All right, y’all think about this for a second. A kid loses his father, loses his mother, then loses his grandmother, too. And the first people who really show up for him ain’t teachers, ain’t counselors, ain’t nobody from the city. It’s the men on the corner. They feed him. They give him a little money.
They make him feel like somebody actually sees him. But at the same time, what does that teach him about love? About what comes with it? In 2010, on a quiet culde-sac in Aurora, Illinois, an elderly woman across the street watched a man carry her groceries up her front steps. She had been watching him do this for years.
She knew what he did for a living. She told the federal judge later, when there was a federal judge, that she was not a fool. She was not writing to say that what he did was good. She was writing to say what she had seen. What she had seen was a man who was kind to her. Same week, 12 square blocks, Pilaski Road to Costner Avenue, Jackson Street to Congress Parkway, West Garfield Park, Chicago.
A corner that could move up to $10,000 on a good day. a corner that ran on colored plastic baggies stamped with a gold crown sold for $10 a piece and that the federal government would spend nearly a year trying to shut down. Same man, same hands. In that same period, in that same calendar, a man named Leadonna Gil came up $400 short on drug proceeds.
The man from the culdesac walked into Leadonna Gill’s apartment with a baseball bat. He broke Ladonna Gill’s hand. The culde-sac in Aurora is 70 kilometers from the corner at Pilaski in Vanurren. 70 kilometers. His name was Dana Bostic. On the street they called him Bird. Dana Bostik was born in 1979 on the west side of Chicago.
His father was in prison by the time he was 3 years old. His father was never going to come back. His mother was addicted to heroin. When Bostik was eight years old, she lost custody. He and his younger brother Curtis and his sister Tiffany were sent to live with their grandmother on the west side.
The same neighborhood, the same streets, a grandmother who had agreed to take in three children she had not raised from the beginning. Their grandmother died within the year. Of the three children, it was Dana and Curtis who stayed closest through what came after. There is no polished way to say that the children arrived. The woman took them in.
Within 12 months, she was gone. What happened after that is not in the court record in any detail. The system had them for a while. The system eventually did not. What the record does contain is this. The men who showed up after that were not teachers. They were not social workers. They were not a coach with a gym and a theory about discipline.
They were the men who worked the corners. They were already there, already present, already consistent. And they decided, for their own reasons, to notice that there were children on those corners who needed things, food, money, something that resembled attention. They bought him pizza. They gave him money. Picture it.
A stoop on the west side of Chicago. A Tuesday evening in the middle of the 1980s, the sun still on the buildings, the corner still running, a man comes down the steps and hands a slice to a boy sitting below him. The cardboard box is warm. The boy takes it without being asked twice. The first thing that ever called itself love in his life arrived wrapped in cardboard.
By the time he was 12, Dana Bostik was selling marijuana. By 13, he was working as a lookout for a heroin operation at Pilaski and Van Burren. The same corner, the same men, the same arrangement he had been in the orbit of since the grandmother died. He was paid by the shift. He was watched over.
He learned which cars to look for and which footsteps meant nothing and which ones meant run. He joined the new breeds, a faction of the black gangster lineage. A name that had been on those blocks since before Bostic was born. A name that would be on those blocks long after. He was not recruited in any formal sense. He was already there.
He had been there for years. He was simply at some point acknowledged as someone who was going to stay. He stayed. He learned. He moved up. By the time he was 22 years old, he was a lieutenant to a faction leader, a man named Eleaza Alvis, known on the street as Budro, who had been in the most functional sense available to a boy growing up without parents on the west side, something like a father.
Budro is not in the court record as a documented figure. He is in the street record. And the street record says that on the third Sunday in June 2001, Father’s Day, he was shot and killed at a block party on the west side of Chicago. >> The third Sunday in June 2001, a block party on the west side of Chicago. The kind of June day that Chicago does when it wants to forgive itself for January.
Warm enough to open everything up. humid enough that the air has weight to it. The kind of afternoon when the music from one block carries to the next. The man who had taken Dana Bostik in, the man who had made him a lieutenant, the man who had been for most of a decade the only authority above him that he had ever chosen to accept, was shot and killed at that block party.
He is not in the court record. He exists in the street record in the accounts of people who were there that afternoon. What they describe is a man shot in the middle of a June day in front of people who knew him on a block where he had worked for years. He was not the first man Bostic had lost.
He was the last one who had been above him. Dana Bostik was 22 years old. He succeeded the man who had just been killed. That much is in the street record. He stepped into the position. He took the corner. He inherited the men. What is not in the record is any definitive answer to the question that people in that neighborhood have been asking ever since.
Whether the man was killed because of Bostic or in spite of him. The court never asked the question. The street has never stopped asking it. The neighborhood had a way of marking the date. Those who knew him have said that in the years that followed, on the third Sunday in June, there would be a gathering, a backyard somewhere on the west side, folding tables, paper plates, smoke from a grill, a barbecue for a man who was gone, a way of saying that his absence had a shape and that the shape had a date. His defense attorneys years
later would tell a federal judge that Dana Bostic was as much a victim of his environment as he was a criminal. That framing is worth holding at arms length. Not because it is false, but because it is incomplete. It accounts for the origin and stops there. It does not account for what he built on top of it or who got hurt by the building of it.
What is true is simpler and harder than any framing. He had learned loyalty from people who showed up. He had learned authority from people who led. And now the person who had embodied both of those things was dead on a Sunday in June. And Dana Bostic was the one standing where he had stood. He was 22. He had the corner. He had the men.
He had the date. By 2008, Dana Bostik had two addresses. One of them was a corner. The other one was a culde-sac. The corner was at Palaski Road and Van Beern Street in West Garfield Park on the west side of Chicago. 12 square blocks open air. Men positioned at intervals across the grid. Lookouts at the perimeter, runners in the middle, the cash at the center.
The operation ran in shifts. On the first of the month, when the government benefits hit, it moved more than any other day. The corner had been running for years. It would run for years more. On an ordinary day, it looked like a block. A man near the mouth of the alley watching the street.
A runner three doors down, moving when the signal moved. Buyers came in once. A woman who paid without looking up. A man who knew the count before he arrived. The exchange took seconds. The block stayed quiet between exchanges. That was the discipline. The culdeac was in Aurora, Illinois, 70 kilometers to the west.
A quiet residential street, the kind where the sound carries on summer evenings, where the neighbors know each other’s schedules, where a woman can watch from across the street and notice who takes whose groceries up the stairs and feel that she knows something true about a person. On the basis of that, Dana Bostic lived there with his girlfriend, Mahogany Barbie, a nursing assistant. His children were there.
Three cars sat in the driveway. All of them registered in Barbie’s name because a man building what Boston was building does not put assets in his own name. And because the man doing the building understood that clearly, his younger brother Curtis moved between both places. He was the one person alive who had seen all of it.
The grandmother, the system, the corners, Aurora. He needed neither address explained to him. Put a pen in each address on a map. Draw the line. 70 kilometers. That line is the architecture of the whole story. And the story will not make sense until you can see both ends of it at once. He drove between them.
He drove west on Sunday nights and east on Monday mornings. He drove back west on Fridays. The corner was running when he left and it was running when he came back because he had built it to run without requiring his constant presence with lieutenants who knew the chain with an enforcement logic that everyone on those 12 square blocks understood with consequences for shortfalls that were swift enough to stay in people’s memory.
That is a skill. he had it and the federal government spent nearly a year confirming that before they moved on him. Cooperating witnesses would later describe an operation that moved with the precision federal investigators had not expected. Positions rotated every few days. Cash separated from product. Shortfalls tracked mentally without paper. The violence was enforcement.
The organization beneath it was management. He ran both. In the years the corner ran, the money was visible in the way that money gets visible when someone has more of it than their stated income can explain. He took trips to Las Vegas. He rented party buses to celebrate the birthdays of the men who worked for him.
Federal prosecutors would later describe these as evidence of flaunting. They were right in the narrow legal sense. In the broader sense, what he was doing was what the street calls loyalty. Spending the money back down toward the people who made it and the only currency he had ever been taught to recognize as real.
He had a daughter in that culde-sac. He had a woman who worked hospital shifts helping strangers through their worst days. He had a street in Aurora where the school bus came through on schedule every morning and where nothing about the driveway announced what the driveway contained.
He did not commute as a man hiding. He commuted as a man who lived in both places fully without appearing to experience any contradiction in doing so. The culde-sac was not a cover. The corner was not a secret. The people in Aurora knew enough. The minute Pilaski and Van Beern knew enough, he was not performing two versions of himself.
He was one person who required two addresses to hold everything he was. He did not hide one from the other. He lived both. In 2002, or close to it, the timeline in the public record has a seam in it that nobody has fully explained. Dana Bostik was charged with the murder of a rival, a member of the Undertaker Vice Lords, a man from the other side of a long running territorial boundary.
A witness recanted. Bostic was convicted of first-degree murder, but the conviction was reversed one month later. The prosecutor, who would later stand up at his sentencing, wrote in her filing that even after being acquitted of murder, he did not change his behavior, that he did not start trying to lead a better life.
That is a measured sentence from a prosecutor who measured her words carefully. What it doesn’t say, what it cannot say is what a better life would have looked like for him or what direction it would have required him to move in. He kept going. The corner kept running. The drive to Aurora kept happening. Around the same time in the culdesac in Aurora, an 83year-old woman who lived across the street from him was watching.
She watched for years. She watched him carry her groceries up her front steps. She watched him tell the other men who came around his house to treat her with respect. She made a decision at some point, not a legal decision, just a human one, that she knew what he did for a living and that she also knew what he had done for her and that she was not willing to pretend that the second thing had not happened.
So, she wrote a letter to the federal judge. Her name does not appear in any public court documents or news reports. She is the only witness in this story for the proposition that Dana Bostik was kind. An old woman on his block sat down and wrote the federal judge a letter and described what she had seen. She was not wrong about what she had seen.
In the same calendar, the same period of years, the same man, Leanta Gil, a member of his operation, was short $400 on the count. Bostic came to his apartment. He had a baseball bat. He used it. The prosecutor was not wrong about what she had seen either. They coexist. The same authority that walked her groceries up the stairs, walked into Ladonna Gills apartment with a baseball bat.
The same authority that an 83y old woman trusted enough to write a federal judge about. The same authority that broke a man’s hand over $400. Megan Cunniff Church, the lead prosecutor, wrote, “Even after being acquitted of murder, he did not change his behavior. He did not start trying to lead a better life.” She was right. He did not change.
The question she did not ask was direction change would have required him to move toward what? Away from what? That question belongs to a Sunday in June 2001 and a block party and a man who was no longer alive to answer it. Three months later, August 2008, Sunday, August 17th, 2008, a birthday party at Excalibur, a nightclub on North Dearborn for an NBA player named Antoine Walker.
Also in the building was Tony Allen, also a player, also Chicago, also Westside. Tony Allen had a problem that had followed him out of a prior incident involving a New Breed’s member named Nigel ODM. There was a civil lawsuit, still alive, Tony Allen believed he still knew the face. He had the face wrong. In the bathroom at Excalibur late in the night, Allan confronted a man he recognized as Odum.
The man he believed had been snitching on him in the civil case. He was wrong about who was standing in front of him. The man in that bathroom was not Nigel Odum. The man in that bathroom was Curtis Ellis, 25 years old, Dana Bostik’s younger brother. The same younger brother who had been sent to his grandmother with Dana and Tiffany when they were children.
The same one who had grown up inside the same neighborhood, the same orbit, the same west side. He was at a birthday party in River North on a Sunday night because his older brother had brought him there. Curtis punched Tony Allen. Then they left. They walked out of Excalibur and got into Bostic’s Mercedes and they drove north and east a few blocks and parked on the northwest corner of Clark Street in Ohio outside the Rock and Roll McDonald’s at 600 North Clark.
It was approximately 4:15 in the morning. I do not know what they said to each other in that car. Nobody does. There are four hours between the punch in the bathroom and the moment the gunfire started. Four hours of a birthday party winding down, four hours of walking back through a night that had already turned wrong.
And whatever passed between the two brothers in those hours in that car, in that parking space on Clark Street is not in any record I have been able to find. That conversation belongs only to the two people who had it and only one of them is still alive. Gunfire came from outside the vehicle. Dana Bostik was hit five times.
Curtis Ellis was hit multiple times. Bostik got the car moving. He drove south through the city, five bullets in him, to Stroger Hospital on the west side to the same side of the city where both of them had grown up. He did not stop the car. He did not pull over. He drove himself. He did not call an ambulance. He drove.
Curtis Ellis died at Stroger Hospital. He was 25 years old. He had been in the wrong place because Tony Allen had confused his face for a different face. That is the whole geometry of it. a mistaken identity in a nightclub bathroom, a punch, a drive, a parking spot on Clark Street at 4:15 in the morning, and a brother who was gone before the sun came up over the west side.
Police closed part of Ohio Street to investigate. A second vehicle was suspected. The case remained open. The public record does not contain a conviction for what happened outside the McDonald’s on Clark and Ohio. It contains only this, a parked Mercedes, five bullets in the driver, the passenger seat empty by the time the car reached the hospital.
He signed himself out of Stroger Hospital before they had finished treating him. That is in the record, not as a symbol, as a fact. He was shot five times outside a McDonald’s on the north side, drove himself to a hospital on the west side, and before the hospital had completed what it was doing to him, he was gone.
That morning, Monday, August 18th, 2008, he convened the men who worked for him at an apartment on West Van Beern Street. Davis, Floyd, Gil, Moore, Bagley, Richardson. He gathered them in a room a few hours after his younger brother had died at Stroger while the police tape was still across Ohio Street while the rock and roll McDonald’s on North Clark was unlocking its doors and starting the coffee and beginning a Monday that it did not know had already been decided.
Curtis Ellis had been 25 years old. He had never seen 26. He was the same younger brother who had been sent to live with the grandmother when he was a child, who had grown up on the same blocks, who had eaten at the same tables. He was the one person in the world for whom the distance between Pilaski and Van Beern and the culde-sac in Aurora did not need to be explained.
He was the one person who had been in both places and known what both places were. He was gone. And on a Monday morning in August, in an apartment on Van Beern, his older brother had to decide what to do with that. Across the street from the McDonald’s at Fedo Irish Pub, a man named Kieran Ahern told a reporter, “It is unfortunate and very sad, but there’s nothing much to be nervous about here. It is a safe area.
” It was a safe area. It was Monday morning. The buses were running four kilometers to the west in the apartment on Van Beern. Dana Bostik was doing the only thing he had ever been given the tools to do with a grief this size. He was running the chain of command. He moved into rival territory. He came back to the apartment.
In the sentencing record compiled years later, the names appeared. Fincher, Bambi, Bud, Ramon. Four people identified in a room on the west side as the answer to what had happened at Clark, Ohio the night before. Those who were close to him have said the arithmetic of what he wanted was tied to his brother’s age. 25. I cannot confirm that the number 25 belongs to the accounts of people who knew him, not to any document with a case number on it.
What is in the federal record is David Taylor. August 21st, 2008, 3 days after the apartment meeting on Van Beern, 3 days after Curtis died at Stroger, David Taylor was killed. He had a name and the name is in the record and that name is the only thing this story can give him. Kieran Aern was right. It was a safe area three blocks east that Monday morning. Three Days.
Devon Taylor. In August of 2010, federal agents arrested Dana Bostik at a residence in Villa Park, Illinois. He had been a fugitive. He was 31 years old. According to investigators, he was taken into custody without incident. The operation that brought him in was called Operation Bird Cage. Beginning in October of 2009, the DEA built its case through wiretaps, undercover buys, cooperating witnesses, and surveillance.
Nearly 10 months of work around a 12 square block heroin market on the west side of Chicago. In February of 2012, Dana Bostik plead guilty to conspiracy to distribute heroin. He admitted the drug operation. He did not admit to ordering the killings. Among the cooperating witnesses was a man named Morris Davis. His nickname was Capone.
He had grown up on the same blocks as Boston. He had been formed by the same corner, the same post, the same chain of who taught whom, the same logic about who you owed and who owed you. For years, he had worked as an enforcer inside Boston’s operation. Capone sat down in a federal courtroom and gave extensive testimony for the government.
He described Bostik as the chief and major decision maker of the heroin operation. He described the chain of command and the mechanics from the inside because the same corner that built Bostic had built him too. The boy who learned to sail on the same stoop sat down in the witness stand and told the federal government everything he knew.
The corner did not just produce the man at the top. It produced a man who would testify against him. Morris Davis received approximately 20 years. In the same sentencing file, the same folder that the federal judge opened on August 6th, 2012 was the letter from the 83 year old woman in Aurora.
The one about the groceries. The one about the man who required the other men around his house to treat her with respect. Capone’s testimony and the old woman’s letter arrived in the same file and Judge Matthew F. Kennaly read both of them. The prosecutor, Megan Kun of Church, wrote, “Bostic controlled his territory and his organization through violence and intimidation.
Bostic’s defense attorneys wrote, he is as much a victim of society and its educational and legal systems as he is a criminal.” The judge said Boston was involved in an organization that used violence from time to time to accomplish whatever goals it thought was appropriate. None of them were wrong about what they had described.
They were describing different parts of the same man. Judge Kenny sentenced Dana Bostic to 38 years in federal prison. The verdict is not the climax of this story. The verdict is the period at the end of a sentence that had been writing itself since 1979 on the west side of Chicago in the absence of a father in the presence of a dealer with a pizza on a stoop that no longer exists.
38 years the van drove. Dana Bostik is still alive. He was initially sent to USP Pollock in Louisiana. 38 years became 30 on appeal. He has not spoken publicly about his brother. He has not spoken publicly about his daughter. The public record does not contain his voice. He is present in the documents as a name at the top of a hierarchy as a case number as 30 years.
That is what the record kept. His daughter would be in her early 20s now. Somewhere his daughter is grown. People in the neighborhood have said that for years after 2001 on the third Sunday in June, somebody was still standing in a backyard on the west side with a paper plate. There were not two men.
There was a boy who got fed on a stoop in 1987 by the only people who would feed him. There was the rest of his life. The culde-sac and the corner were the same answer to the same question. The question was who showed up? The tragedy is not that the street gave him love. The tragedy is that it taught him love and violence in the same language.
The dealer showed up with a pizza and a cardboard box on a stoop on the west side. The boy learned. The boy learned all the way down to the bone.
