The Mayor of Howard Street

A little after six o’clock on a Wednesday evening,  men begin to filter into the Howard Area Employment Resource Center, in Rogers Park. One young man walks in sporting cornrows and a shirt and tie. Charles Hardwick, who manages the center, grins approvingly. “Brother came in here with his pants down to here,” he says, gesturing below his hip. “Now look at him.”

Tall, bald, and broad-shouldered, Hardwick presides over the room. His voice is back-straightening. “Gentlemen, you know the rules. Hoods down, hats off.” The men he’s addressing are here for the center’s weekly Overcomers Group, which helps re-entering citizens find community. They are “re-entering citizens,” the center is careful to say, and not “ex-convicts.” Hardwick, fifty-seven,  is fitted in a white shirt and well-pressed black suit, with a stud in one ear. For twelve years he has helped run the employment program at Howard Area Community Center. He always shows up for work in a suit, though he doesn’t have to.

Everyone who walks into the Employment Resource Center either knows Hardwick personally, or has been sent by someone to ask for him. The workforce program he manages with Outreach Director Antione Day, an old friend, serves 120 to 160 people a year, meeting with each of them once a month. Many who enroll are re-entering citizens, though anyone is welcome. “Antione and myself,” says Hardwick, “we got a reputation throughout the city as guys who keep it real, keep it straight, and run these programs the way they’re supposed to be because we’re both ex-cons ourselves.”

Hardwick, who grew up on the South Side and was raised by a single mother on welfare, has served fourteen years in prison. In Rogers Park, he is commonly known as “the mayor of Howard Street.” He doesn’t know if he likes the title. “My bosses already think I think that I’m outside of Howard Area Community Center, that I think this is my own little island.” Sometimes people call him Howard, and he has to correct them.

Hardwick is also a skilled code-switcher, able to speak  his mind to power brokers. At open 49th Ward business meetings held by the alderman, Hardwick is often the only black man in the room. “I use my position to voice what I don’t think is fair to black people, and I do it intelligently so they can’t throw me out.”

He knows the importance of community integration, better than most.

In all his fifty-seven years, Hardwick has always been a bully or a leader, sometimes both at the same time.

When his mother moved her eight children into a two-flat in the Back of the Yards in the early seventies, there was only one other black family on the block. Within a year, Hardwick says, there were about twenty. The white families were moving out, and Mickey Cogwell, chief of a gang called Cobra Stones, sighted virgin territory from a mile away.

Before the move, Hardwick had lived in the Robert Taylor Homes, next door to “the Hole”—three connected blocks of buildings on 53rd and State Street that formed the stronghold of Cogwell’s Cobra Stones. Hardwick had worked under Cogwell, and soon after he moved he received Cogwell’s blessing to start a charter in the neighborhood. “We were drawn together by a community that was predominantly white,” says Hardwick. “The community didn’t want us there, so it was only natural that we get together and run the community.” They called themselves the King Cobra Stones.

Armed with zip guns made from door checks and nails, they embarked on a door-to-door “recruitment” drive. At first, people were forced to join, unless they wanted to see their houses burned down. Later, they did so by choice. At its peak in the mid-seventies, the King Cobras were 150 strong, comprising about fifty true die-hards and a hundred or so tag-alongs, according to Hardwick. They called their turf—from 51st to 56th Streets, between Racine and the rail yards to the east—Motown, so named because Cobra Stones called themselves Moors, or Mo’s. Hardwick, nicknamed Teddy Bear for his formidable size, was a “king,” one rank below the highest office.

Drug pushing was the gang’s main business. They bought cocaine and heroin wholesale from the big chiefs of the Cobra Stones, and sold it in ounces to street dealers. Out of a $17,000 “key,” or kilogram of powder, they could make up to $50,000, Hardwick says.

Gangs were a business enterprise, and a charter’s first duty was to fatten the treasury. “Sell drugs, sell whatever,” says Hardwick. “We had good car thieves, we had good burglars, we had good pickpockets, panhandlers, purse-snatchers. Any way of generating revenue, we did it.” In each case, a bulk of the income went to the Black P. Stone Nation, a cartel of allied gangs of which the Cobra Stones were a member.

Though Hardwick claimed a leadership position, he had to defend it with public displays of violence. He has twin scars on his palms from when he snatched a knife from a “square” who retaliated when he stole marijuana from him. Hardwick stabbed him eighteen times for trying to make sales on his turf. During another fight, Hardwick was stabbed through the right nostril with a piece of metal that came out through the roof of his mouth. To fix it, hospital doctors  had to cut away the jagged edge of his wound and sew it over. “I think they did a pretty good job,” he says, feeling the flatness of his nose, which betrays his bone structure. “They just changed my profile.”

When he was fourteen, Hardwick was convicted of burglary and car theft, and sent to a youth detention center. Almost three years later, he was released and earned his high school diploma. At age seventeen, old enough to be tried as an adult, he was sent to Stateville prison for armed robbery.

Youth prison was where Hardwick furthered his education in the criminal life, which he began at the age of twelve. In the Robert Taylor Homes, it was obvious even to children that those who crossed the poverty line usually did it illegally. Hardwick got to know a car thief, and was taught to steal a car before he could drive. “I learned how to drive by stealing a car and crashing it,” he recalls. “And then the next car I stole, I learned how to drive a little bit better.”

To survive youth prison—to come out undefeated, with priorities unchanged—was another important milestone along Hardwick’s criminal career path, almost like acing a final interview. If he was afraid, he tried not to show it. Fear had no street value, but reputation did. “First I was a money-getting guy. Now, I’m dubbed the tough guy,” he says. “Because if you go to jail and don’t tell on anybody, you’re alright. You’re trusted. And then you meet people and make relationships in jail.”

When youth prison spat him out, Hardwick had matured as a criminal. He wanted to “invest” in heroin and cocaine, which the gangs controlled, and his reputation opened the door. He stopped stealing cars. He was a drug dealer now, he told himself, and a chief of the Cobra Stones. With this mindset, prison too turned out to be less of a shock than he had thought it would be.

Hardwick was sent to Stateville Correctional Center, and assigned to one of the prison’s roundhouses. He remembers standing on the cell-house ground for the first time, looking up at the stacks of cells that enclosed it. To the boy who had grown surrounded by concrete, this place did not look much different than the Hole. A voice called out his name, Teddy Bear. The voice belonged to Napo, a Cobra Stone, gone so long from the street that some had thought him dead. Hardwick was at home.

You all are some stupid motherfuckers,” Hardwick remembers saying to himself in 1997, lying on his bunk with a blanket over his face. He was in Pontiac Correctional Center, serving the last five of his fourteen years for multiple counts of armed robbery and burglary. One gangster, Crazy MC, had just squirted a bottle of rotting feces into the face of a black officer. Feces clung to the officer’s mouth, recalls Hardwick. The smell was awful. When Hardwick tried to reprimand Crazy, the other inmates began starting a row, accusing him of taking up for the police.

“I changed that day, but it was a slow process. It wasn’t like, ‘I’m done with this,’” says Hardwick.  “It was more like, I’m not stupid, I’m not ignorant, I’m not heartless, but I’m hanging out and calling these guys my brothers. Is this who I am?” He listened to their shouts, and that was the closest he got to a crossroads hymn marking his turn away from gang life. Crazy’s feces remained on the gallery until the inmates were released from lockdown.

Gangs ruled Pontiac. Hardwick remembers inmates having sex in the visiting room, picnics and barbecues on the prison yard, and access to whiskey, wine, and drugs. But gang control also made it hard to do time there. Jerome Williams, a former inmate, explains: “I’m a part of a gang, and I’m here talking with you. Cross over there, my gang is fighting with someone. That means I got to stop what I’m doing, and go help because I’m a part of that. How could you do your life like that? I wanted to be accountable for my own actions, not someone else’s.”

Inmates seeking peace of mind often sought Williams out in his cell, which the Kennedy-King College graduate decked out like a dormitory room. Even gang leaders like Hardwick would drop by. “Yeah, he was in control,” says Williams, who is sixty-two. “But being the chief, you’re obligated to certain things that you can’t push aside. A lot of the chiefs really wanted to sit out and do nothing. But their foot soldiers wouldn’t allow them to sit down and leave things alone. They pushed him to be what he is.”

Hardwick was eventually transferred out of Pontiac and into medium-security facilities for the last leg of his sentence. “It was like being free,” says Hardwick. “I didn’t have to be tough. I didn’t have to handle my business, as they called it. It changed my whole life.” He thought these medium-security facilities must look like college, which he had never attended. Rooms were divided by doors instead of bars. Inmates there had a different mentality from their gang-affiliated counterparts. They obeyed rules, and were set on going home.

Hardwick was released in 2001 and put under house arrest in Skokie, near Rogers Park. He was also enrolled in Strive, a job-training program for ex-offenders. But Hardwick felt less than prepared to re-enter society legally. He headed back to 51st Street, to the White House of Motown, an apartment where the brothers hung out and bagged dope. He was still in his gray prison-issue sweat suit.

Hardwick approached 14K, a brother he had come up with. He remembers 14K reaching under a table and slapping what appeared to be $10,000 on the tabletop. Hardwick’s eyes lit up. Then 14K placed two keys of cocaine on the table, followed by a .38 Special and a nine-millimeter. The gang was opening a spot down the street, and 14K wanted Hardwick to run it.

Hardwick said he couldn’t do it. 14K leaned forward. Hardwick remembers his words: “Do I fucking look like I’m in the business of giving my money to a motherfucker and then you go on about your business?”

Guns cocked, and 14K put a hundred-dollar bill in Hardwick’s hand, telling him never to come back. After thirty-two years, this was how Hardwick would go out. Rejection clarified what he had always known but forgotten. “We were a gang, we were an enterprise. It was very clear,” says Hardwick. “Gangs are not in the business of you going off independently being successful in your life.” Gangs, according to Hardwick, have never been concerned with community or self-improvement. Not in the seventies, and not now.

Hardwick was alone. He was growing older, and more hungry. With only a high school diploma and eighteen felony convictions, his prospects of finding legal work looked weak, and he shared this apprehension with his counselor at Strive. But he could only hold his Strive counselors accountable for finding him a job if he did absolutely everything that they required of him.

On graduation day, Hardwick was asked to speak for the class. On placement day, they offered him a job as a placement specialist, paying $25,000 a year. Hardwick says he could have made $20,000 in just one week as a dope dealer. But it was a different kind of money. Hardwick worked his new job “like it was the last job on the planet.” He was the first one in the office every morning, and the last to leave at night. If a workshop had twenty people in it, he saw it as his job to get all twenty of them a job placement when the month was up. He did not know it, but his contract required him to place only four people a month.

In 2006, Hardwick was appointed to head the Howard Area Employment Resource Center.

On an average day in the center, every sort of person steps into Hardwick’s office. Desperation sends them, or lawyer’s orders, or just the need to share some good news. Some have work but are looking for a career. More will work whatever job they get. Hardwick is always the voice of reality: harsh with his expectations, kinder once you meet them. Under Hardwick’s leadership, seventy-two percent of enrollees in the employment program exit positive, meaning that they have worked the job that they were placed in for ninety days without issue.  “He was aggressive with the gangs and now he’s aggressive with changing lives,” says Jerome Williams, whom Hardwick recruited as a case manager. Says Williams of Hardwick: “If you ain’t been nowhere, you can’t show nothing different.”

Hardwick has had his differences with local slumlords and a group of white male residents called Rogers Park Positive Loitering, but he never feels threatened and rarely loses his cool. “He means well,” says Antione Day. “Sometimes when you mean well, you do well. We make it difficult with all this language we use. He keeps it simple.”

Day, fifty-two, met Hardwick at Pontiac. After Day was exonerated in 2002, they spotted each other at an ex-offender community conference. When Day talks about his workplace, he calls it a “community center.” It is a humble space in an old building, pieced together with furniture from closing businesses, but always neat and orderly. Goodwill is often shared outside of professional roles. A recovering alcoholic lends his tie to a young man who has an interview. Day gives the men free haircuts on Wednesdays. Hardwick walks a young man to the main center to pick up a pair of work boots.

If the neighborhood belongs to those who fight to keep it together, then Hardwick doesn’t face much competition for the title of mayor. Gentrification, as he puts it, is a model of economic growth that rejects community integration. “You get in your car, go downtown to your office, come back to your garage, and wait for the rest of the community to change.”

Hardwick therefore makes it a point to intervene when well-meaning but poorly planned community initiatives are put forth by middle-class interest groups. He is on a committee to turn a one-acre lot between Howard and Ashland Avenue into a community garden, which will open by the end of May. Hardwick takes his job very seriously. “Somebody drew this,” he says, holding up a color-pencil drawing of a barn with a big red roof and signage that reads, “Howdy, Howard Pavilion.” Oversized fruit sit in the windows. “Howdy? Give me a break, this is Howard Street. So that’s been scratched.”

For a man who has crossed worlds, Hardwick has a fine sense of the ridiculous. He has come a long way up at a very late age, and perhaps that is why he deals in second chances: “Guilt is a strong word, it prevents you from moving forward. The decisions I made in my life, I suffered for them. And that’s probably why I do the work that I do.”