The night of June 14th, 1981, 43rd Street, Chicago’s South Side, the El Rukns came armed. Prosecutors later said the attack was meant to send a clear message. One gun fired too early. Willie Bibbs died around midnight. The man who stepped into his position, chief of the Titanic Stones, was named Robert East. They called him Button.
His name would later appear in a federal indictment as one of the intended targets of 175 count RICO case filed as US versus Andrews, naming 38 defendants. Buried in it, six men the El Rukns had decided needed to die. June 14th was supposed to be the night they crossed off most of them. Here are the names: Eugene Hairston, George Thomas, Barnett Hall, Ray East, Robert East, Willie Bibbs. Read them slowly.
The name most people know is the first name on the list, Eugene Bull Hairston, the man who co-founded the Blackstone Rangers and built the organization that Jeff Fort eventually took for himself. The name most people have never heard is the one near the bottom, Robert East, Button. He knew what side he was on.
He knew what it had already cost Hairston to refuse. He ran the Titanic Stones for several more years on that corner. He was still there when two more of those names got crossed off. He was still there when someone tried to get to a third and killed a woman named Charmaine Nathan instead because she was in the way.
He was still there, six names. The paper ended in a federal courthouse. The damage didn’t. His name was Eugene Hairston. They called him Bull. And if you want to understand why Button East did what he did, you have to start with him. Hairston and Jeff Fort met at a reform school in St.
Charles, Illinois around 1959. They came back to Chicago and built the Blackstone Rangers on Blackstone Avenue in Woodlawn. 5,000 members by the mid-60s. 21 South Side gangs under one name. Hairston built it. Fort was number two. Then in 1968, Hairston was convicted of soliciting murder and sent to prison. Fort inherited everything.
The members, the territory, the name, the relationships, the power. Every phone call Hairston had made, every handshake, every arrangement. While Hairston was locked in a cell, Fort got the organization. Hairston got the prison sentence. Button East chose Hairston. Can’t tell you exactly when Button East came into Hairston’s orbit.
The record doesn’t say the specific personal history between the two of them isn’t there. What the record does say is that by the time Fort returned from Leavenworth in 1976 with a new name, a new theology, and a new demand convert or become an enemy, Button East was on the Hairston side. He didn’t convert. He stayed.
That choice is the entire documentary. Not the organizational structure of the Black P Stone Nation or the El Rukns. Those are the walls of the world. Button East lived in, not the subject of this video, Button East watched another man get outmaneuvered, watched him lose everything he had built to the very person he had built it with, and attached himself to the losing side anyway.
And never let go. Eugene Hairston, the first name on the list. Now, you know why before Fort even got out of prison, someone tried to kill Hairston. 1975, a shooting at 70th and Paxton. Multiple shots. Hairston ran bleeding into a laundromat on 71st Street. He survived, but in East knew about this. Hold that for a second.
Fort doesn’t come home until 1976. The demand to convert that still a year away, and someone is already trying to kill Hairston. Button East is watching this happen. He sees what that does to a man. He sees Hairston survive, and he stays on Hairston’s side anyway. So, when Fort came home in 1976, calling himself Abdullah Malik, the Black P Stone Nation renamed the El Rukns new theology new order of allegiance, Button East already knew exactly what refusing cost.
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He refused anyway. A lot of people converted because the alternative was standing on the other side of Jeff Fort. Hairston refused. He was expelled, pushed out of the organization he had helped build by the man who had taken it from him while he was in prison. Out after building what Fort [clears throat] inherited, after serving time while Fort built on what was theirs.
Button East followed Hairston out the door. Being expelled from the El Rukns in 1976 meant something specific. It wasn’t a resignation or negotiated exit. Hairston had helped build the largest street organization Chicago had ever seen, had been present at its foundation, had his name on its early years, had relationships with every man who had come up through the Blackstone Rangers.
And now, by Fort’s declaration, all of that was severed. The territory Hairston had helped claim was no longer his. The people who had owed him loyalty owed it to Fort instead. He was not just expelled, he was reclassified. He went from co-founder to enemy, and every man who had known him had to make a calculation.
Is my relationship with Hairston worth what it cost with Fort? Most made the right calculation. The ones who didn’t, Buttermilk among them, were now a small group on the wrong side of an organization with 5,000 members, a theological framework, and a demonstrated willingness to kill anyone who said no. The decision to stand with Hairston was not a neutral act.
It was a positioning. Buttermilk East was now in Fort’s accounting on the same side as Hairston, not because of a specific refusal or a public defiance, but because of who he chose to be associated That’s what it cost to stand there. That’s what standing there meant. This is the part I keep coming back to. Hairston’s refusal was not a surprise to anyone.
Someone had already tried to kill him before the demand was even issued. So, when Hairston said no, when the man who co-founded the entire thing refused to bow to it, the response was predictable. More violence, more attempts, the kind of ongoing pressure that tells you the conversation is over, and the question now is just timing.
And then there is the matter of Mickey Cogwell. Cogwell ran the Mickey Cobras, another faction that chose not to convert. He said no the same way Hairston said no. And at a gang meeting, according to trial testimony, Fort made clear what he intended to do with Cogwell. He said it out loud in front of people.
On February 25th, 1977, Cogwell was murdered. Cogwell stood on the wrong [clears throat] side of that table. Fort said what he intended to do. Then, Cogwell died on the schedule Fort had announced. Fort doesn’t warn twice. The rational read is that he had no real exit. Hairston’s people were already classified as enemies, and switching sides at that point might not have made him any safer than staying wood.
The other read is simpler. This was a man built for loyalty, built before the math started working against him. By the time the math was bad, the loyalty was already load-bearing. You can’t pull a load-bearing wall without the whole structure coming down. He stayed. The list won’t exist until April of 1981, but everything the list would eventually put on paper, the decision to kill Robert East, was already made in that moment. Fort expelled Hairston.
Cogwell said no, and was murdered. But an East on the Hairston side is now classified as an enemy. The list is the paperwork. This act is where the decision happened. Here is what that night actually looked like. Fort was accused of ordering the attack. Trial testimony placed a planning meeting at his apartment on the evening of June 14th, hours before the shooting, where he allegedly gave the word.
Whether he was present or in custody by midnight is less certain. He was frequently in and out of prison during this period. It didn’t matter. He had an entire operation built for exactly this. The general doesn’t pull the trigger. The general just decides. He had decided. The target was Willie Dollar Bill Bibbs.
Bibbs was the chief of the Titanic Stones 43rd Street. The Titanics were selling drugs on that corner without paying tribute to the El Rukns. They were also still using the word Stones in their name, which Fort had decided needed to stop. He decided it needed to stop in a particular way. Fort wasn’t trying to kill one man. The scale was the point and announcement loud enough that nobody on the South Side would need to ask what it meant to refuse.
That’s what was supposed to happen that night. One gun moved early. Willie Bibbs shot on 43rd Street around midnight on June 14th, 1981. First name crossed off the list. The other names on that federal list, George Thomas, Ray East, Robert East, were still alive when the night was over. I’m not going to lie, I don’t know if Button East was there that night.
The record doesn’t say whether he heard the shot or heard about it afterward, or what it felt like to learn that the answer to what happened was one trigger and everyone else made it home. What the record shows is that the plan targeted the Titanic Stones leadership at that location. And one trigger moving too early is the only reason it didn’t become a massacre.
One gun fired early. That’s it. Button East steps into the silence that follows. He is now the chief of the Titanic Stones, the same spot Bibbs just died in shot by El Rukn gunmen. The position they just tried to massacre out of existence. He stepped into it anyway, and his name is on the list, and the list is still active.
Bibbs is gone, but the crossing off was supposed to take everyone. One trigger, one death, and Button East inherits what’s left. The Titanic Stones in the summer of 1981 were not a large organization. They were a corner set a block, a name, men who ran 43rd Street and had refused to convert when Fort demanded it. That’s what Bibbs had been holding together.
That’s what Button East now held. The El Rukns were everywhere south of Cermak. They had structured money and a theology that had become indistinguishable from a rationale for violence. The Titans had a corner and a name the El Rukns had publicly decided needed to disappear. There was no compliance available anymore.
That window had closed when the first gun was picked up on June 14th. What Button East had was the corner. What he did with it is mostly not in the record. The record doesn’t tell us what Button East’s four years actually looked like. What the record does say is this. The El Rukns conspiracy to kill the Titanic Stones Chiefs ran from April 1981 to January 1983.
Documented in the same indictment that produced the list. The whole time Button was running that corner, there was a live documented conspiracy to kill him. Not a rivalry, a specific named prosecuted conspiracy. The list was active for 21 months. Within that first year, Barnett Hall was dead. Hall was another name on the federal list, another man the conspiracy was designed to reach.
The exact date I looked, it’s not there. 1981, same year as Bibbs, is what the indictment gives you. How it happened, who was responsible, not there. Two names crossed off. One corner still standing. Button East is running a set the El Rukns have explicitly designated for elimination. He knows this not because he has a federal indictment that doesn’t exist yet, but because he has watched Cogwell die, watched Hairston be expelled, watched Bibbs get shot, watched Hall disappear.
The math has been explaining itself to him for 6 years. It is not subtle. He is running a narcotics operation on the same corner where Bibbs was shot under the same name the El Rukns have decided needs to disappear. Whatever revenue that corner generated, whatever disputes needed to be managed, whatever the ordinary logistics of running a street level operation involved, he is doing all of it while being a named target of a documented conspiracy to kill him.
The mundane work of running a set stacked on top of the specific knowledge that someone has been ordered to take him out. The record doesn’t tell us how he navigated that, whether he moved differently, trusted differently, ran the corner differently. What we have is the fact of the corner still being there, still being run into 1983.
Every day the corner opens is a day the math didn’t collect. And then there is Charmaine Nathan, January 23rd, 1983. El Rukn gunmen went looking for George Thomas, another of the named targets. They found the wrong person. They killed Charmaine Nathan, who was not a target, and wounded Sheila Jackson.
She was in the wrong place on a corner where people were being hunted. That’s what Button East streets looked like. He kept the set running inside all of that. He was working closely with Hairston, the man who had survived one assassination attempt, been expelled from the organization he built, and was still trying to pull together what was left.
Whether he was protecting his people or protecting his position, maybe on those corners the distinction didn’t exist. Button East was convicted of murder in 1985 and imprisoned. I went looking for the case. It’s not there. Who he killed, why the circumstances, they’re not there. All I got is the sequence. In 1985, there’s a courtroom and then a door closing.
4 years on a corner where his name was on a list. 4 years of Shamay Nathan Corners and premature triggers and the weight of running a position that had already gotten one chief killed. And then the door closes. His brother Ray, they called him Scooter, steps into the same position. The position that had gotten Bibbs killed.
The position that Button is now leaving. Scooter steps into it. The list doesn’t always use a gun to cross your name off. Sometimes it uses a courtroom. The mechanism doesn’t matter. The consequences do. Button East was in prison when his brother died. He was in prison when Bull Hairston was killed.
He found out the way you find out when you’re locked up. Someone tells you the door is still locked and there is nothing to do with it. Scooter East inherited the position that had gotten Willie Bibbs killed and put Button behind a prison door. He was Button’s younger brother. The record doesn’t tell us who he was beyond that, what he thought the job was, or whether he believed he could hold together something Button had held for 4 years by sheer force of staying.
What the record says is this, he was young, he was family, and he stepped into it anyway. There’s something specific in that. Button had chosen his position deliberately over years, watching the math get worse, making the same decision again each time it cost something new. Scooter inherited his position from a different place.
Blood set. The fact that someone had to and he was next. He didn’t have the same years of evidence Button had accumulated. He had a brother in prison, a corner that needed running, and a set with no one else. He showed up for it anyway. He held it for 3 years. What followed was the Titanic Stones trying to hold something together without the means to hold it, fighting for territory that kept slipping, keeping a set going that was running out of the people who knew how to run it.
They were fighting territory battles with the Mickey Cobras, with the Vice Lords, doing what you do when you’re trying to keep something alive that has already been critically wounded. Surviving and not doing that especially well. Then in 1988, Scooter was arrested on a corner. Accounts from the time describe a violent arrest.
Ray Scooter East died in a holding cell. The official cause was cardiac arrest. 3 months later, the same year, Eugene Bull Hairston was shot near the Ida B. Wells projects. 3844 South Vincent Avenue. They took him to Michael Reese Hospital. He didn’t make it. The same year, Scooter died in a holding cell, and then Hairston shot near the Ida B.
Wells projects, and Button East in a prison cell for both of them. Stone supporters blamed the El Rukns. Hairston had been on the list since 1981. He had been a target since at least 1975, the shooting at 75th and Paxton. He was the man Jeff Fort had expelled from the organization they built together.
If anyone had a reason to want Hairston dead, the El Rukns had it. The El Rukns held a press conference and said they didn’t do it. The case was never solved. No arrest. The co-founder of one of the most studied street organizations in American history was shot outside a public housing project in Chicago and nobody has ever been charged.
Nobody knows who crossed Hairston’s name off the list. The investigation that followed was quiet for a case this size. Hairston was not an obscure figure. He was a named defendant in federal court filings. He had been shot before. He had survived the same violence that killed Mickey Cogwell and Willie Bibbs. The people who might have known something were mostly dead in federal prison or had specific reasons not to be remembered as people who talked.
The El Rukns were still operating when Hairston died. Still capable of reaching people. Anyone who knew something had reasons to stay quiet. The press conference denial was not a miscalculation. It was a wall. Nothing moved behind it. The official record on Hairston’s murder runs out fast.
A corner, an address, a hospital, then silence. The Titanic Stones were effectively gone by around 1990. Not taken apart in a single decisive moment, just worn through. The assassination campaign. Buttons imprisonment in ’85. Scooter’s death in ’88. Hairston’s murder in ’88. Each one a piece removed until there was nothing left that could hold the shape it had been.
The same federal case that produced the list brought the El Rukns down the major indictment returned by the grand jury in late October of 1989. 38 defendants, RICO charges. Many high-ranking members eventually pleaded guilty as part of the federal case. The organization that had put Button East’s name on a kill list was dismantled by the federal government while Button was still inside.
Button East was still inside. Sit with that for a moment. Not the resolution, just a man in a prison cell and everything. He chose the man he was loyal to. The brother he passed his position to the set he held together for 4 years gone without him while he was locked up. That’s the act.
He came out eventually, 20-something years. The El Rukns were gone by then, taken apart by the same government that had been building a case against them since before Button East ever became chief. The Titanic Stones were gone. The corners were different. Bull Hairston and Scooter had both been dead for over a decade.
He reportedly carried the title of general of a set that no longer existed. That detail, if it’s true, is the whole story in a single sentence. General of nothing. The title without the territory. The loyalty without anyone left to be loyal to. Six names. Let me tell you what happened to each of them. Willie Bibbs, dead.
June 14th, 1981. First name crossed off. Barnett Hall dead. 1981. George Thomas survived the attempt in January of ’83, the one where Charmaine Nathan died instead. What happened to him after that? I couldn’t find it anywhere. He’s gone from the record. Ray East, dead. 1988. A holding cell. Eugene Hairston dead. September 1988.
Outside the Ida B. Wells projects, case never solved. Nobody knows. Robert East Button. He came out in the 2000s, the exact year I couldn’t find it. The El Rukns were closed federal case. The set was gone. The man he had spent his entire adult life being loyal to had been dead for 15 years and the killer had never been found.
The corner on 43rd Street was still there. Corners don’t leave. The Titanic stones weren’t the set had stopped existing somewhere around 1990, worn through until there wasn’t enough left to hold a shape. The name was historical now. The South Side he came back to was not the South Side he had left. The big confederations were gone, broken up by federal cases, by deaths, by informants, by time.
What replaced them was smaller, faster, less organized, and in some ways more dangerous. The structures Button East had known, the tribute systems, the organizational logic, the names that carried weight, most of it was different. Not gone, different. He came out carrying a title that meant nothing to a city that had already finished mourning everything he stayed to protect.
Derrick Keys, the man who fired the shots that killed Willie Bibbs, eventually walked out after cooperating with federal authorities. He had worked his way from a potential 99-year sentence down to something he could walk out of. Button East served roughly 20 years. He got out, too. But not to the same world.
That’s where the list turned up a court filing. The list stopped collecting names. The damage keeps going. Six names. One of them I still can’t find where it ends. Nobody wrote that part down. I looked.
