Jeff Fort biography

Synopsis

Early Life

Infamous criminal Jeffrey Fort was born on February 20, 1947, in Aberdeen, Mississippi. Fort and his family moved to the low-income Woodlawn neighborhood in the South Side of Chicago in 1955 in order to find work. But Fort's family life disintegrated, and the grade-school dropout found himself in and out of juvenile detention centers, including the Illinois State Training School for Boys in St. Charles, Illinois. It was there that he met an older boy, Eugene Hairston, who soon became his friend and mentor.

To protect themselves on the streets, Hairston and Fort founded a group in the late 1950s called the Blackstone Rangers, named after the Blackstone Avenue area where they spent their time. Hairston earned the nickname "Bull" early on, and Fort became known as "Angel", a term of endearment given to him by his mother. The group quickly turned into a gang, as area youth afraid for their safety took membership with the Rangers. As the gang grew, so did their territory. They claimed the area east of Woodlawn Avenue as their stomping grounds, and anyone who violated this dividing line put their lives in jeopardy.

Black P. Stone Nation

The Blackstone Rangers began absorbing other crews in the area, eventually uniting under the new name, the Black P. Stone Nation. The Stones organized themselves into a hierarchy, establishing a leadership council they called The Main 21. Jeff "Angel" Fort served as the gang's leader, with "Bull" Hairston as second-in-command. In 1966, under Bull and Angel's leadership, the Nation grew from 500 to 1,500 members. By 1967, that number had doubled to approximately 3,000 members. When Hairston went to prison in 1968 on drug charges, Fort was left to run the Nation unchallenged.

With the help of local minister Reverend John Fry, Fort learned how to garner financial support from public agencies and philanthropists. Charities such as the Ford Foundation and the Kettering Foundation donated money to the P. Stone Nation, who had by then formed a faux political charter under the name The Woodlawn Organization. The Woodlawn Organization, or T.W.O., announced plans to create jobs for reformed gang members who were struggling to make ends meet. Under President Lyndon Johnson, Fort also managed to obtain a $1 million federal grant from the Office of Economic Opportunity by claiming that he would use the money to teach job skills to gang members. Fort instead used the money to "pay" his gang members a salary that would, in turn, be given directly back to Fort.