On October 14th, 1978, a correctional officer came to Benny Lee Sell and told him he was being transferred to another institution. Lee stepped out, got shackled, and was led to a Cook County Sheriff’s bus. When he climbed on and looked down the aisle, he recognized every single face staring back at him.
Larry Hoover, then the most powerful gang figure inside the entire Illinois prison system. Ike Taylor, Albert Jackson, Joe Smith. Every dominant gang chief who had been housed at Pontiac Correctional Center was on that bus. Lee looked around and understood exactly what was happening. They were not being moved for administrative reasons.
They were being transported to death row at Stateville Correctional Center, and the state of Illinois intended to execute every last one of them. He was 24 years old. Three months earlier, on a hot Saturday morning in July, a riot had torn through Pontiac Correctional Center and killed three guards.
Lieutenant William Nelson Thomas, 49 years old from Saunemin, Illinois. Correctional Officer Robert J. Conkle, 22, two months on the job, an Army veteran from Graymont. Correctional Officer Stanley Cole, 47, from Pontiac itself. Three men went to work that Saturday and didn’t come home. The state needed someone to answer for those deaths, and the most efficient answer available was the men on that bus.
The recognized chiefs of every major Black Street organization inside the Illinois Department of Corrections. Together, they would be charged with 15 counts of murder, two counts of attempted murder, and mob action. Together, prosecutors called it the largest civilian death penalty case in American history, and they would beat every single charge.
But to understand what happened inside Pontiac, why the state’s case collapsed the way it did, and why a riot that took three lives produced zero convictions, you have to start somewhere else entirely. You have to start on a Friday night in the summer of 1967 at a church on the west side of Chicago where 13-year-old kid walked in with no name for his crew and walked out as the youngest chief in Vice Lord history.
Because the riot at Pontiac in 1978 and the boy who stood in that church in 1967 were not separate stories. They were the same story running on the same rail all the way from a corner in Austin to death row at Stateville. Chicago in 1963 when Benny Lee’s family arrived from Cleveland was a city mid transformation.
His mother was from Kosciusko, Mississippi, the same small town that produced Oprah Winfrey’s mother. His father had gone ahead to Painesville, Ohio, secured work, and eventually moved the family to the K-Town section of Chicago’s west side when Benny was 9 years old. By 1966, the Lees had pushed further west to the corner of Cicero and Jackson in South Austin, among the first black families to integrate that part of the neighborhood.
The reception was what integration looked like in Chicago in 1966. Fights on the way to school, confrontations at the pool, and the steady daily pressure of a white community that had organized itself to push back against every black family that moved in. To get to Columbus Park at 5500 West, Lee and his friends fought their way through white blocks going and fought their way back.
They did it often enough that the older Vice Lord sets in the neighborhood took notice. The Cicero Vice Lords, led by a Golden Glove boxer named Freddy Py, recognized what Lee’s group of boys had built. Loyalty, toughness, and enough collective organization to hold a block against kids twice their age.
In the street world of the West Side of 1967, that combination was worth folding into the broader structure. They summoned the Lee and his crew to a meeting at Mandell United Methodist Church on Lavergne and Congress. Lee’s group hadn’t even given themselves a name yet. They hadn’t thought of themselves as a gang, just as a crew of boys from the same few blocks who watched each other’s backs.
At that meeting, Troy Martin looked at how Lee’s boys had been holding their corner against white kids in the neighborhood and made a suggestion. Since they were fighting out there like Geronimo’s people, like Apache warriors taking on the settlers, they might as well call themselves the Apaches. That’s how the Apache Vice Lords got their name.
One man’s analogy at a church meeting on a Friday night in the summer of 1967. Benny Lee was recorded as the youngest recognized chief in the Vice Lord Nation that evening at 13 years old. The Apache Vice Lords planted their flag around Gladys Avenue and Lavergne Avenue in South Austin. And from that summer forward, the trajectory of Lee’s life was set.
Not because he chose it with any particular awareness of where it was leading, but because at 13, you don’t yet know the difference between the beginning of a story and the rail it’s going to run on for the next 30 years. A chief at 13, an organization at its peak. The Vice Lords that Benny Lee joined in 1967 were not a static organization.
They had been founded in 1957 inside the Illinois State Training School for boys in St. Charles by a group of young black men from North Lawndale led by Edwin Peppelo Perry. Perry and his co-founders had organized inside the facility, carried their structure back to the streets when they were released, and planted their flag at 16th and Lawndale in North Lawndale.
By 1964, the eight original Vice Lord factions had voted to rebrand as the Conservative Vice Lords. A name chosen to signal self-discipline and cohesion among the sets. Bobby Gore, born Frederick Douglass Gore, had joined in 1958, risen to the organization’s public face by the mid-1960s, and was already steering the CVL towards something far more ambitious than straight street activity by the time Lee’s family moved to Austin.
What Lee stepped into at 13 was a street organization in the middle of attempting something that had rarely been tried by a group like them. They were going legitimate. In September 1967, with support from Alderman George Collins and Peace Corps veteran David Dawley, the CVL incorporated as a non-profit, Conservative Vice Lords Incorporated, with Alonzo “Big Al” Allfoot as president and Bobby Gore as spokesman.
They secured an initial grant from the Rockefeller Foundation and built a portfolio of businesses and programs along the 3700 block of West 16th Street in North Lawndale, Teen Town, a restaurant and ice cream parlor on the northwest corner of 16th and Lawndale that opened on April 4th, 1968, the same day Martin Luther King Jr.
was assassinated. An Afrocentric boutique called the African Lion selling dashikis, Afro picks, and jewelry. Two House of Lords recreation centers. An art gallery called Art and Soul built in partnership with the Museum of Contemporary Art and the University of Illinois at Chicago. They ran tenant rights advocacy.
When a landlord illegally evicted a black family, the Vice Lords put the furniture back and took the landlord to court. They had no defeats. They organized summer jobs, a beautification grant to grow grass in the neighborhood, and eventually produced a glossy annual report called Report to the Public that went out to white funders across the city.
Sears and Roebuck became the Vice Lords fiscal agent because they didn’t yet have a 501. Western Electric, Motorola, and Zenith hired Vice Lord members as apprentices. The political context surrounding all of it was as important as the money. Illinois Black Panther Party Chairman Fred Hampton had reached out to the leadership of the three major black street organizations, the Vice Lords, the Blackstone Rangers, and the Gangster Disciples, and brokered a cross-gang coalition called LSD, Lords, Stones, and Disciples. They shut down construction
sites that refused to hire black workers. The Vice Lords picketed the building of the University of Illinois Chicago campus. They went south to help the Stones shut down expansion at the University of Chicago. The Disciples got two community centers. The Stones got two. The gangs weren’t simply participating in in civil rights movement.
They had moved past it into the black power era using organizational muscle to win economic concessions that marching alone hadn’t delivered. Warner Saunders, then a news anchor at WGN, mediated a meeting between the Vice Lords and the Black Panthers when friction over Panther literature started circulating among the younger Vice Lord membership.
The two organizations sat down and realized they were running parallel programs. The Vice Lords had their own breakfast programs by then, their own community events. The distance between kill the pig and we’re going to shut down this construction site was smaller than it looked. That potential alarmed Mayor Richard J.
Daley and the FBI’s COINTELPRO operation simultaneously. Daley had come up through the Hamburg Athletic Club, an Irish street organization in Bridgeport, and he recognized exactly what the black street organizations were building. He also recognized it as a threat to his machine. Senator John McClellan’s congressional hearings in 1968 and 1969 put federal funding to Chicago gang organizations under national scrutiny.
COINTELPRO worked the individual leaders. Bobby Gore was arrested for murder outside an Ogden Avenue tavern in November 1969. The prosecution, in Lee’s telling and in the telling of most gang historians, grew out of the same political targeting that took down Hampton. Big Al Allfort suffered a stroke and was incapacitated.
The Rockefeller Foundation withdrew its funding after congressional pressure. By the early 1970s, the CVL’s entire legitimate front infrastructure was shuttered and a generation of young West Side leaders, many of them teenagers like Lee when the community organization period had begun, funneled directly into the Illinois prison system.
As Lee put it in his talk to the Chicago Gang History Project in 2002, Daley’s attack on street gangs led to discontinued appropriation of funds for the programs they started. So, you saw a large number of arrests and eventually convictions. This was the first time in the history of Illinois Department of Corrections history that they were faced with a large population of African-American street gangs.
The music shifted, too. He has talked about this at length. The movement music of James Brown and the Impressions got replaced on the radio by Superfly and platform shoes and a culture of hustling. The consciousness that had been building through the late 1960s got redirected. And the leaders who might have held that consciousness together were behind the wall.
Lee’s own adolescence ran inside all of that context. His criminal activity, as he has described it across dozens of interviews, was picking pockets, shoplifting, and small armed robberies, not drug distribution, though the Apache and later Insane Vice Lord organization around him was deeply involved in the heroin trade that ran up Cicero Avenue through a pipeline connected to Mexican cartels after 1971.
After 1971, Anthony Harris, King Asad Shabazz or AJ, introduced the Insane branch concept and the Apaches reorganized as the Insane Vice Lords, with Lee remaining as chief of his cell. Sister groups across Madison Street became the Four Corner Hustlers. A Columbus Park area group became the Central Insane Vice Lords.
Lee rose through what gang sources called the same gang, the umbrella coordinating all the insane factions, and eventually achieved top leadership within the prison-based Almighty Vice Lord Nation. That rank was the specific reason he would end up on the bus to death row in October 1978. Within the growing Insane Vice Lord structure, Lee’s reputation was that of a fighter and an organizer rather than a primary drug trafficker.
The Chicago gang history site notes a gun battle on Christmas Eve 1970 in which two Apache Vice Lords robbed a person of welfare checks, were cornered by Chicago police, and were both killed, documented in a December 25th, 1970 newspaper clipping. That was the environment around him. Lee himself went to the Illinois State Training School for Boys at St.
Charles, the same facility where the Vice Lords had been founded after being suspended from Austin High School in 1968 during a fight in which, he has said, “Four white guys tried to come in the classroom on me.” The school identified Lee as the ringleader and suspended the black students collectively, citing his status as Vice Lord Chief.
He served roughly 2 years at St. Charles and spent the years following in a pattern of short county jail stints and street activity. By his own count, he had been in and out of custody since the age of 15. The conviction that sent him to Pontiac came from a 1975 scheme that combined stupidity with ambition in equal parts.
Lee and his crew had stolen CB radios from a store and sold them to a fence, then decided to go back and rob the same CB radios from the same fence a second time. The police caught him in the act. During the arrest, he was beaten so severely that he required 27 stitches. He was convicted of armed robbery, burglary, and unlawful use of a weapon, sent first to Stateville, and eventually transferred to Pontiac Correctional Center, where he was housed when July 22nd, 1978 arrived.
He was still in his early 20s doing time for a robbery in a maximum security prison that held nearly twice its designed population. And because of his rank inside the Vice Lord Nation’s prison structure, he was not an anonymous face in the crowd. He was one of the men the administration and the gang intelligence apparatus watched.
The prison at a breaking point, Pontiac Correctional Center, sits at 700 West Lincoln Street in Pontiac, Illinois, about 100 mi southwest of Chicago, in a town of roughly 11,000 people that serves as the county seat of Livingston County. The facility opened in 1871 as the Illinois Reform School for boys, was reclassified and expanded over decades, and by 1978 was a maximum security adult prison with a walled compound running directly adjacent to quiet residential streets.
Elizabeth Brewer, Armstrong, then 11 years old, watched the riot from her living room window across the street. That proximity, a maximum security prison looking directly into suburban front yards, gave the events of July 22nd their particular suffocating texture for the people who live there. The late 1970s population at Pontiac was a direct product of the collapse of the legitimate front period on Chicago streets and the concurrent wave of arrests and convictions Daley’s political campaign had set in
motion. The cell houses had been designed to hold approximately 600 inmates. By July 1978, the prison was housing somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 men depending on whether you include the full compound or only the cell houses. Even the lower estimate is nearly double the design capacity.
The cell houses had no air conditioning. The Illinois summer heat that year was real and relentless. The Illinois Department of Corrections had been aware this was coming. Governor James Thompson would tell reporters on the day of the riot itself that this riot is a year late. We expected a potential riot due to the overcrowded conditions.
The Corrections Director, Charles Rowe, said the same thing publicly on the day it happened. Inside the walls, the population was organized along the exact same fault lines as the streets of Chicago. Larry Hoover, then 30 years old, serving a 150 to 200 year sentence for the 1973 murder of William “Pooky” Young, was widely understood within I DOC as the single most influential gang figure in the system.
The various Vice Lord branches, Conservative, Insane, Unknown, Cobra, held their own ground in the cell houses. The Black P. Stone Rangers and the emergent El Rukns operated under Jeff Fort’s structure. The Black Souls, the Latin Kings, the Black Gangster Organization, smaller sets that had crystallized in the late 1960s, all of them were present, all organized, all running the same hierarchies they had run on the outside.
Where the white gangs had once dominated the Illinois prison system, the incoming generation of black street organization members was more organized and more numerous, and the administration had never fully adapted to that shift. The result was a permanent low-grade friction that occasionally broke into outright violence. On April 23rd, 1973, a mess hall brawl involving roughly 100 Pontiac inmates armed with homemade knives, cleaning utensils, and metal trays left two men stabbed to death, suppressed only by tear gas.
The new African Prisoners Organization, N A P had been circulating warnings about conditions and tensions through his newsletter, The Fuse, in the months leading up to July 1978. The most immediate spark came on the night before the riot when an inmate was stabbed to death in a narcotics dispute between members of rival Chicago street organizations.
By the time breakfast was served on Saturday morning, July 22nd, the yard was already running hot. Lee’s own account of that morning describes the tension building in visible stages. Men making confrontational remarks in the meal line, officers noticing something was wrong, and making a fateful decision to send the column of prisoners straight to the yard rather than letting them eat in the dining hall first.
On the yard, the confrontation that had been building between rival factions began to shift. Joe Smith, then the head of the Black Souls at Pontiac, made a remark that reframed the whole morning. The conditions they were all living under were the source of the tension, and they should be directing that energy at the administration instead of at each other.
Men were already wound past the point of de-escalation. As the column walked back from the yard to the north cellhouse, Ike Taylor of the Gangster Disciples reportedly said, “Don’t let them close that door.” They rushed it. At approximately 9:45 a.m., as a column of roughly 600 inmates was being moved from the recreational yard back into the north cellhouse, a group of prisoners armed with shanks and a screwdriver broke from the line and charged the guards on the cellhouse floor. The guards were overrun
within minutes. By 10:10 a.m., Officer Robert Conkle had been stabbed multiple times and was pronounced dead on arrival at St. James Hospital in Pontiac. He was supposed to be best man at a colleague’s wedding the following week. At 10:50 a.m., Lieutenant William Nelson Thomas died in the emergency room, stabbed multiple times with a shank.
At 12:12 p.m., Officer Stanley Cole was pronounced dead, stabbed with a screwdriver. Three more guards, Danny Dill, Dale Walker, and Sharon Patchett were seriously wounded. Lee himself ended the day with a shank straight through his arm, caught in the chaotic press of bodies during the initial rush into the cellhouse.
By 10:15 a.m., reinforcements from the Pontiac Police, the Livingston County Sheriff’s Department, and the Illinois State Police had arrived and eight rounds of tear gas hit the yard. By 10:30, inmates had set fire to the laundry, the clothing room, the general store, and the prison chapel. Smoke rose over the walls into the surrounding streets while Pontiac Fire Department fighters worked the chapel fire from outside the perimeter.
Property damage was later estimated at 3 to 4 million dollars. The active violence lasted roughly 5 hours. State troopers with shotguns began returning prisoners to cells in groups of 25 to 50. The 9:00 p.m. count was the first complete one of the day and then the deadlock began, a condition that lasted from July 22nd through mid-October.
Prisoners were not permitted to leave their cells for any reason. Meals were brought to the cell. All work and recreation were canceled. Family visits were suspended until October 14th. Phone calls home were prohibited until September 30th. Showers were denied until October. State and federal investigators interrogated every inmate during those months.
Two men to a cell the size of the average bathroom 24 hours a day for the better part of 3 months. When officials finally conducted the weapons shakedown in early October, they ordered every prisoner to strip in the yard and left the clothing outside over the weekend. It rained. Whatever physical evidence had existed in the fabric of those clothes dissolved in the rain and with it went any scientific basis for linking a specific person to any specific act of violence on July 22nd.
The prosecution that followed would have to be built entirely on the word of other prisoners. That was the foundation on which the state of Illinois decided to seek the death penalty for 17 men. 17 men, one electric chair. The indictments came down on August 19, 1979, a date Lee remembers precisely because it was the moment the full shape of what was being built against them locked into place.
17 prisoners, all black, were named on a uniform slate of charges. 15 counts of murder, three guards, five overlapping theories of liability per guard, including direct, accomplice, and felony murder counts. Two counts of attempted murder, and one count of mob action. The Pontiac Prisoners Support Coalition documented that across the full scope of the investigation, 31 men were indicted for riot-related offenses.
28 black and three Latino, and 16 of them faced a total of 200 charges, any one of which could have sent them to the electric chair. Livingston County State’s Attorney C. David Vogel led the prosecution. Thomas Breen served as special prosecutor. The case was correctly described in wire dispatches at the time as the largest civilian death penalty case in American history, and later compared by historians to the Scottsboro Boys prosecutions of the 1930s.
The roster of the Pontiac 17 read like a directory of Chicago’s prison gang leadership. Larry Hoover, 30 years old, already serving 150 to 200 years, the undisputed chief of the Gangster Disciples. Ike Taylor, King Ike, identified in Black Disciple oral tradition as the founder of the GDs on Chicago’s West Side, also 30.
Albert Omega Jackson, affiliated with the Black P. Stone Rangers and black nationalist politics, 27. Ernest Smokey El Jackson of the El Rukns, Joe Smith and Angelo Robinson of the Black Souls, Steven Tuffy Mars of the Unknown Vice Lords, Ronnie Newby, identified in gang tradition as the son of a figure known as Boonie the Don Black.
Jesse Hill of the Gangster Disciples. And Benny Lee, listed as Apache ViceLord and Insane ViceLord, among the highest ranking ViceLord representatives in the Illinois system. The prosecution’s theory of Lee’s individual liability was conspiracy and accomplice liability. That as a high-ranking leader, he had helped organize or direct the attack on the guards.
The problem was that the prosecution couldn’t place him at the scene of any specific killing. They couldn’t place most of the 17 at any specific killing. The physical evidence was gone. Dissolved in the rain that fell on the clothing yard over the shakedown weekend in October 1978. What the state had instead were witnesses it had built out of the deadlocked interrogations, developed through a process that would become one of the most politically damaging aspects of the eventual trial.
PPSC documents and a Chicago Tribune story from May 29th, 1980 headlined “Death Penalty Threat Used in Probe of Riot at Pontiac” documented that the state had paid more than $75,000 to witnesses by that point and that reluctant witnesses had been threatened with the electric chair if they refused to cooperate.
The key cooperator was Angelo Robinson, one of the original 17 defendants who accepted immunity in exchange for his testimony and became the prosecution’s most critical witness. Robinson’s account identified Albert Jackson as having kicked Officer Conkle and stabbed Officer Dill. Under cross-examination, Robinson made a concession that the defense worked hard to make sure the jury heard.
I’m guilty of some things in this case. I feel guilty of the murders of the officers. I was involved. A second defense witness, Ahmad Shafiq, testified that Robinson had told him while at Cook County Jail that the 10 men on trial were not responsible for the murders. Guard Danny Dills’ identification of his attacker was undermined when Captain Richard J.
Harder testified that Dill had originally named an inmate called Rufus Tyson, not any of the defendants, as the man who had attacked him. While the legal machinery ground forward through pretrial motions and the long process of a change of venue hearing won by the defense in June 1979 after they documented that any Livingston County jury would inevitably include the family and friends of the deceased guards.
The political situation around the case was building its own momentum. The defendants had been transferred to death row at Stateville in October 1978, housed under conditions matching those of men awaiting execution, single cells, restricted movement, segregated from each other. And then Minister Louis Farrakhan came to visit them.
The visit was rare because it required bringing the defendants together, men from organizations that had spent years in active conflict on the streets and inside the prisons. Farrakhan’s message, as Lee has quoted it in every major interview for more than 20 years, was direct. The conspiracy is not at this time in the courtroom.
The conspiracy happened over 400 years ago during slavery. As leaders of different gangs, you look at each other as opposition. It is with this division that you have lost the trial already. Out of that visit and out of the ongoing organizing work of NAAPO inside the walls, the 17 defendants built something.
They called themselves Brothers of the Struggle. Every letter home ended with the initials BOS. They formed committees, political, communication, fundraising. Lee oversaw the communication committee. That name, Brothers of the Struggle, would later be adopted in a very different form by Larry Hoover and the Gangster Disciples in their 1980s reorganization as Growth and Development.
But the original BOS was the Pontiac defendants, Vice Lords, Gangster Disciples, Black Peace Stones, Black Souls, El Rukns, holding together against the prosecution that was counting on exactly the opposite. Outside the walls, the Pontiac Prisoners Support Coalition ran full-page ads in the Chicago Tribune. Comedian and activist Dick Gregory held fundraisers for the legal defense.
The coalition produced a 93-slide educational presentation, ran a defense newsletter for 16 issues between October 1978 and September 1981, and documented the bribery and threats in materials that would eventually become central to the defense’s trial strategy. The New York Times ran a major retrospective in October 1980.
Two years after Illinois prison riot, tension and doubt unresolved, before the trial had even finished jury selection. The case had become, in the language of his defenders, the largest political prosecution of black people in the post-civil rights era. Prosecutors chose what they considered their 10 strongest cases for the first trial and severed the rest. Lee was in that first group.
Larry Hoover, Ike Taylor, John Bailey, Anthony Gilberry, Robert Harris, and William Ozzy were set aside for a second trial that would never happen. Two members of that second group, Jesse Hill and Ronnie Newby, demanded to be tried alongside the first cohort, which made it the Pontiac 10.
Five months of jury selection began in September 1980. The six-man, six-woman jury was seated under Sangamon County Circuit Judge Benjamin K. Miller. 11 weeks of testimony began in early 1981. 10 men, 15 counts of murder each, the electric chair on the other end of a guilty verdict, and a prosecution whose entire case was built on witnesses who had been paid and threatened into cooperation, with no physical evidence behind them.
The trial, the acquittal, and the door that finally opened. The state’s case began to crack in front of the jury almost immediately. Judge Miller granted a directed verdict acquitting Albert Jackson on 14 of the 15 murder counts mid-trial on the grounds that Jackson had been mentioned only once during the entire body of testimony.
Two witnesses scheduled to testify against Jackson had given the defense videotaped statements repudiating their grand jury testimony before they ever took the stand. That collapse happened in front of the same jury that would decide the fate of the other nine defendants, and its message about the quality of the state’s evidence was unavoidable.
The state’s key witness, Angelo Robinson, had undermined his own account under cross-examination. Guard Danny Dills’ identification had been directly contradicted by his own superior officer. The prosecution couldn’t put a specific weapon in a specific hand because the rain that fell on the Pontiac clothing yard in October 1978 had made that impossible.
The six man, six woman jury acquitted all 10 defendants on all of the most serious charges in May 1981. 11 weeks of testimony and zero convictions. Benny Lee had spent three years on death row at Stateville waiting for a trial that finally delivered a verdict of not guilty. On June 1st, 1981, State’s Attorney C.
David Vogel and Special Prosecutor Thomas Breen announced that all charges were being dropped against the remaining six defendants. Larry Hoover, John Bailey, Anthony Gilberry, Robert Harris, William Ozzy, and Ike Taylor. Vogel’s stated reason was blunt. The problem was the lack of hard evidence and the necessity of relying on the testimony of inmates and former inmates.
And the problem from the first trial could not be overcome in a second. A cheer went up in the courtroom. Larry Hoover’s mother, Odell, told reporters, “It is all over and I thank God. It almost put me in my grave.” William Ozzy and Anthony Gilberry were freed in court that day. Hoover remained in prison on his original underlying conviction.
None of the 17 was ever convicted of the murders of Officers Thomas, Cole, or Conkle. The three guards’ deaths never legally attributed to anyone. Lee’s release did not come the day the verdict was read. His underlying sentence for the 1975 CB radio robbery had technically expired in November 1980, but the state claimed he had forfeited a year of good time and a year of C grade during the riots aftermath and returned him to Joliet for an additional year.
Lee, who had spent 3 years on death row learning how to read the law, challenged the determination. He was released on June 5th, 1981. He was 27 years old with half a year of high school behind him, no driver’s license, no social security card, no employment history, and no preparation for the civilian life waiting on the other side of the gate.
The first months were not a clean break. By his own account, he was unprepared for everything, the paperwork, the job applications, the basic bureaucratic mechanics of existing as a free person after nearly a decade moving in and out of institutions. He drifted back toward street activity and was back in custody before long.
At Stateville again, placed in segregation, the previous occupant of his cell had left a copy of the autobiography of Malcolm X on the bed. Lee threw it in the corner. About a month into segregation, with nothing else to read, he picked it up. He turned to the page where Malcolm had grown frustrated trying to read a book, put it down, and started reading the dictionary instead from A to Z.
That image, a man refusing to let illiteracy be permanent, turning frustration into method, stopped Lee. He called down the gallery and asked for a dictionary. He started reading. When he came out of segregation, the framework he was working with had shifted. The streets had wanted him to be a certain kind of man.
Malcolm had modeled another kind. He dropped his Vice Lord flag formally during that period, though his full public disavowal came later, around 1989, after the broader collapse of the Insane Vice Lords into Troy Martin’s reorganization as the Mafia Insane Vice Lords. Lee walked out of Stateville after that stint with a different orientation, enough to begin telling the younger men around him that the Vice Lords were supposed to be an organization, not just a gang, and that spending their 20s behind the wall was not the
mission. He ran into resistance from the older guard who still wanted to run things the old way. For 3 months at Stateville, Lee pulled himself off count entirely, no rank, no affiliation, a neutron in the system, before eventually being pulled into drug rehabilitation. The process was slow, and it was not linear, but the direction was set.
His final arrest came in 1984. A judge, rather than returning him to the Department of Corrections, diverted him to Treatment Alternatives for Safe Communities, TASK. He completed the TASK program that year and did not look back. 1984 was the last year of his gang life and the beginning of his recovery from a heroin addiction he had been carrying through most of his adult life.
He trained as a substance abuse counselor through the Gateway Foundation and began working in Evanston, Illinois, where he found he could connect with clients who had served time in a way nobody without that background could. He earned a GED, then a bachelor’s degree, then a master’s degree in education from Northeastern Illinois University.
The university asked him to join the adjunct faculty. The first class they gave him to teach was the history of Chicago street gangs. He has taught at Chicago State University in criminal justice as well. The Illinois Alcohol and Other Drug Abuse Professional Certification Association named him professional of the year.
The US Department of Justice recognized him in 2004 through its Project Safe Neighborhoods program. He has presented internationally in Israel, across Africa, across the United States. The work that defines his public legacy now is the re-entry circle model he built back in Austin. Lee opened a storefront on Chicago Avenue, filled it with chairs donated by local churches, and started holding Saturday morning meetings for formerly incarcerated people and their families.
No professional distance, no clinical framework, just people who had been through it sitting in a circle sharing what they knew. The closing ritual, each participant takes the next person’s hand and says, “With your hand in my hand, together we can make it.” Out of that circle work, Lee and Bobby Gore, the same Bobby Gore who had been the CVL’s public spokesman in the late 1960s and who refused to return to Vice Lord leadership after his 1979 release, co-founded the National Alliance for the empowerment of the
formerly incarcerated. Lee has served as its CEO. The closing ritual of the Saturday circle has been reproduced across Chicago re-entry programming. What Pontiac left behind. Every year, the surviving members of the Pontiac 10 hold a reunion. In 2016, they gathered at a South Side Church to mark the passing of Jesse Hill, a Gangster Disciple who had demanded to be tried with the first group and been acquitted alongside Lee.
Ike Taylor opened that meeting by saying, “Hello everybody. My name is Ike Taylor and I am and will always be one of the Pontiac Brothers.” The reverend who had ministered to them on death row at Stateville decades earlier, Mary Lucas, told the assembled men, “They really came to love each other as heads of all the existing gangs and there was a oneness that developed and changed those men.
” What that room held, former chiefs of organizations that had spent decades in violent conflict sitting together in a church pew to remember one of their own, is not something that fits neatly into any of the frames that get applied to Chicago gang history. What they carry from Pontiac is not simple and none of them have ever described it as simple.
Three guards died on July 22nd, 1978 and nobody was ever convicted of killing them. That fact sits at the center of this story and it does not resolve cleanly from any direction. The families of William Thomas, Robert Conkle, and Stanley Cole absorbed a loss that the legal system formally attributed to no one.
The trial cost $2.8 million and produced zero convictions. The charges were dropped on June 1st, 1981. The prison system that created the conditions for the riot continued to exist, continued to overcrowd, continued to warehouse people in spaces designed for half the bodies it held. The 1978 Pontiac riot occupies a specific place in the arc of American prison uprisings.
It came 7 years after the September 1971 Attica rebellion in New York in which 33 inmates and 10 hostages were killed in just under 2 years before the February 1980 New Mexico State Penitentiary riot, the most violent in US history, in which 33 inmates were killed by other inmates, but no guards died.
Pontiac sits between those two events and is unique. No inmates were killed on the day of the riot itself, but three guards were and the aftermath unleashed the largest civilian death penalty prosecution in American history. Historian Dan Berger has located the Pontiac brothers acquittal at the hinge between the radical prison movement of the early 1970s and the politics of mass incarceration that hardened under Reagan in the 1980s, describing the 1981 verdict as a major victory won at the precise moment when
the anti-left, anti-black backlash of the Reagan years was coming into full effect. A victory that cost 3 years on death row, produced no reforms to the conditions that had made the riot inevitable, and left three families in Livingston County without husbands and fathers. Illinois had reinstated the death penalty in 1977, the year before the Pontiac riot, following the Supreme Court’s 1972 Furman versus Georgia decision that had invalidated existing capital statutes.
The Pontiac case became one of the first major test of the new statute and the defense’s success at producing acquittals was an early signal that Illinois’s capital system would have a deeply difficult evidentiary path in cases built on jailhouse informant testimony. That exact pattern, paid witnesses, threats, no physical evidence, unreliable cooperators would reappear throughout the wrongful conviction scandals of the 1990s, eventually persuading Governor George Ryan to impose a moratorium on executions in
2000 and to commute all 167 death sentences in Illinois on January 11th, 2003. Between the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1977 and its abolition in 2011, Illinois exonerated 19 men from death row and executed 12. None of the Pontiac 17 was among either group. They had been off death row since 1981.
But the political and legal infrastructure that produced that eventual abolition rested in part on case histories of which Pontiac was a foundational chapter. The Brothers of the Struggle defense constructed the defendants built in pre-trial confinement eventually became the framework that Larry Hoover attempted to use to reorganize the Gangster Disciples in the late 1980s under the growth and development banner.
Hoover called Lee in 1993 when the Urban Peace Summit was bringing street organization representatives from around the country and asked him to attend despite the fact that Lee had been out of gang life for nearly a decade. Lee went. Later, when Hoover was transferred to federal custody in 1997, Lee testified at his federal trial.
When Hoover’s mother passed, Hoover’s wife, Wendy, contacted Lee and asked him to speak at the funeral on Hoover’s behalf since Hoover couldn’t be there. That relationship, two men from opposite organizations forged in 3 years of shared crisis on death row, carried forward across radically different paths, is the human face of what the Pontiac case actually produced between the people it touched.
Lee has been asked what the case meant across 40 years of public storytelling and his answer has been consistent every time. He told the Chicago Gang History Project in 2002 that the same structural conditions that produced the riot at Pontiac, overcrowding, racism, deprivation, the total absence of investment in black West Side communities are the conditions that continue to produce shootings on the streets of Austin, Lawndale, and Garfield Park.
The prison didn’t create those conditions. It reproduced them, then released men back into the communities they came from without any of the tools necessary to live differently. His argument to the Stateville Warden in that town hall meeting inside the cell house, the one that got him thrown into segregation, and eventually led to him finding Malcolm X on a cell bed was simple.
“We are here because we come from marginalized communities with limited access to employment and education. Now that we’re here, you’re going to continue this crap?” That same argument, developed across four decades of re-entry work and academic teaching, eventually carried Lee to Washington. The Congressional Black Caucus held a hearing on re-entry and criminal records and Congressman Danny Davis brought Lee to Capitol Hill to testify for three days.
What Lee told Congress was blunt. The Second Chance Act had taken 21 years to pass. In Illinois, there were approximately 110 professional licenses a convicted person could not apply for, regardless of how long ago the conviction occurred or what that person had done since. If society genuinely believed people had paid their debt, then the 13th Amendment’s carve out, the clause that makes involuntary servitude constitutional unless otherwise convicted of a crime, needed to be reckoned with.
The debt, he told them, was a myth, written nowhere enforceable forever, built on the same constitutional logic that had made 3/5 citizenship possible. He also co-curated with Bobby Gore the Jane Addams Hull House Museum’s traveling exhibition Report to the Public: An Untold History of the Conservative Vice Lords, which toured Chicago, Milwaukee, Memphis, Jackson, Israel, and parts of West Africa.
The exhibition took its title from the glossy annual report the CVL had produced for white funders during the 1967 to 1969 community organization period. The same period that Daley and McLennan’s hearings had destroyed. Displaying it in a museum 40 years later was not a rehabilitation of the Vice Lord gang.
It was a documentation of what had actually happened. That a group of young men from North Lawndale had built something real, that the political establishment had identified it as a threat and dismantled it, and that the wave of arrests and incarcerations that followed was not accidental.
The exhibition closed on January 25th, 2009 with Lee as its public face. In the Slate Placemakers podcast in 2016 speaking about reentry and the debt that convicted people are told they’ve paid, Lee said, “If you believe you paid your debt to society, then why is it that people can still deny you employment and housing and education because of your conviction? Then the debt really ain’t been paid.
He told Mayor Rahm Emanuel in 2018 in a conversation for the city’s Chicago Stories podcast. The strongest part of me now is this 5-year-old grandson I got. Clifton Boonie Mack Mcfowler, one of the regulars at Lee’s Saturday Reentry Circles, spent nearly 28 years in prison for first-degree murder.
He sits in those circles on Saturday mornings and shares his experience the same way Lee shares his. The man who became the youngest chief in Vice Lord history at 13, who spent 3 years on death row at 24, who came home with half a year of high school and went back to prison before finally finding the door out in 1984, has been a college professor and community organizer for longer now than he spent in any of the institutions that tried to define his life.
He was inducted into the Apache Vice Lords in a church on a Friday night in the summer of 1967. He still works out of a building in Austin. The circle still closes the same way it always has. Each person takes the next person’s hand. They say, “With your hand in my hand, together we can make it.
” The question Bennie Lee has never pretended to have a clean answer for, and that the Pontiac case has never settled, is whether the conditions that put three guards in the ground in 1978 and 17 men on a bus to death row have actually changed. The cell houses at Pontiac were designed for 600. The American prison system today holds more than 2 million people.
The math is what it is. And Lee, who has spent four decades building something inside that reality, will be the first person in that circle to tell you he knows it.
