What’s up, everybody? Welcome back to Hood Archives. Y’all been asking for this one. Chicago North Side black and green. Today, Insane Deuces. Drop a comment. Tell me who’s next. I read every single one. That’s how we ended up here. Now, you think you know this story? You’ve heard Chicago.
You’ve heard the North Side. You’ve heard gang. You don’t know this one. This isn’t the Kings at Humboldt Park. This isn’t the Disciples on the low end. This is something that shouldn’t have been possible and existed anyway for 20 years because of one building, 12 guys, and a loyalty I have never seen documented anywhere else.
Julia C. Lathrop Homes, built in 1938, low-rise brick buildings, courtyards, archways along the North Branch of the Chicago River. One of the first three federally funded housing projects in Chicago. The best one this city ever produced. 35 acres on the North Side, 925 units. Here’s what made Lathrop different.
It was racially mixed from day one. By 1981, 50% white, 25% Latino, 25% black. Same hallways, same courtyards, same schools. 1981 Chicago, three communities sharing the same building in one of the most segregated cities in America. Before the Deuces, the projects were run by a crew called the Junior Barons.
Mixed-race, mostly white. Their leader, Gilbert Sanchez. On July 27th, 1968, Sanchez was killed by a Lathrop security guard, not a rival gang, a security guard, inside his own building. Y’all already know what I’m thinking. The Barons aged out. A new group, younger, from all three, was watching and waiting.
All right, so here’s a detail that I have never, not once, seen anybody lead with when they talk about the Insane Deuces. This gang did not start with the shooting. Did not start with a drug corner. Did not start with somebody getting hit and people retaliating. It started with a sports rivalry at a park.
In 1971, the young men from the Lathrop projects had been going back and forth with the crew called the Paulina Barry Community, the PBC, over Hamlin Park. The PBC wanted that park. They’d been competing with the Lathrop youth in sports, basketball, football, whatever was running. And that on-and-off competition, confirmed in two separate documented sources, crossed the line into something uglier.
The PBC wanted Hamlin Park and they were making that known. When you’re young and somebody keeps pressing you at the park, at the bus stop, at school, eventually you stop looking for a referee. You find a crew, and that’s exactly what happened. Inside the Lathrop projects that same year, a group of 12 young men, that’s the number that gets passed down, were forming up.
Their leader was a man known on the street as Little Richie, a former Morgan Deuce, a gang already running out of the Near West Side since 1959. The Morgan Deuces were founded at Taylor Street and Morgan Street. Little Richie knew what organization looked like. He’d seen it from the inside. Now he was going to build his own.
One of the other 11 was a cousin of a Morgan Deuce. There was a blueprint in the room from day one. Here’s how they handled the Barons. They didn’t bang on them. They didn’t run them out with violence. They walked up and said, “Step back. We’ll take care of you.” Respectful, but clear.
And the Barons, who were aging anyway, stepped aside. That’s the kind of transition you only see when the incoming crew has enough respect behind them to make the offer credible. From that moment, these 12 men took over the Lathrop Homes. And one of the first things they did, before any of it meant anything, they designed a sweater.
Original black and green sweater. That was their identity. That was their uniform. That was who they were. After a few years, they cut ties with the Morgan Deuces name entirely. They were the Insane Deuces. Now, they had to grow. Because 12 people in a housing project up against established crews like the PBC and the Simon City Royals, that’s not enough bodies.
So, they recruited in three directions. The Lathrop projects themselves, the multi-racial original, then John School, which brought in a white greaser rooted section. Then, and this is where the sports beef comes full circle, Hamlin Park. In 1973, the same youth who had been competing with the PBC over that park officially turned Insane Deuces.
The moment Hamlin Park turned Deuces in ’73, the war with the PBC and the Simon City Royals went full. No more back and forth. All out. And now there were four sections. Lathrop, Hamlin Park, John, Young Deuces. a couple hundred strong. Here’s the thing that made everybody on the North Side scratch their head.
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The greaser gangs, the white crews at Lane Tech, the Gaylords, the Popes, the C-Notes, they could not figure out how the Deuces operated as a mixed-race outfit. Like, genuinely, it didn’t compute. In that era, on the North Side of Chicago, you ran with your own. The Deuces ran with everybody. When they got into it at Lane Tech, and they got into it frequently, the Deuces were usually outnumbered.
Most of the greaser and Latino gangs had 30, 40 deep. The Deuces would sometimes have 12 at school. So, what did they do? They called their black and Latino friends from the projects for backup. White kids calling black and Latino backup in 1972 Chicago. An original member preserved that reality in a first-person account that still exists today.
He said it plain, “We all grew up together and watched each other’s backs.” That wasn’t a political statement. That wasn’t ideology. That was just the truth of what Lane Tech had built before the gang even existed. The building made the gang possible, not the other way around. July 10th, 1974 changed everything.
But before we get there, you need to know who the Deuces were fighting, the Simon City Royals, founded in 1969 by a man named Rashad Ziyad. They called him Arab, and Arab was not a man you took lightly. He was a Vietnam veteran, came back from the war, moved to the Lake View neighborhood with his family, linked up with the crew called the Ashland Royals, and built one of the most feared white gang organizations on Chicago’s North Side.
What made Arab different from the typical gang founder was the way he operated. He was a builder. He came back from Vietnam with the discipline and the strategic instinct of a man who’d been trained to hold ground under pressure. He brought that back to Lakeview, merged it with the street, and created something that outlasted him by decades.
Arab was the kind of leader you don’t replace. He was the kind of leader where if somebody took him off the board, everybody felt it for years. By 1973, things had gotten hot enough on the North Side that somebody actually tried to cool them down. A peace summit between the Royals, the Aces, and the Insane Deuces, the Deuce Truce, documented in a Chicago newspaper at the time.
The photo of that meeting still exists. People on both sides were photographed. It made print. It didn’t last. Nobody remembers exactly how long, but everybody remembers is what ended it. July 10th, 1974, Wednesday evening, Arab pulled into his girlfriend’s garage on the 1900 block of West Melrose Avenue. Here’s the detail that tells you everything about how this was arranged.
His girlfriend, she was the sister of an Insane Deuce. Two Deuces were already waiting. Arab stepped out of the vehicle. He never made it back. The two shooters were arrested and charged. The Chicago Tribune ran the story on July 13th, 1974, page 23. The paper described both men as Insane Deuce members who had deserted the United States Marine Corps.
Marine Corps deserters living in Chicago running with the Deuces waiting in a garage. The charges didn’t stick. Both men walked. The streets knew. The Royals knew. And from that moment, the war between the Deuces and the Simon City Royals was no longer about turf. It wasn’t about a park or a corner or school.
It was personal. It was generational. And it was permanent. After Arab’s death, a man named Timothy Bimbo Gilfillan took over the Royals. Bimbo was charismatic, connected, good at keeping alliances together, but he wasn’t Arab. And the losses kept coming. Just months after Arab was killed, still in 1974, Bimbo’s younger brother Jeff Tuffy Gilfillan, also a Royal, also a leader, was shot dead on Paulina Street by Latin Eagles.
Then, in April of 1975, Bimbo himself was killed by a Latin King named William Pothead Lewis at the corner of Leland and St. Louis. Three leaders. Two years. The Royals lost their founder and both Gilfillan brothers in back-to-back years. Now, here’s where the story turns in a direction most people don’t expect.
While the Deuces were fighting the Royals on one front, they were building something entirely different on another. In 1975, the Insane Deuces gave the Latin Kings a piece of ground inside the Lathrop projects. A section called the Horseshoe. The southernmost part of the complex along Diversey Parkway, shaped like a horseshoe from Hoyne to Levitt.
They gave it away on purpose as a gesture of alliance. Hold that image. The Deuces who were born in that building, who fought for it, who bled for it, took a named piece of their own house and handed it to the Kings. That is the deepest form of trust you can show somebody in that world. You don’t give away ground.
Ground is everything. They gave it anyway. For more than a decade, it worked. The Deuces and the Kings ran those projects together, fought off outside pressure together. In 1981, People Nation was formally enforced on the streets of Chicago. Both the Deuces and the Kings were People Nation. Same side, same flag.
It worked. For a long time, it worked. Remember the horseshoe. 1986, the Latin Kings and the Insane Deuces had been sharing the Lathrop projects for 11 years. 11 years of alliance. 11 years of backing each other against the Royals, the PBC, every outside threat that came at those buildings.
They went from handing over the horseshoe to being genuinely intertwined. Same courtyard, same buildings, same People Nation flag. Then crack cocaine showed up and so did the math. In 1986, maybe early ’87, three People Nation allies came together to distribute crack cocaine centered around the Lathrop projects.
The Latin Kings, the Insane Deuces, and a third crew of People Nation ally from Logan Square called the Ghetto Brothers Organization. The GBO, founded in 1970 by two men known on the street as Red and Rico. They’d merged their separate crews in ’77 and by the mid ’80s, they were a known quantity on the north side. These three organizations, who had been running together for years, tried to run the crack trade together, too.
By 1987, there was friction. Not a shooting, not a war, friction. The Kings were angling for control of the distribution. The Deuces felt the squeeze. The GBO was watching its own people get pushed to the margins. And that year, in a move that survives only in street accounts, a Deuce leader known as Blade is said to have called a secret meeting.
He brought in the GBO and the Puerto Rican Stones. The question was direct, “Do we go to war with the Latin Kings, or do we flip to Folk Nation?” Both the GBO and the Puerto Rican Stones said no. They backed out. Think about that decision. Think about what it cost them. Blade sat on that answer. Two years.
1989, full conflict broke out between the Latin Kings and the Deuces GBO alliance. The Kings had more numbers, more territory. They had the horseshoe. The same piece of ground the Deuces had gifted them 14 years earlier. And they used it. The GBO took the worst of it. According to documented gang history, both GBO founders, Red and Rico, were killed in 1989.
Different incidents, same year. The organization that these two men had built from a corner at Francisco and Cortland, grown for nearly two decades, it lost both its founders in 12 months. What happened next tells you exactly what kind of men were in that organization.
After Red and Rico were killed, the GBO didn’t dissolve. They retaliated. They tracked down a Latin King named King Monk. They killed him. And then and this is the detail no documentary has ever put on screen. They burned his car in the street afterward. Not just the kill, the burn, the statement. That is a message.
That is we know what you did and we are not afraid of you even now. It didn’t save them. By the end of 1989, the Ghetto Brothers Organization was extinct. Gone. Surviving members fled to Hamlin Park and flipped to the Insane Deuces. One of the main GBO heads, a man known as Wino, made that switch.
I want to spend a moment on Wino because he doesn’t get one. Wino was a senior figure in the GBO. When his organization collapsed, when both his founders were dead, when the Kings had taken everything, he made a decision. He flipped to the Deuces, crossed over in the middle of a live war because he needed somewhere to land.
In 1990, the year after he flipped, the Latin Kings from the Lathrop projects killed him. He didn’t get a year. He switched sides and was dead inside 12 months. And here’s the detail that haunts me. According to chicagoganghistory.com and accounts from inside the projects, the Latin Kings recorded two songs in 1990 documenting what they’d done to the GBO and the Deuces.
Two songs, not one, two. I don’t know if those songs still exist, but the fact that they were made, the fact that the Kings felt confident enough, victorious enough to record music about what they’d done, that tells you exactly how the power balance had shifted inside those buildings. January 1992, winter in Chicago.
The decision wasn’t made in the spring when everything looked survivable. It was made in winter when the math was undeniable. The Insane Deuces flipped from People Nation to Folk Nation. They joined the Insane Family alongside the Spanish Cobras, the Insane YLO Cobras, the Insane Dragons, the Insane Harrison Gents, documented in primary sources.
The criminologist John Hagedorn at the University of Illinois-Chicago placed the Deuces specifically inside the Insane Families Organizational Chart in his 2015 book The Insane Chicago Way, University of Chicago Press. Built on 3 years of interviews and original gang documents.
In the same month they flipped, January ’92, they left the Lathrop projects. Over 20 years in those buildings, gone in 1 month. The Kings moved fully into the Horseshoe. The buildings that Lil Richie had organized into something real, that 12 guys in black and green sweaters had bled to hold, were not theirs anymore.
The flip also fractured the Deuce family itself. Their cousin gang on the South Side, the Carleton Deuces, running out of Marshall Square, stayed People Nation. The fracture between the two organizations was real. Some accounts say there was an actual war. Two gangs with the same name on opposite sides of an alliance line.
They were real enough to be in the police files, just not big enough to make the headlines. I want you to think about what it means to be a gang that just got forced out of the building it was born in by the same people it once handed a piece of ground to as a gesture of trust.
That’s not just a loss. That’s a specific kind of loss. The kind that changes how you see people. The kind that makes you harder or breaks you entirely. The Insane Deuces did not break. 1994 two years after the flip the Colleton Deuces, their South Side cousin gang still People Nation still carrying two years of hard feelings were getting pressed by the Latin Kings in Little Village.
Their leader, a man named Arty, called north. The Insane Deuces answered. But the price was everything. You want our help? Flip to Folk Nation. Join the Insane family. Become a section of us. Change your colors to black and green. Half the Colleton Deuces said no. Half of them looked at that offer. The Kings pressing from one side the Insane Deuces setting terms from the other and chose the Kings.
Their enemies over their own family. I’ll be honest. I understand both decisions. In that world, with those options, neither choice is clean. You’re choosing between your blood and your survival. And there’s no version of that where you walk away whole. The other half stayed. Rebuilt. They became the 21st Insane Colleton Deuces.
Here’s what I keep coming back to. Two years before this moment, the Insane Deuces were the ones being forced through a door they didn’t choose. Losing their home, their alliance, their people. And now, in ’94 they’re standing at the door. Setting the terms. A gang that survived its own identity crisis became the authority on someone else’s.
That’s a full circle. While all of this was happening in Chicago, the Deuces had already been building outside the city for over a decade. Aurora, Illinois, the A-Town Deuces established in 1980, 12 years before Lathrop fell. Grand and Locks, Ohio and Cain, Farnsworth Park, Elgin, Illinois, Rooken Level, Saint Francis Park.
In 2012, WBEZ published an interactive gang territory map built from Chicago Police Department data and the Chicago Crime Commission’s gang book, conditions as of 2010. That map shows the Insane Deuces still holding territory in North Center, their birthplace. 40 years after 12 guys in black and green sweaters first took over the Lathrop projects, same neighborhood, same ground, still there.
And Chicago Police Chief of Organized Crime, Nicholas Roti, when asked about releasing that map publicly, said, and I genuinely love this quote, “We don’t want to either glorify a gang or maybe unintentionally cause a gang rift.” By 2010, the Deuces in Chicago were a fraction of what they had been.
The worry ship had sailed respectfully. October 25th, 2009, the Lathrop Homes held a reunion. 650 people showed up. Not 60, not 100, 650 former Deuces, former Kings, former residents, men in their 40s and 50s with families, with jobs, with lives built somewhere else. All of them walking back into the courtyard that made them.
Nobody covered it, no feature story, it just happened because that place meant something that doesn’t translate into language about those buildings. In 2006, the CHA announced it would demolish the Lathrop Homes, level everything. But the residents and the preservation community fought it and won.
April 2012, the Lathrop Homes were placed on the National Register of Historic Places. The CHA moved the final residents out in 2011. Then instead of a wrecking ball, a renovation. Phase one completed in 2019. Phase two in 2023. 488 apartments. The building standing. The projects that produced the Insane Deuces are now a protected national landmark and one of the most expensive neighborhoods in Chicago.
In 2015, criminology professor John Hagedorn at UIC published The Insane Chicago Way through the University of Chicago Press. Primary sources, original documents, organizational charts, a real academic work. And on page 105 of that book, there is a photograph of a physical object, a ticket.
An actual paper ticket to an Insane Deuces Holiday Family Reunion. Not a police report, not a surveillance photograph, a reunion ticket, the kind you print when you want to see the people you came up with when they’re scattered and you want to bring them back together for one night. Somebody kept that ticket long enough for it to end up in an academic book.
That’s who the Insane Deuces were. Not just a gang, a community built in a mixed-race housing project by 12 guys who designed a black and green sweater and decided the people you grew up with were worth fighting for, regardless of what they looked like. They held that building for 20 years, lost it in January of ’92, rebuilt in the suburbs, held a reunion that 650 people came to, and left behind a ticket, black and green forever, two dots.
