Leaders of the Stones and Devil’s Disciples — which later became the Gangster Disciples — were hired by The Woodlawn Organization (TWO) in 1967 to run a nearly $1 million government grant program designed to engage and train 800 out-of-school youth. Mayor Daley was furious that the funds from the federal Office of Economic Opportunity bypassed City Hall and went directly to TWO.
He did everything in his power to sabotage the program and refused to approve a program director for more than two months. And when the program finally started, Daley’s GIU detectives routinely surveilled and raided the Stones’ training centers that TWO had opened in Woodlawn.
Senate committee hearings on the TWO program began on June 28, 1968, in Washington D.C. Fort and other leaders of the Stones were eventually charged by the federal government with mismanagement of funds, extortion and conspiring to defraud the U.S. government.
Members of the GIU testified against the gang members, claiming that no training was happening in the program and the Stones were using the government grant to line their pockets and fund their criminal activities. Fort was convicted and sentenced to five years in federal prison.
And just like that, Daley didn’t have to worry about gangs receiving government funding in his city without his approval anymore. The Stones’ reputation was so tarnished by the trial that funding for their community outreach and development programs ceased almost immediately.
Furthermore, after the trial, it was considered bad business to invest in Black street gangs or try to aid the misguided youth in actualizing their potential to evolve and become architects of community construction. Newly forming relationships between philanthropists, corporate giants, reformers and Black youth gangs were irreparably harmed.
Across town on the West Side, the Vice Lords had been raking in grants from the likes of the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the U.S. Department of Labor, the Jessie Ball DuPont Fund and the Sears-Roebuck Foundation.
With this funding, from 1967 to 1969, Vice Lords, Inc. opened at least five businesses in North Lawndale, including: The African Lion, an Afro-centric clothing store; Teen Town, a youth-centered ice cream parlor; The House of Lords, a recreation center for teens; Art and Soul, an art center for youth opened in collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Art, the University of Illinois and the Illinois Sesquicentennial Commission; and two Tastee Freez franchises.
After the trial, although the Vice Lords had nothing to do with the TWO program scandal, their funding was cut off too. All Black gangs were bad business and never to be socially accepted through political organizing like their Irish, Jewish and Italian predecessors.