Former gang member speaks at McLeod West

By KURT NESBITT

Journal Staff Writer

STEWART -- Ronald Smith, Jr. grew up on Chicago's West Side not knowing that using illegal drugs and hanging out with the Gangster Disciples were wrong.

He didn't learn that lesson until he was 31 years old and sitting in the Cook County Jail, facing the possibility of spending 25 years or more in an Illinois state prison on his third set of armed armed robbery charges.

Smith spoke at the McLeod West campus in Stewart Monday night as a part of a community workshop about drugs and gangs.

By the time Smith was a sophomore in high school, it was no problem for him to join the Gangster Disciples. To many young black men in the projects, gangster life seemed glamourous.

For his initiation into the Gangster Disciples, Smith had to shoot someone with a gun. He did just that. As he began to grow within the gang's rank structure, he got shot at by his own gang and stabbed by some of his fellow members. Smith was convicted in three separate armed robberies during his time in the gang.

"We found some old man walking down the street, and we pushed into an alley and we robbed him of $13," Smith recalled. "The police called me soon after that and the gangs didn't tell me that part."

After Smith went to jail in 1981, he met up with other Gangster Disciples, who reportedly told him that going to jail earned a gang member respect and that criminal convictions are just part of gang life.

Smith found himself in a similar situation a year later in 1982. That was also the year he tried to straighten himself out by joining the Army, but he figured out that the Army had its own ideas on how things should be done. He was eventually discharged. Smith returned to the housing projects on the West Side of Chicago in 1983.

As a recruiter for the Gangster Disciples, Smith often targeted young black boys with no older siblings and bought them Nikes. At the same time, he was supervising drug sales.

Like most other businesses, the Gangster Disciples had a structure and had rules. One of those rules was that each member had to pay $1 a day as a membership due, which went to help finance the drug operation.

Smith and a few others ran cocaine from Chicago to Indiana.

"We had everything. We had girls. We had guns. We had the necklaces. Everything was fine until I got into cocaine," Smith said.

One rule in the Gangster Disciples is that you can't do drugs, Smith said. As his cocaine habit grew, he started to loose rank within the gang. Smith's last armed robbery was in 1993. He was arrested after a couple Chicago police officers recognized him as he was coming out of a drug house.

"I was strung out on crack (cocaine) and heroin," he said. "The bottom fell out and the gang didn't want me anymore. I was 31 years old."

Smith said his mother always told him to pray to God; a piece of advise Smith brushed off until he went to a church service while he was being held in the Cook County Jail. The preacher, who was one of the few whites inside the building, took him aside and offered him an opportunity that changed his life. Smith went to work talking to young kids about the dangers of joining a gang not too long after that.

"Most gangs are pretty sophisticated," he said. "It's cops' job to catch us, but it's my job not to get caught."

Gangs are in Minnesota from Mankato and Rochester to International Falls and Duluth. They move drugs from Chicago to Minneapolis and then to smaller cities.

There are 2,360 confirmed gang members in Minnesota and 148 gangs have been identified with at least one confirmed member, Smith said. Most of the identified gang members are black (about 1,384) but are also white (669), Native American (151) and Asian (144).

According to Smith, members who are between ages 11 and 25 are the most active because they are the most influential and usually spend less time in jail if they are convicted. They are mostly male and are mostly Latinos or blacks who come from impoverished areas. Most of them already have a family member already involved in the gang.

These days, Smith still goes back to his old neighborhood in Chicago. Many of his former gangsters are in jail or are dead.

Stewart Police Chief Jimmy Hansen said gangs were an issue in Stewart when he first started working as a patrol officer. He said kids were doing things like intimidating teachers and the general public, were vandalizing property and loitering in a effort to get more kids to join the Latin Kings, a mostly Hispanic gang found mainly in the Twin Cities that had come to Stewart to recruit white kids. Hansen said the issue hasn't escalated to the point where Stewart shows signs of gang violence, but the city does have fights and vandalism. He said the problems have spilled over into Glencoe, Hutchinson, Olivia and Gaylord and gangs are a rising issue on American Indian reservations.

"I worked on the White Earth reservation and five, six years ago there was no problem. Now it's a trend," he said.