Word: cabrini
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...pals from his college days at Notre Dame or buddies from the well-to-do Evanston neighborhood where he grew up. They are mostly the hardened souls of the Gangster Disciples, their Vice Lord rivals and a tally of cross-fire casualties who lived in the wretched Cabrini-Green housing projects just a mile or so from Chicago's gleaming downtown...
Fifteen years ago, an extraordinary epiphany drew William Wylie Tomes Jr. to a series of Chicago housing projects, including Cabrini-Green. Since then, as a Roman Catholic lay worker, he has embraced the people of the projects as if they were family and tried to steer them off the path to an early grave. As a consequence, Brother Bill is perhaps the only outsider who can walk freely through the 15 buildings that make up Cabrini-Green or penetrate the paranoid, often vicious circle the gangsters have built around themselves...
Everyone in Cabrini-Green, it seems, knows Brother Bill, 63. He is a difficult man to overlook, his 5-ft. 11-in., 220-lb. frame clad in a trademark flowing, sky-blue cassock made from hundreds of tattered denim patches. That robe has become an understood symbol of peace and humility in this place with precious little of either. Fifty-three times, by his count, he has waded into gunfire in order to stop it. Fifty-three times, the gunfire has stopped. And 53 times, he has emerged unscathed...
...easy on gangsters who recount their murderous acts to him without fear of betrayal, who borrow money from him and never pay him back, who curse, smoke and drink around him as if he were one of them. "He gives all his attention to the wrong people," gripes a Cabrini resident...
Lessons, though, walk at their own pace. And Brother Bill can hardly trumpet a major victory over gang violence. True, Cabrini-Green enjoys more spells of peace than it has in years. And some hard-core gangsters have managed to break away to find jobs and move from the projects. Nonetheless, in a city with an estimated 125 active criminal gangs with as many as 70,000 members, Cabrini-Green remains the most entrenched subculture around of poverty, drug use and gang violence. So much so that the Federal Government has begun, in piecemeal fashion, to simply tear the place...