neither did Speedock. Speedok was killed, too. The man who had organized rotating shifts, who had built consequence into every level of what he ran, who had controlled who entered and who left. He died in someone else’s apartment, caught in someone else’s recklessness, killed by people who were not part of any hierarchy he had built.
The control stopped at the edge of his own territory. What reached him instead was something older and simpler. A family that had decided a debt needed to be paid. He had organized that logic for years. That afternoon, the logic organized him. The person who pulled the trigger was a child by almost any definition.
Whatever happened in that apartment, whatever the full sequence of events actually was, a 16-year-old boy is at the center of it. The record on what happened to him after is not accessible. If there was a juvenile court process, those records have never been made public. History didn’t follow the boy who ended this.
The news traveled the way news traveled in a place like that. Person to person, building to building. Word of mouth moving faster than anything official. Bo got killed. Three words. That’s what reached the yard outside 6:30 West Evergreen that afternoon. There was a child out there, 6 years old, playing in the sideyard the same way kids played in that yard every day.
He heard those words for the first time in his life. and it was the first time he would later say that he had ever lost someone. The full story of that afternoon has never been written down anywhere. What can be verified is limited. What has been written down is this. He didn’t come home. Here’s what the record kept and here’s what it didn’t. what it kept.
The insane gangster disciples continued operating in Cababrini Green until the last tower came down. March 30th, 2011. The final building was demolished. The project that had existed in some form since 1942 when the first Cabrini row houses were built was gone. Tens of thousands of people who had lived there were displaced.
What replaced it was marketed as mixed income redevelopment. Of the families who had actually lived in those towers, very few came back. What replaced the Cababrini area more broadly was market rate housing, condominiums, developments priced for people who had never lived there. That’s not a metaphor either. That’s just what happened. what it kept.
On May 18th, 2018, Ernest Don Smokeoky Wilson, the man who built the insane disciples, who brought Bo John in as his right-hand man, who spent decades building what they built together, was shot multiple times and killed at 7100 South Uklid Avenue. He was 65 years old. Federal prosecutors alleged the men who did it had been appointed by Larry Hoover from prison in 2014.
The same Larry Hoover that Bo John and Junior Hope rode to Pontiac to visit in 1978. The circle closed on Smokeoky’s end. In the account those prosecutors presented, the man who had once given the permission had eventually sanctioned the opposite. Smoky Wilson’s slang was a changing of the guard.
Now, here’s what the record didn’t keep. No real name for Donbo John. Not in any public record, not in any court document, not in any news archive that has been found. The man who organized the drug operation at 6:30 West Evergreen, who sent word to the Cobra Stones, who blessed sections from Cababrini to West Humble Park to East Garfield Park.
His real name has not been written down anywhere that anyone can currently find. No date of birth, no date of death, no headline in the Chicago Tribune or the Sun Times that runs longer than a sentence if at all. A mid 1980s killing somewhere without a date attached to it. The building is gone. The man’s name is gone. But the logic he built control passed as protection.
hierarchy held together by consequence that didn’t need a building to keep running. It didn’t need a name. It replicated itself the way he had always intended, block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood, into places he had already sent word. The questions that stay open are not small ones. What is Bo John’s real name? There are people alive today who would know.
They haven’t said, at least not anywhere a public record catches, what happened to Junior Hope, the man who rode with him to Pontiac in 1978 and stood in that room. What happened to Andrew Taylor, the 16-year-old boy at the center of that afternoon? The answers exist somewhere. They’re just in places history chose not to look. What does exist? a man named Kasik Micah who describes himself as Bo John’s godson who is making a video series called Last Look, the Bo John and Speedock story because he is afraid that if someone doesn’t put it on record now,
it will disappear entirely. One person decades later trying to hold on to something before the last person who remembers it is gone. not just the larger than-l life image people created over the years. He said Last Look strips away the folklore and brings the audience face to face with the human being behind the reputation.
In 2011, they tore down 630 West Evergreen. What came after was market rate housing built for people who had never lived there. The people who had lived there were scattered across Chicago. The protection was the control. It always was. That was the whole design.
