Atlantic
Monthly Press, $22 hard
“I knew if I were caught I would go to the chain gang. But was not my life
already a kind of chain gang? What, really, did I have to lose?”
— Richard Wright, Black Boy
As I sit with Bill Adler
in the happy-hour hubbub of G�ero’s, I distance myself from the
conversation for a moment. I want to observe this one tough hombre. As I watch
him I realize this remarkably tenacious and brave man possesses a quality I had
observed only once before. In the middle of a riot with legendary underground
writer William Burroughs, I’d witnessed a unique survival mechanism — the
ability to fade away. I’d seen Burroughs almost dissolve into a wall, drawing
no attention to himself, while waves of demonstrators and baton-wielding police
raced right by. In knife-edge situations, being able to become nearly invisible
by reducing personal energy is an accomplishment of the highest order.
Of course, that ability is contrary to the portrayal of media action heroes
and almost unique in our culture where everyone nearly shouts look at me, me,
me. The really brave, like Bill Adler, are only startling in that they don’t
shout out for attention. At this moment in G�ero’s, Adler was as
eye-catching as an old shoe. Yet I knew he had entered maybe the toughest crack
underworld in the nation — central Detroit — and emerged with a story
unmatched in the chronicles of the drug war. Adler literally risked his life to
tell the remarkable story of a true King of Crack. It was the story of
baby-faced Billy Joe Chambers and his brothers in the Chambers Gang.
Adler describes how Chambers, like many others before him, fled the rural
South with just enough money for a one-way bus ticket north and a pocketful of
dreams. Or more precisely, what passes for dreams when you stare at a future of
sharecropping a cotton patch, a future so bleak anything seems like it
must be for the better.
In the still-segregated town of Marianna, Arkansas, Chambers learned to rely
on his sharp wits and quick smile. His generous manner elicited trust among his
friends. But Chambers’ resum� was as thin as the pine slats on the shack
that had been his home. Shortly after arriving in Detroit, Chambers landed a
job in a shoe store. He quickly learned that in the Detroit of the Eighties all
the old good-paying jobs were long gone. The once-great auto industry was
choking on the exhaust of its Japanese competitors and 34 percent of the Motor
City’s citizens were living on the public dole in worse conditions than during
the Great Depression.
According to Adler, Chambers says, “I did whatever needed to be done. Some
days they’d have me outside washing windows in a knee-deep blizzard. I’m like,
`Oh wow, are you kidding? There has to be a better way.'”
There was. Starting with a little store front called Billy Joe’s Party Store,
where marijuana could be obtained in the exclusive back room, Chambers built a
reputation for working long hours and delivering good service. A few short
years later, Billy Joe and his brother Larry had prospered. By 1985 they’d
become the crack kings of Detroit, employing many of the hard-working youth
from their hometown.
If their flourishing business — estimated by the government as grossing up to
three million dollars a day — had been legal, they would have been cover
material for Business Week. In 1986, the year before their federal bust,
the brothers took in an astounding $55 million. That year, by most estimates,
Billy Joe and Larry’s profits were greater than the faltering Chrysler
Corporation.
Most white reporters avoid exploring this world of inner-city drugs because
crack makes dealers paranoid, and dealers carry heavy armament. Most of the
combat reporters covering the “drug war” stick hard to the safety of hanging
out with narcotics squads. These writers are as far from the angry culture of
the inner-city drug dealers as society matrons are from Watusi dance parties.
But Adler didn’t let the fear of being a medium-built white man in a black
world full of rage prevent him from digging out the story. His work, condensed
into the book Land of Opportunity, breathes with the fire of the ghetto.
It’s one of the best investigative works of the Nineties.
I watch as Adler, with his goatee, thinning hair, and soft-spoken demeanor,
explains how he became fascinated with the Chambers family after reading about
them in a magazine story. Adler looks more like a jazz critic than a man
comfortable on the mean streets — beginning in February, the Austin resident
will co-host a news program on labor issues for KOOP radio, in addition to his
freelance writing. As I quiz him about this dangerous world and his ability to
gain the trust of those who inhabit its underbelly, he seems a little
surprised. His self-description is not heroic: “I didn’t write a drug book. I
wrote about the last wave of a great migration.”
He calculates that the five years’ labor it took to produce his acclaimed
book, published in hard cover last May, has earned him “about 50 cents an
hour.” But it takes that kind of time for a white reporter to gain trust in the
drug underworld, and even longer when people may still face prosecution. After
getting into the nitty-gritty of the crack universe, Adler says, “Don’t mistake
it. I wasn’t investigating a subculture or an underground economy, for people
like the Chambers it was the only culture.”
“I wrote about people,” he says, “everyone — even the cops — gave up on.”
Which may sound farfetched to anyone who hasn’t ventured to Red River and
Seventh in the shadow of our downtown police station. Here the penny-ante
street drug culture thrives. Cruise the block sometime and listen to the
whispers, “Hey bro, wants some smoke?” They aren’t talking about marijuana. And
give the police some credit. Arresting $10 street-corner salesman will change
nothing. Their places will be instantly taken by someone else trying to make a
living on the street while, as usual, the big fish flourish.
For tens of thousands like the Chambers brothers, dealing drugs is a rational
career choice, a chance for a little money and a lot more status than drudging
along in a fast-food franchise. As one Austin teenager I interviewed put it to
me succinctly: “Girls don’t like guys who smell like fries.”
I recently took two young men from what’s not considered the worst high school
to lunch. They brought along a friend, a tall, clean-cut guy wearing a starched
shirt. It turned out he was on the basketball team. “I’m an anti-drug
counselor,” he told me.
“Have you guys ever smoked crack?” I asked.
The ball player responded, “I have, but not in a long time.”
“When was the last time?”
“It’s been more than a month,” he said with pride.
And last year I asked my nephew if he had ever seen cocaine in his Austin high
school. “Sure,” he replied, looking as though I were an alien out of touch with
earth culture. I had visions of dealers with goods hidden in their lockers.
“When was the last time?, I asked.
“Yesterday.”
Yesterday! I was startled. My nephew doesn’t cruise in the speed lane. “What
were the circumstances?”
“We had a substitute teacher and the guy behind me laid out lines on his desk.
He was selling them for five dollars.”
So let’s get real; who in Austin has the money to buy this stuff? I remember
the night I got lost in my car and blundered onto the street that was the
open-air emporium before the well-publicized police raids largely shut it down.
It was a drive-in drug supermarket. Most of the crack customers I saw cruising
up to the street salesmen looked like college kids or white middle-class office
drones.
This experience didn’t fit my expectation, one reason I so respect Adler’s
work, his determination to pierce the shroud of hypocrisy and hysteria that
surrounds drugs. It’s what makes Land of Opportunity so compelling. The
true story of Billy Joe Chambers’ story defies every clich� and
convention.
Small at 5’2″, Chambers relied on likability and marketing skill, not muscle,
to rise to the top. His rules were simple — stay loyal to the organization and
don’t do drugs. While other dealers cut their product, Chambers offered a
quality rock for the dollar. Adler notes the organization’s emphasis on quality
products was as important to them “as, say, Frank Perdue’s reputation for
selling tender chicken. Quality control was everything.”
As he prospered, Chambers bought repossessed HUD houses and turned them into
business outlets. Even after million-dollar weekends were common, Chambers’
idea of the high life was cruising around town with his friends in his
Cadillac, listening to tunes and dining on Pizza Hut Pizza to go.
Chambers’ one recorded extravagance was a doozy. He rented five white stretch
Caddies and in procession drove into impoverished Marianna for his younger
brother’s high school graduation. Adler relates how the group pulled into the
high school parking lot and were greeted like Hollywood movie stars. “Parents’
cameras snapped, recording the event for posterity; teenagers squealed and
pressed against the cars. The brothers failed to discourage the adulation.
`They were throwing money out the windows,’ says one teacher. School
administrators were too stunned to move.”
Which is not to forget crack’s dark side. Adler writes about Billy Joe’s
brother Larry’s instructions to his Uzi-toting doorman. “Project warmth,” he
counseled. “When a crackhead comes to you and his woman is on his back, his
babies don’t have no Pampers, he hasn’t eaten in two days, and he’s about to
spend his last five dollars on crack, you have to make him feel good about
spending his money.”
As the crack operation took in millions, not surprisingly, it began to attract
attention. Finally, a local Detroit TV station spent a week trumpeting their
coming expos� revealing the crack family who ruled Detroit. The Chambers
remembered thinking, “These guys must really be big. We ought to get to know
them.” As they gathered to watch the show they were surprised to learn the
expos� was about… themselves!
Predictably, their organization was soon busted by the feds. Billy Joe
Chambers, rich enough to hire a Johnny Cochran or F. Lee Bailey, hired an
attorney who almost dozed off during the trial. Half the organization used
court-appointed lawyers. Theirs was a strange mixture of sophistication and
na�vet�. They were sensational at marketing yet they were still
innocent kids from the sticks. They were multi-millionaires who didn’t even
have a lawyer on retainer.
Nor did they know what to do with wealth. Swiss bank accounts? They didn’t
have any. They simply didn’t know how to hide money in international banks.
“What happened to their fortune after they went to jail?” I questioned Adler.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if they buried it in a vacant lot,” he replied.
“How can that be?” I asked.
Adler replied, “Billy Joe calls me from prison from time to time. I’ll try to
get him to call you and you can ask him yourself.”
Two weeks later the operator was on the line with a collect call from “Mr.
Chambers.” Billy Joe’s rap was upbeat and congenial, even friendly. “Why were
you so badly represented at your trial?” I asked.
“First, I didn’t take it seriously,” he replied. “I had only been busted for
pot. I didn’t know anything from the feds; I didn’t take it serious.”
“My lawyer was garbage,” he said. “I trusted people in authority. I grew up
believing in loyalty. I gave my lawyer $25,000 and he didn’t care about me.”
Chambers was irate that if he was convicted of selling powdered cocaine —
white people’s crack — he would be doing far less time. Penalties are far
harsher for crack over powdered cocaine. It’s a racial issue that receives
scant recognition in the white legislative world.
“So how long did the streets stay clean after they put away the Chambers
brothers?”
Billy Joe laughed. “The day they cuffed me up the transition had started.
Nothin’ changed.”
On the crack life, Chambers explained, “we never had any food on our table. I
grew up with the poors stealing and killing. Poor people surviving off poor
people. You build an organization; you help some poors, and you destroy some
poors.” All this was said matter-of-fact. That was simply the way he found
it.
At one point in our hour-long conversation he said, “If I grew up in a house
with a judge, I’d probably be a judge. I did what I knew.” In one way, Billy
Joe Chambers was eminently likable. With better credentials, he might have been
a lion of industry. Instead, he’s facing most of his adult life in the
penitentary. Chambers said he might be out when he’s 47 —-“I’ll still have a
life to lead.”
It sure ain’t a middle-class
world Adler captured in Land of Opportunity. As Adler talks, I’m
intrigued by story after story that reveals a curious blend of innocence and
savagery. “I didn’t want to write a sensational tale of a drug lord. I wanted
to put a human face on it,” he says. “Remember, in Marianna for the Chambers
brothers, there weren’t even minimum wage jobs.”
And what are we to conclude?
“I didn’t come away hopeful,” he says. “There’s no pot of gold at the end of
the rainbow. There’s no happy ending.” n The prolific Jeff Nightbyrd has participated in so many aspects of journalism
it’s difficult to mention just one. He is currently involved with United
States-Cuba baseball relations.
This article appears in January 26 • 1996 and January 26 • 1996 (Cover).