Sam McKay: The Black Souls King Who Built Chicago’s Most Insulated Gang 

 

 

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East Garfield Park, Chicago. November 13th, 1987. Two young men were found shot in a rear alley near 3330 West Fulton, a block from the Black Souls drug house at 3233. Brian Fowler and DeJuan Buck were teenagers. They had been selling drugs on the wrong block. The murders were ordered by a man named Sam McKay.

McKay was the leader of a gang called the Gangster Black Souls. He ran the territory in that stretch of West Fulton. He called the meeting where the plan was made. He sat in that room and gave the order that ended two teenagers’ lives. He was not in the car. He was not charged. In the legal record that followed the confessions, the trials, the convictions, McKay’s name surfaces and then recedes.

Other men received life sentences. One man appears in the record only by a street name, jet attached to no legal identity, connected to no charge. McKay remained in East Garfield Park on the corner he had built. That is 1987. In 2025, nearly 38 years later, Sam McKay’s name appeared again in an Illinois Appellate Court opinion.

 Not as a defendant, not as a suspect. As the author of an affidavit filed on behalf of a man who had spent 35 years in a cell for driving the getaway car to those murders. The man who called the meeting was arguing from beyond whatever point he had died that the man convicted of driving had not been in that car at all.

There is a specific word for what Sam McKay built that made this possible. We will get to it, but first you have to understand where it came from. Sam McKay didn’t invent the system he used. He inherited it twice. The first inheritance came from a man named Horace Willis. Willis helped form the Black Revolutionary Soul Brothers drawn from multiple street organizations in the area.

 Community Protection Black Power aligned an organization built around the idea that a neighborhood could govern itself. In 1969, Chicago police shot him dead. Details of the shooting and any subsequent legal action remain limited in public records. What remained was the Black Souls, the structure Willis had built stripped of its political frame still occupying the same blocks in East Garfield Park.

The community project was gone. The organization stayed. The second inheritance came from Larry Hoover. After his 1973 murder conviction, Hoover ran the Black Gangster Disciples from inside at Stateville Correctional Center across the South and West Sides of Chicago from a prison cell. His defining contribution was not violence alone, it was structure.

 Hierarchy, assigned roles, the structural principle that the person at the top never had to be in the room when things went wrong because the organization was designed to keep them out of it. McKay had been active in the BGD and Supreme Gangster Network during the 1970s according to historical accounts of the period. The record doesn’t give us the details Rank Corner’s specific role.

 The record only meets a man when he becomes large enough to threaten something. What we know is this, by the end of the decade, McKay had spent years inside that model. Not absorbing the ideology, the architecture. By the end of the ’70s, McKay moved west. He carried two things, the memory of an organization erased when its leader was shot in the back and a decade watching an organization built to survive because its leader was structurally unreachable.

He understood what each one built and what each one left when it was gone. That was the inheritance. He was about to use it. Around 1980, Sam McKay left the BGD orbit and joined something smaller. What he brought with him was a set of ideas about how an organization should run.

 The man he found was Wayne Edwards, street name Jack Bobo. Edwards had prior experience in the Black Gangster Disciples and brought organizational ideas that became known as gangster concepts, the assigned roles, the geographic discipline, the principle that authority could be systemic rather than personal. He had been carrying those ideas into the Black Souls network in East Garfield Park.

What they needed was someone who could run a corner. Their roles were specific from the start. Edwards supplied the framework, the BGD derived structure that made what they were building feel like something beyond a crew. McKay supplied the operations, the corner at Walnut and Homan, the territory from Fulton to Lake Central Park to Homan, the rules about who could sell where, on whose permission, and what happened to people who decided those rules didn’t apply to them.

They called it Gangster Black Souls. The heroin operation ran out of a documented drug house at 3233 West Fulton Fulton and Kedzie, East Garfield Park. Members were assigned to specific corners. Not self-assigned, assigned. Each person had a designated spot and a role, and the assignments were managed, which meant the corner knew what to do before McKay arrived.

 It knew what to do when he wasn’t there at all. That is not a crew. That is an operating system. The distinction matters because a crew requires its leader to be present. An operating system does not. A crew dissolves when the person running it is removed. An operating system keeps running different inputs, same outputs, because the structure itself carries the authority.

McKay was not trying to build a crew. He was trying to build something that didn’t require him to stand on a corner. In a city where every gang was being sorted into two camps, Folk Nation and People Nation, a split that formalized in 1981, McKay refused to choose. The Gangster Black Souls maintained strategic neutrality, which meant GBS could do business with Vice Lords on the People side, with Four Corner Hustlers, and with Black Gangster Disciples on the Folk side.

In prison, GBS members typically aligned Folk tracking the organizational split. On the street, they aligned with whoever was buying. Picking a side would have cost him customers. McKay didn’t pick a side. That is not loyalty, that is market logic. The BGD proximity was not accidental.

 GBS operated one to two blocks from active Black Gangster Disciples in the same stretch of East Garfield Park, a remnant of McKay’s prior affiliation and a standing business relationship with the organization whose structural model he had spent a decade studying. By the mid-1980s, the operation was running. By 1994, when investigators from the DEA, IRS, and Chicago police finally pulled the threads, the Walnut and Homan operation was reportedly generating substantial daily revenue with some accounts estimating as much as $50,000 a day.

$50,000 per day on a corner in East Garfield Park, according to the accounts that put a number on it. McKay was not the man making that money by 1994. By then, he was in custody, but he built the machine that produced that number. The assigned corners, the hierarchy, the discipline that kept the operation consistent enough that a surveillance team watching it from the outside understood immediately what they were looking at. Not chaos, a system.

 And the signature of McKay’s system, the thing that would matter most in November of 1987, was that the people at the top were never required to be in the room when the consequences happened. The operating system McKay had built had a protocol for encroachment. Selling on his territory without permission was not a gray area.

 It had consequences, and those consequences had been built into the system the same way everything else was. In November of 1987, two teenagers named Brian Fowler and Dejuan Buck were selling drugs near the Black Souls stretch of West Fulton. They were connected to a dealer called Smitty, and they were selling on a block that already had owners and rules in a territory where the response to exactly this situation had been thought through in advance.

They were not random victims. They were the output of a managed system with a documented protocol. McKay called a meeting. The people in that room were Kevin Murray, Tyrone Washington, and two others known by street names, Jet and Paris. McKay laid out what had happened, people selling drugs around his territory without permission.

Then McKay said what needed to happen next. The plan, put simply, was to find Smitty and his boys and kill them. Washington and Jet armed themselves with Uzi’s. Murray drove. McKay was not in the car. That is not an incidental detail. That is the operating system working. McKay called the meeting. McKay gave the order.

 McKay was the reason Brian Fowler and DeJuan Buck were targeted. The architecture he had spent seven years building put deliberate distance between the man who authorized the violence and the room where it was planned, and then more distance between the planning room and the car where the order became irreversible. Each layer of distance was a layer of the blueprint.

 Fowler and Buck were found. Two teenagers killed on a block they had no idea was governed by rules they had never been told about by men carrying out an order from a man who was somewhere else entirely. Then, the accounting. Kevin Murray was arrested, tried, convicted on September 11, 1990, life sentence for driving the car. Tyrone Washington pleaded guilty to avoid the death penalty.

 He also received a life sentence. Jet, the man who armed himself with an Uzi and used it on those two teenagers, appears in the legal record of this case by street name only. In a 2025 Illinois Appellate Court opinion filed nearly 38 years after the murders, Jet is still a street name attached to a single paragraph, no legal identity, no charge filed in connection with this case in the available records.

The gap where his name should be is not a failure of investigation. It is the product of deliberate design. The blueprint protected Jet the same way it protected McKay by ensuring there was enough distance, enough insulation that the accountability could not find its way back to the right person.

 Paris, the fourth person in the planning room, appears the same way. A street name in Kevin Murray’s confession. Nothing after that. Smitty, the dealer whose crew’s encroachment triggered all of this, apparently survived the night. He has not been publicly identified in any court document reviewed. Sam McKay was not charged with the murders of Brian Fowler and Dejuan Buck.

He remained in East Garfield Park, Murray life, Washington life. Jet, a street name in a document with no charges attached. McKay still on his corner. The gap where Jet’s name should be is the last image of this act. It is not going anywhere. No public record reviewed shows that McKay was arrested or charged in connection with the murders of Fowler and Buck.

The operating system had worked exactly as designed. And while Murray was waiting for trial, McKay was sitting down with two other men to discuss an expansion. That deserves a beat of acknowledgement before we move on. Two teenagers were dead. The man who ordered their deaths faced no known legal consequences for those murders.

 His corner operation was intact, his organization was running, and he was planning what came next. That is 1987. That is the operating system at peak efficiency. The man McKay was sitting with was Monroe Banks. Banks had come out of prison with the specific ambition to take the Four Corner Hustlers, one of the West Side’s oldest street organizations, founded around 1968 by Walter King Wheat and Freddy Gage, and cut them loose from the Vice Lords entirely to make the Fours independent, to run them under their own flag. The

third man was Wayne Edwards McKay’s co-founder. Edwards brought the framework. Banks brought the Four Corner Hustlers. McKay brought the operating model that had just insulated him from a double murder without leaving a legal trace. What they forged became known, according to historical accounts of the era, as the Black Diamond Alliance, a business agreement between two West Side organizations timed to the crack cocaine epidemic arriving on Chicago’s West Side.

The timing was not coincidental. It was market intelligence. Crack cocaine was a new economy, and a new economy required new infrastructure. What they built was not a peace treaty. It was a joint venture between organizations that understood themselves as businesses. What McKay had at Walnut and Homer was a corner.

What the alliance produced was a West Side corporation. By 1994, 7 years later, when investigators from the DEA, IRS, and Chicago police had accumulated extensive record communications from the operation, the Walnut and Homer network was reportedly generating substantial daily revenue, with some accounts estimating as much as $50,000 a day.

When agents searched the residences connected to Edwards’ operation, they found a Mercedes-Benz, approximately $21,000 in cash, and more than $50,000 in jewelry across the search locations. They also found a telephone tap detection device. Edwards knew they were watching. He had a device in his home specifically designed to detect surveillance, and he kept running the operation anyway.

That is what it looks like when a machine has been running long enough that the people inside it believe it is too large to stop. McKay built that machine. And the murder meeting in November of 1987, the business decision that put Murray and Washington in prison for life and left Jet nameless forever was not the peak of what McKay was building.

It was a maintenance decision made by a man constructing something much larger. In 1992, according to historical accounts of Chicago street organizations, Sam McKay was arrested in connection with a separate murder and kidnapping case. Not for Fowler and Buck, the blueprint had held on those.

 A different case with no publicly accessible record. The victim’s name, the docket number, the specific charges, the trial or plea, the sentence, the record does not produce any of them. McKay’s 1992 case is in a particular irony almost as invisible as the 1987 case he was never charged with. The public record describes his arrest as a major blow to the gangster Black Souls.

 That is essentially all it offers. That same year Monroe Banks was murdered. Drug-related killing, no public suspect, no documented circumstances. According to accounts of the period, leadership of the Four Corner Hustlers passed to younger figures. The alliance that McKay and Banks had forged was now running without either of them.

 Willie Jones, another senior figure in GBS leadership, was also imprisoned for murder around the same period. The organization had lost its architect, its ally, and a second key leader in the span of months. And yet, by 1994, Wayne Edwards’ Walnut and Homan operation was still running. The surveillance team watching it, D E A I R S, Chicago police, had accumulated extensive recorded communications from the operation before Edwards was indicted in June of that year.

The machine McKay had built was running without him at a scale he had designed, but would not see. Here’s the thing the audience might be expecting that McKay fell because the blueprint finally failed. That the 1987 murders caught up with him. That the architecture he built couldn’t hold indefinitely.

 McKay didn’t fall because the blueprint failed. He fell because he stepped outside it. The 1987 blueprint held. Jet is still unnamed. The charges from that November night never reached McKay. What brought him down was a separate case, different victim, different circumstances. A case that the public record cannot even fully document.

 Meanwhile, Kevin Murray had already been in Illinois Department of Corrections custody for 2 years by the time McKay was arrested. 2 years into a life sentence for driving a car to a murder McKay ordered, and McKay’s own affidavit would later say Murray didn’t commit. The blueprint had protected McKay from Fowler and Buck completely and permanently.

Murray had no such protection. A legacy doesn’t require its creator. That’s how you know it was built right. Sam McKay was released from prison at some point. The record does not say when. And then at some point after that, he was killed in the streets. The record does not document that either. No date, no circumstances, no named killer.

What the record does say is that in 2025 his name appeared in an Illinois courtroom. Not as a defendant, as a witness. The dead man’s fingerprints in a living case. To understand how McKay’s name got there, you have to go back to the trial. Kevin Murray was convicted in September of 1990. His trial judge was Thomas J. Maloney.

Murray’s case was the last case Maloney heard before his June 1991 indictment in Operation Greylord, a federal investigation that ultimately convicted Maloney of taking bribes to fix murder cases. Maloney was the most corrupt judge in the history of the operation. There is a legal doctrine called compensatory bias.

The theory articulated in federal appellate case law is that a judge who has been taking bribes to fix cases in defendants’ favor may start ruling against innocent defendants with extra severity, deliberately compensating, trying to look clean aware that his record of corrupt rulings might be scrutinized. The Illinois Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission, in reviewing Murray’s case, found the Maloney connection relevant.

Murray’s conviction may have been one of the cases Maloney used to compensate. Murray’s former defense attorney, Karen Shields, who later served 12 years as a Cook County judge, filed an affidavit describing what she witnessed at trial. Maloney, she said, “closed his eyes and turned his back to counsel as if to say to the jury that the defense did not deserve to be heard.

” The two detectives who extracted Murray’s confession were named Kristin Cato and John Somerville. Detective Cato had a significant number of complaints filed against him with the office of professional standards, including allegations of physical abuse during interrogations, according to investigative reporting.

At least one other confession linked to Cato was suppressed after a court found evidence of beating. Special prosecutors were eventually assigned to multiple Cato-linked cases. That is not a series of isolated incidents. That is a documented pattern of accusations active during the months when Murray was being interrogated.

Somerville was convicted in 1993 of criminal sexual abuse against women in his police car. One sentence because it only needs one sentence. Murray’s post-conviction case accumulated evidence over decades. Washington, the man who had pleaded guilty to the murders, filed an affidavit stating that Murray had not been present at the murders and had not driven the getaway car that Murray was instead working his assigned spot selling drugs at the time.

Washington said he had falsely named Murray in part because of an old beef about drug territory, but more importantly, because petitioner was messing around with Washington’s girlfriend. And then there is McKay’s affidavit. Before his death, the date is not in any record, Sam McKay filed a post-conviction affidavit on Kevin Murray’s behalf.

The 2025 Illinois Appellate Court opinion describes it this way, “Mackay’s affidavit attests that petitioner was in fact working for him selling drugs on his usual corner when Fowler and Buck were murdered at Mackay’s behest.” Sit with the architecture of that sentence. The man who ordered the murders is telling a court that the man convicted of driving the car was actually working a corner, the corner that Mackay had designed, the assigned spot operating system had created.

 Mackay’s blueprint is present in every word of the exculpatory affidavit, including the language about assigned corners, which is the language of the operating system itself. What does Mackay gain from filing that affidavit? By the time the case reached this stage, Mackay was out of prison and at some point after that did he filed paperwork that could help free a man his own organization may have wrongfully imprison.

The record gives us nothing to explain why. That question belongs to the gaps the blueprint was built to produce. On July 29th, 2025, the Illinois Appellate Court reversed the lower court’s dismissal of Murray’s petition and remanded the case for an evidentiary hearing on his torture claims. Murray remains in Illinois Department of Corrections custody, not exonerated, awaiting a hearing represented by the Exoneration Project.

 According to secondary historical accounts, Mackay was killed in the streets. The architect of a system built entirely around the principle of not being in the room when things happened, died the way his system suggested he should, without documentation, without anyone filing the paperwork that would make his death a verifiable fact.

The blueprint ran all the way to the end. Kevin Murray has been in Illinois Department of Corrections custody since 1990. That is 35 years for driving a car. Jet has a street name in a 2025 Illinois Appellate Court opinion. That is all. No charges were filed against him in connection with these murders in the records reviewed.

 The gap where his name should be has been there since 1987 and remains there now. According to secondary historical accounts, Sam McKay was later killed in the streets. No date, no name killer, no public record confirms the circumstances. The man who built the blueprint died as completely outside the record as he had lived inside it.

 In 2017, six leaders of the post-McKay Black Souls organization were convicted in Cook County’s first RICO trial under Illinois’ 2012 RICO statute. Other defendants in the case resolved their charges through plea agreements. Their territory was Monroe Street and Pulaski Road, a geographic shift from McKay’s Walnut and Homan base.

Different leaders, different streets, different era. The organization that bore the name McKay had built was convicted under a law that didn’t exist when he built it for crimes committed in the territory he had never controlled. The blueprint outlasted everyone who used it. Here is the accounting. McKay’s blueprint protected him from the 1987 murders completely, permanently, without a single charge ever filed.

It protected Jet, whose name is still a gap in a document nearly 38 years on. It did not protect Kevin Murray, who was inside the machine but not at a level the blueprint was designed to shield. The blueprint protected the architect. Everyone below the architect was to the extent the system considered them at all expendable.

 Brian Fowler and Dejuan Buck were teenagers. Kevin Murray was also a teenager working a corner on assignment. The man who assigned the corners is according to the accounts that exist dead killed in the streets, no record, no date. The man who pulled one of the triggers has never been named. That is what the blueprint produced and somewhere in Illinois in a courtroom that accounting is still being argued over nearly 38 years later.

 The record is all we have and sometimes the record is almost nothing.