Word: gangsters
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...come to be known--has seen some of his best friends murdered on this field. The victims are not 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...
That year Tomes was asked to take on the role of youth minister for a parish and work with the street gangs in the surrounding projects of Henry Horner Homes and Rockwell Gardens. At the time, the neighborhood was rife with killing between the Vice Lords and Gangster Disciples. On Tomes' first day in the projects, he was snubbed. Some gangsters threw rocks at him. On his second day, the gang voted in council whether Tomes should be killed, but decided that his intentions were only positive and that he should be protected rather than removed. The gangsters also accepted...
...identified myself with the characters in these books. They represented a different world from that of my peers, who were just beginning to decide they wanted to be doctors, schoolteachers, and lawyers. Personally, I would have settled for being a gangster's moll, or even a mysterious heiress with a cocaine habit. But my ideal alter ego was the prostitute with the heart of gold, who in a fit of morality turns in her crime connections, or falls in love with the slightly seedy but sexy hero...
...stole the art, says Myles Connor, 54, a Milton, Mass., native who is in federal prison for interstate transportation of two paintings stolen in 1975 from the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College. Connor, who appears to have escaped from a Damon Runyon story, says he and a gangster named Bobby Donati, a longtime pal and partner in crime, checked out the Gardner around 1974. "Did I case it?" asks the 5-ft. 7-in., bushy-bearded Connor, who looks more like a visiting professor than a guy who has run with a crew of gangsters for 30 years...
...Houghton died in 1992 of natural causes, and Donati went out about a year earlier of multiple stab wounds, found hog-tied in the trunk of a car--which is relatively close to natural causes among the people he ran with. Connor says Donati would not have violated the gangster's vow of omerta. Bobby was a stand-up guy. If gangsters had been trying to find the stolen paintings, "they could have chopped his fingers off one at a time," and Donati wouldn't have given up the goods. Connor thinks it's more likely he was killed...