America’s federal government has ruthlessly crushed organised crime

THE CORNER of Archer and Kedzie, on Chicago’s South West side, is far from being the city’s prettiest intersection. What it does have, however, is wide streets, which in the early hours of October 23rd made it a perfect place for a car meet. These, which are especially popular among young Mexican-American men, involve a caravan of fast cars and huge modified trucks known as “rammers” taking over a road junction to perform tricks. Mobile-phone footage shot by an attendee shows a sports car spinning doughnuts at high speed, tyres screeching, while onlookers hold up their phones to record it. And then the camera suddenly dips, as the sound of gunfire cracks out, followed by screaming. Five people were shot. Three died.

Finding out what happened that night is tricky. The police said only that the three who died, all boys and young men, aged from 15 to 21, were affiliated to gangs. Yet according to a community activist who has pieced together the details, the spark was a dispute between two street gangs attending. One was Two Six, a Latino street gang named after 26th Street in Little Village, the centre of Chicago’s Mexican community. The other was a “set” of the Almighty Latin King Nation, a group with origins as a Latino self-help organisation in the early 1950s that turned into a national (and indeed international) organised-crime group. “They got into a staring match, a bit ‘what are you looking at’,” says the activist. Soon they were shooting at each other. Now there are fears of escalation. “Thank God it’s not the summertime,” she says.