September 4th, 1968. A hallway at Parker High School, 68th in Steuart Inglewood. James Highmith was 18. Larry Hoover was 17. 5 seconds after they saw each other, Hoover was on his way to St. Bernard’s Hospital with a bullet in his leg. 57 years later, Highmith went on camera to protect the same man he had shot.
Larry Hoover ain’t never told on me. May 28th, 2025, Trump commuted Hoover’s federal sentence. Three days later, a 1968 newspaper article resurfaced Hoover’s name on a police witness list. People called it snitching. The man Hoover had named as his shooter said it wasn’t. But that same news cycle pulled Highmith’s own record back into the light of profer session, a cooperation paragraph, and a sentence that fell below what the guidelines called for.
He tried to close the question around Hoover. Instead, he opened one around himself. Parker High School at 68th and Stuart sat one block from Ogden Park where Larry Hoover had organized the Supreme Gangsters four years earlier. It was not neutral ground. Hoover was 17. He had already survived two assassination attempts that year, 1968.
Both connected to the escalating war between the Supreme Gangsters and the Devil’s Disciples. The September 4th shooting was his third. He was by every measure of that world a target. James Highmith was 18, a barren disciple affiliated with the East Side faction and already on law enforcement’s radar. He and Leonard Longreet were both arrested within days of the shooting.
Both were part of the East Side Disciples Circle. Both had walked into a school building on the edge of Larry Hoover’s home turf. What happened in that hallway depends on who you ask. The dominant account highmith walked past Hoover with a smile. A school corridor on a September morning locker’s lenolium.
The particular echo of a building that has 300 students in it and nowhere near enough adults. Leonard Long Street from somewhere nearby called out. Highmith drew a 32 pistol and fired. Mildred Seville, 15 years old, and Louis Jackson, 15 years old, were hit in the crossfire. All three rushed to St. Bernard’s Hospital. Hoover survived.
Highmith’s account told 40 and 50 years later in interviews, two girls came to warn him that Hoover was coming to kill him first. He got there early and waited with the pistol, stood in a corridor that both of them had walked through as students on ground that was functionally Hoovers and waited. Long Street, he says, was down the hallway somewhere, not beside him, not giving orders.
Highmith says he acted alone. “I had a pistol,” he said in a Wack 100 interview. So, I waited for him and that’s what happened. Those two accounts have never been reconciled and they never will be. The girls who warned him have no names in any document. The principal’s office doesn’t have a recording. Long Street was acquitted. What is not disputed after the shooting, Larry Hoover cooperated with Chicago police. He identified his attackers.
His name appeared on a witness list that a 1968 newspaper article documented an article that stayed buried for over 50 years until a content creator named 1090 Jake surfaced it in 2025. Highmith was convicted of aggravated battery. He received a sentence of 1 to 5 years and served approximately four and a half.
During that time, Chicago changed. In June of 1969, nine months after the shooting at Parker High School, David Barksdale and Larry Hoover sat down together at a parish house on South Peoria Street and decided to stop killing each other. The Black Gangster Disciple Nation absorbed both factions. Highmith serving his sentence in an Illinois state facility was folded into the merge structure from inside a cell.
He would emerge into a world where the man he shot was technically his brother in the same organization. That is the first vacancy, not a body Hoover survived, not an absence. The vacancy here is a question permanently open. What actually happened in that hallway and why Highmith is the only surviving witness who claims to know.
He has been answering that question in different ways for nearly 60 years. The record does not support a verdict. The documentary is not going to deliver one. In June of 1969, the merger was a political decision. The structure was more important than the grievance. What the structure could not fully address.
James Highmith was in state prison serving his time for shooting the man who was now on paper his organizational superior. The merger made the southside safer for the organization. It made the question of what to do with Highmith, the man who shot the co-founder simple. He was a Barksdale man. He stayed a Barksdale man.
The politics moved around him while he served his time. Highsmith and Hoover ended up in the same Illinois state facility and they played basketball not once, not as a symbolic handshake. According to Highmith, and this is his account, not corroborated by any prison document made public, they played almost every day.
They walked out to the same yard, used the same court, ran the same pickup games. Illinois State Prison in the early 1970s. A concrete yard where the light comes in flat and cold, even in August, where the hours move differently than they do outside, slower in one direction, faster in every direction that matters. Time that belongs to the institution and not to you.
You fill it with whatever the yard allows. what the yard allowed basketball. It wasn’t no real animosity towards him and I highmith said years later because him and I grew up together. Think about what that image contains. Two men who had tried to kill each other. One who shot the other in a school corridor. One who then identified his shooter to the police by name.
walking to the same end of a prison yard every morning running the same plays the ball going up. A man lines up a shot. The man guarding him once put a bullet in his leg. What does he think about while the shot is in the air? What does the shooter think about waiting to see if it goes in? Highmith ain’t never said. Ain’t nobody know.
But the ball goes up and one of them has to decide what to do with his hands. The BGDN merger made it politically possible. What Highmith says is that it was never particularly complicated personally. When you grow up on the same blocks, when you run in the same world long enough, the shape of a grievance changes. It doesn’t disappear.
It reconfigures around whatever is most immediately useful. An enforcer in prison needs allies. A rising leader in emerged nation needs to know who his people are. There are no other witnesses to those basketball games beyond Highmith’s account. No prison visitor logs, no documented conversation between them about what happened at Parker High School about the witness list about the police cooperation that produced the arrest.
Whatever words passed between James Highmith and Larry Hoover in that yard, if any did, they passed in a place where nothing was written down. The silence in the record isn’t absence. It’s the shape of what two men from those blocks decided was worth saying out loud and what wasn’t. What the record does contain during the years Highmith played basketball in an Illinois yard, Larry Hoover was building what would become one of the largest street organizations in American history, 30,000 members, 35 states, an estimated $100 million annually. He ran
it from a prison cell. And James Highmith was designated in the records law enforcement maintained as the future third leader of the Black Disciples, the nation enforcer. David Barksdale died September 2nd, 1974 from kidney failure connected to gunshot wounds he received in a 1968 or 1970 assassination attempt by the Black Pea Stone Rangers.
He was 27 years old. When he died, the organizational structure resolved itself. Hoover consolidated. The machine kept running. Highmith was released. His function in the machine, the man who settled things that couldn’t be settled with words. He was very good at it. Willie Fluky Stokes ran his cocaine and heroin empire out of the Roberts Motel on King Drive, where he was known to win or lose $250,000 in a single Las Vegas weekend.
Stokes was born in 1937 by the time Highmith was released from prison and found his way into Stokes’s orbit. Fluki had already built the most formidable drug operation on Chicago’s south side. Law enforcement called him the richest and most flamboyant drug dealer on the south side. He has survived a 1979 narcotics conviction, 18 months, and a 1985 bribery conviction, 36 months probation.
The DEA was constructing a new case against him for racketeering and running a continuing criminal enterprise, which meant they were watching. Stokes knew they were watching. He operated anyway. The Roberts Motel at 6635 South King Drive had been built as black luxury in 1954 by Herman Roberts, a southside entrepreneur who saw the segregated city and decided to give his community something equal to what it was denied downtown.
Nat King Cole had performed there. By the 1980s, it was Fluk’s headquarters. the same building, the same address, the same rooms. What had changed was what happened in them. James Highmith was the enforcer inside that operation. The nation enforcer designation he’d been given in the black disciples hierarchy translated in Stokes’s world into the same function.
He was the man who resolved problems that couldn’t be resolved with a conversation. He understood the geography of every corner. He knew which disputes were business disputes and which were personal ones. That distinction mattered. In an operation as complex as Stokes’s misreading, the distinction could cost you a supplier, a protection arrangement, a relationship with the wrong set of police.
Highmith had been selling drugs since he was a teenager. stimulants and depressants, the pills that moved through southside corners before the Parker High School shooting. By the time he was working for Stokes, he had 15 years of street level knowledge folded into his judgment. The enforcer role was not decorative. The machine needed someone at the junction between authority and force, and Highmith was very specifically built for that junction.
In February of 1984, Stokes’s son was murdered on the steps of the Roberts Motel area. Willie the Wimp, that’s what they called him, shot dead by a gunman. Stokes buried his son in a casket shaped like a Cadillac, sitting upright behind a steering wheel, a diamond ring on his finger, and a wad of bills in his hand. Stevie Ray Vaughn heard about the funeral and turned it into a song.
Three weeks later, Stokes went back to work. The machine doesn’t pause for grief. That is the enforcer’s operating condition, not a metaphor, a job requirement. When Stokes returned, Highmith’s function was to make sure the operation rid that return as strength, not exposure. to keep the disputes inside manageable limits to make sure that the thing that could crack the whole structure apart never got close enough to get a hand on it.
But what Highmith could not have known or what he knew and chose to live with was that the threat was already inside the perimeter. Stokes’s own bodyguard was on the Chicago Police Department’s payroll. Not as a retired officer, not as a former informant, as an active undercover narcotics informant working simultaneously for Stokes and for the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office.
The enforcer kept the machine running. It was already compromised. The only thing left to decide was when. Earl Wilson was on the Chicago Police Department’s payroll, active undercover, working simultaneously for Stokes and for the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office. not retired, not a former cop who had crossed over.
He had been positioned inside the most powerful drug operation on the south side, earning Stokes’s trust while reporting on him to the state. On the night of November 18th, technically into the early hours of November 19th, Wilson was Stokes’s bodyguard, following in his own car behind Stokes’s 1986 Cadillac limousine as Stokes headed to drop off his girlfriend at 79th Street and South Ellis Avenue.
It was 12:38 in the morning. Two gunmen were already in position. Willie Stokes was shot and killed. His chauffeur, Ronald Johnson, died at the scene. Stokes was 48 years old. The DEA within hours issued a formal statement from assistant special agent in charge Garfield Hammonds. Chicago has lost one of its biggest sources of supply for cocaine and heroin.
That sentence was functionally an announcement that the most powerful position on the south side was now open. Here is what the court record established. Documented in People versus Wilson, the 1999 Illinois appellet court decision. In the minutes before the shooting, Earl Wilson made cell phone calls to a number registered in a man named Elliot Taylor’s name.
He kept Taylor informed of Stokes’s route. The bodyguard in his own car directly behind the limousine, feeding the destination and the timing to whoever was waiting at the other end. The bodyguard’s entire value is proximity. Wilson had turned that proximity into the instrument. Stokes had trusted him with the schedule, the routes, the body.
Every phone call Wilson made that night was paid for with that trust. Wilson was arrested, tried, and convicted in December of 1987. Two counts of first-degree murder, sentenced to natural life. That sentence was later reduced to 60 years on appeal. He was released from prison prison on October 20th, 2023.
Elliot Taylor was identified by the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office and Chicago Police, as in the court records language, primarily responsible for Stokes’s death. The charges against him were dropped before Wilson’s trial began. He was never charged with anything. The night of the murder, the police named someone else entirely.
Officer Bob O’Neal told reporters Charles Edward Bay vowed revenge from an earlier shooting and we think he was up there. The 1999 court record names Taylor. The 1986 police statement names Bay. Neither man was charged. The two shooters were never publicly identified. Who called it record don’t say? Earl Wilson ran and had Taylor’s number going right before them shots. Wilson out here free.
That’s it. Within months, James Highmith was the one law enforcement named. He had not run Stokes’s operation. He had been the man who kept it running from inside. He knew the geography the way you know something you have walked through daily for years. which levers moved, which parts, which relationships were real, where the product moved and where it couldn’t.
That knowledge was the vacancy. He was already standing in it. Whether Stokes’s death was something that happened to him, a murder he learned about from the same radio dispatch as everyone else, or something he participated in making happen, is a question the record has never answered. The documentary is not going to answer it either. That is the mechanism.
It had run once before in a school hallway in 1968. It was running again in the early morning dark of November 19 on a corner at 79th and Ellis. The DEA had lost one of its primary targets. It would eventually find another. By 1988, James Highmith was running five drugous in Englewood. Federal records documented nine transactions totaling 47 kg of cocaine in two years.
That’s what they could prove, not the full picture. The government bills conspiracy charges from what it can document. 47 kg is the floor. The actual volume was larger. And the corners where that product eventually landed. The corners are where the people furthest from the first class flights do the most dangerous work for the smallest fraction of what the product is worth.
Highmith was not on the corners. Highmith was above them. He had a black 560 seal Mercedes seized eventually by the DEA. He flew first class to Las Vegas for heavyweight boxing. He had a wrap sheet with more than 60 entries, 60 arrests, 60 times the system had processed his paperwork and returned him to the south side.
And until the summer of 1992, not one of those 60 entries had produced a conviction that held DEA agent Richard Barrett, who worked the case, described Highmith this way. He couldn’t have cared less. He was about one thing and that was making money and stay out of his way. Agent Tim McCormack offered the structural explanation for how someone operates that openly for that long.
With everybody scared of him, Highmith had fewer competitive roadblocks. In 1990, Highmith saw the movie Dick Tracy and ordered a $3,500 yellow raincoat and matching hat custom made to replicate what Warren Batty wore on screen. The film is about a square jaw detective who pursues gangsters through a stylized cartoon city.
Highmith saw it in the theater and called a tor. Warren Batty played the detective. Highmith wore the costume. A man who orders a $3,000 outfit designed for the person supposed to be chasing him is not being reckless. He is being certain performing for himself, making visible the distance between what the detective represented and what his actual situation was.
The detective was a character in a movie. Highmith was running five drug houses and flying first class to watch men fight in a ring. All I did was meet the demand, he told the DEA when they finally got him. He was not wrong about the market. He was also not wrong that the demand left bodies on those same corners.
Highmith had been through the system 60 times by then. He understood exactly where it broke down, which charges didn’t stick, which witnesses wouldn’t hold, which investigations ran out of money before they could build a case that lasted. There is a specific kind of operational knowledge that comes from 60 arrests without a lasting conviction.
Not recklessness, not stupidity, something colder, the knowledge of a man who has watched the machinery come for him repeatedly and mapped every place it has a gap. The machinery did not have a gap in July of 1992. July 23rd, 1992. James Highmith picked up two kilograms of cocaine from a government informant in an Oldtown apartment.
The cameras had been running for a while. The arrest did not take long, 60 plus prior, and the system had never made anything stick. This time, the DEA had designed the event from the beginning. The informant was federal. The cameras were federal. The two kilograms were documented. Highmith was charged. And the charge was upgraded from the 2 kilogram pickup to a conspiracy count covering nine documented transactions between 1988 and 1989.
One month after his arrest, August of 1992, James Highmith sat in a room with a USA Scott Levine and two federal agents. What happened in that room is documented in a 2000 court memorandum, a section 2255 filing. The plea agreement paragraph 12 required Highmith to cooperate fully and honestly to provide complete truthful information about narcotics trafficking and to testify before a grand jury if required.
60 plus arrests had not produced a lasting conviction because what Highmith had built could not be entered into evidence. Reputation doesn’t submit to discovery. Fear doesn’t cross-examine. What the cooperation paragraph required was something he had never given the record before. He agreed to all of it in writing.
The cooperation was later evaluated and found insufficient. No 5K11 motion was filed. Highmith pleaded guilty in July of 1993. In January of 1994, US District Judge Marvin Aspen sentenced him to 170 months, 14 years, and two months. A 47 kilogram cocaine conspiracy under the sentencing guidelines in effect that year produced a base offense level of 34.
The sentence he received fell below the guideline range for his offense level and criminal history. The profer session later appeared in documents filed in 1995 to 1997 cases against black gangster disciple nation members which names which cases what Highmith specifically said in that room. Those details are not public. James Highmith has said publicly.
Larry Hoover ain’t never told on me. He has maintained in interviews across decades that he is not a rat. The documentary is not going to call him one. The documentary is going to read the record out loud, place it next to the sentence, and stop. A profer session, a plea agreement with a cooperation paragraph, a sentence that fell below the guideline range calculated for his offense level and criminal history category, and a profer that appeared later in other people’s cases.
The narrator stops here. The audience draws the line. Reputation is the last thing a man from that world owns after the corners are gone and the organization is disbanded and everyone else is dead. On May 28th, 2025, Trump commuted Hoover’s six federal life sentences. The commutation covers federal sentences.
Only Hoover still faces 150 to 200 years in Illinois state custody for the 1973 murder of William Pooky Young. State parole eligibility approximately 2062. Within days 1090, Jake surfaced the 1968 newspaper article showing Hoover’s name on a police witness list. People called it snitching. 3 days after the commutation, James Highmith went on camera.
I had to come on Facebook and made it perfectly clear. He said, “That man ain’t never told on me. Larry Hoover ain’t never told on me. The court documents arrived in the same news cycle, the profer session, the plea agreement, the 170month sentence. Hoover’s commutation created a vacancy in the public record.
Who was he? Highmith stepped into that vacancy to defend him, which opened a new vacancy in Highmith’s own reputation. Who is Highmith? The answer lives somewhere between a federal court memorandum from the year 2000 to 1968 newspaper article and whatever was said in a room in the northern district of Illinois in August of 1992.
Earl Wilson, who arranged Stokes’s murder, was released from prison in October 2023. He has not spoken publicly. Elliot Taylor was never charged. The two gunmen who killed Stokes were never identified. Highmith is 74 years old and still talking. The one thing no federal document had ever touched was the story he told about himself. Not what he did.
The record had all of that, but who he was. A man who did not break the code. He went on camera in 2025 to protect that story. Not Hoover’s reputation, his own. In doing so, he pulled the other document back into the light, the one he could not argue away, the one bearing his signature. He could only insist to 74 still talking, that it did not mean what it appeared to mean.
Again and again, the powerful men in James Highmith’s world were removed by a bullet, by a court order, by a bodyguard on the state’s payroll. And every time one of them was removed, the space they left behind went somewhere. It went to whoever was standing there. The question the record never answered is whether James Highmith just happened to be standing in the right places or whether he understood vacancies better than anyone around him.
