scourge of the housing-project community.) The miscellaneous ex- penses also include the costs associated with a gang members murder. The gang not only paid for the funeral but often gave a stipend of up to three years wages to the victims family. Venkatesh had once asked why the gang was so generous in this regard. "Thats a fucking stupid question," he was told, " cause as long as you been with us, you still dont understand that their families is our families. We cant just leave em out. We been knowing these folks our whole lives, man, so we grieve when they grieve. You got to respect the family." There was an- other reason for the death benefits: the gang feared community back-   lash (its enterprise was plainly a destructive one) and figured it could buy some goodwill for a few hundred dollars here and there. The rest of the money the gang took in went to its members, start- ing with J. T. Here is the single line item in the gangs budget that made J. T. the happiest:     Net monthly profit accruing to leader $8,500     At $8,500 per month, J. T.s annual salary was about $100,000- tax-free, of course, and not including the various off-the-books money he pocketed. This was a lot more than he earned at his short- lived office job in the Loop. And J. T. was just one of roughly 100 leaders at this level within the Black Disciples network. So there were indeed some drug dealers who could afford to live large, or-in the case of the gangs board of directors-extremely large. Each of those top 20 bosses stood to earn about $500,000 a year. (A third of them, however, were typically imprisoned at any time, a significant down- side of an up position in an illicit industry.) So the top 120 men on the Black Disciples pyramid were paid very well. But the pyramid they sat atop was gigantic. Using J. T.s franchise as a yardstick-3 officers and roughly 50 foot soldiers-