October 14th, 1986. Early morning, Chicago’s west side. A man walks out of an all-night mini on Roosevelt Road toward his late model sports car. 30 years old, king of the traveling vice lords. Most celebrated gang leader on Chicago’s west side. Two men get out of a parked car.

One of them shouts a gang name. Then the shooting starts. Four shots, head, neck, shoulder. He doesn’t go down. He staggers across that parking lot, shot four times, until he reaches a police squad car already rolling in. The store manager runs out, finds him on the ground, asks who did this. The man looks up and says, “The Wade boys did it to me.” Then the police arrive.

Same question. He changes his answer. Says he doesn’t know. Three unknown males and he’ll handle it himself. 6 hours later, Mount Sinai Hospital. Neil, King Neil Wallace is gone. He was 30 years old, and he died protecting the code that built him. See, King Neil’s story really starts in East Garfield Park.

Not the version you see today, not the version the city likes to talk about. The real one, what it actually was and what was done to it. In 1950, East Garfield Park had over 70,000 residents, working families, churches on every block, a commercial strip on Madison Street they called the equator of Chicago, restaurants, grocery stores, movie theaters,armacies with ice cream counters in the back.

A whole world self-contained breathing. 10 years later, it was already dying. and nobody in power lifted a finger to stop it. Here’s how it happened. The federal government builds the Eisenhower Expressway through the 50s and in doing so physically tears through the southern end of the neighborhood, displacing families with nowhere to go.

White residents leave, the banks follow, redlinining kicks in, meaning black families can’t get mortgages, can’t build equity, can’t own what they live in. Absentee landlords buy up the buildings and let them rot while charging the same rent, sometimes higher. Then April 4th, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr.

is assassinated in Memphis and the west side of Chicago burns. Madison Street, that whole commercial spine, the equator, the heart of the neighborhood gone. Almost every business destroyed in the riots that followed. And here’s the part that never gets said. Clearly enough, the city’s answer was to bulldoze the ruins and leave the lots empty, not rebuild, demolish, and abandon.

By 1970, East Garfield Park had lost its commercial base, its middle class, its tax revenue, and its future. What was left was poverty so deep it got into the walls of the buildings, into the air, into the options available to every child born there. By 2000, the population had collapsed to just over 20,000.

70,000 to 20,000 in 50 years. That ain’t neglect. That’s a choice. Now into this place, April 3rd, 1956, a child is born in Mississippi to Neil Wallace, Senior, and a woman named Zola Thompson. They are part of the great migration. Hundreds of thousands of black southerners who came north chasing the promise of something better.

They land on Chicago’s west side. Their son comes up in East Garfield Park during the 60s and 70s. And if you know what that neighborhood was like back then, you already know the options he had. By the late60s, a young Neil Wallace finds the traveling vice lords. Now, the TVL’s. And I want you to understand who they were before they were a gang.

They started in 1962. A group of boys, mostly 16 years old, hanging around California Avenue in Floroi Street, right in front of Zion Travelers Church. Thomas Diablo Wells gave them their name. His exact words, and I’m quoting here, were, “From now on, we travelers and we’ll travel anywhere to stomp a [ __ ] in the dirt.

” And real talk, you can’t say the message wasn’t clear. But here’s the detail that matters for what comes later. Thomas Wells, one of the men who founded the Travelers, was himself a former Albany vice lord before he started the group. Keep that name in mind, the Albany Vice Lords, because 24 years after Wells helped build the Travelers, it’ll be the Albany Vice Lords who end up pulling the trigger on their own king.

The streets of Chicago have a long memory, and they have a sense of irony that would make a Greek Tragedian uncomfortable. Here’s something people don’t really talk about when they bring up Chicago gang leaders. Most of them the ones who end up in documentaries, on Wikipedia, painted up on murals.

Most of the time they’re remembered for what they wrecked. The bodies, the territory, the weight they pushed. That’s the record history ends up keeping. King Neil gets remembered for something else entirely. And that is what makes this story worth telling. Let’s go back to the late60s. Neil Wallace is a teenager in East Garfield Park running with the traveling vice lords in a neighborhood that by this point has been systematically stripped of every legitimate institution that might have given him a different path. No jobs, no investment, no future the city was willing to build for him. What the TVL’s had in those early years was something unexpected. baseball. In 1968, the Travelers put together their first team called themselves the Question Marks.

The following year, 1969, a second team simply called the Travelers. The teams ran on and off through the 70s, the way most things in that neighborhood ran, held together by will and not much else. Young Neil Wallace comes up in this era in a gang that is playing organized baseball. I want you to sit with that image for a second because it matters for who he becomes.

Through the early 70s, Wallace rises quietly, consistently. By the mid70s, TVL oral history places him as the man who coordinates the expansion of TVL territory into Austin, Division Street, central to Long Avenue. Nobody who was there disputes it. He is not the leader yet, but everyone who matters already knows he will be.

Then comes 198081. The man running the traveling vice lords, Darius Edwards, known on the streets as Ray Charles, steps down and the elders of the TVL Nation sit down and take a vote. This is not a small thing. The TVL’s by this point are one of the most significant gangs on Chicago’s west side.

Whoever gets that chair inherits serious responsibility and serious danger. The elders, men who had built this thing from a group of teenagers in front of a church on Florenoi Street, choose Neil Wallace in his mid20s because of his leadership, because of his charisma, because according to every account that exists, he was simply the best man in the room.

They gave him two titles: King of Kings, Lord of Lords. Now, here is where I need you to pay attention because this is the part of King Neil’s story that I genuinely cannot explain away and don’t want to. Wallace takes power and does something no Chicago gang leader of his generation does. He builds not territory, not a drug operation, though that exists, too.

Let’s not pretend otherwise. The TVL’s under King Neil were still a street organization operating outside the law. People were hurt, corners were controlled. That is part of this story, too. But what he builds on top of that, that is what nobody expected. He brings hip hop to East Garfield Park at a time when it had barely touched mainstream radio when most record stores on the west side weren’t stocking it.

when nobody in the industry was sure it would last. He opens a record store and a game room. He holds break dancing competitions in 1984 Chicago. Think about what that means. He runs a free breakfast program on California Avenue. He tells his members, and this one still gets me, he tells the traveling vice lords to stay in school, to get college degrees, and to pursue entrepreneurship.

a gang leader, running a breakfast program and preaching higher education on the west side of Chicago in the early 80s while simultaneously being the king of kings of one of the city’s most powerful street organizations. And then 1984, he takes those two baseball teams, the Question marks and the Travelers, and unifies them into a single squad, California Gold, named for California Avenue, the street that built the TVL’s and the gold they wore alongside the black.

He puts Andrew Bay Patterson in charge of it, specifically because Bay is looking for a way to keep young travelers off the corners. California Gold eventually competes in the USSA Championship in Lacrosse, Wisconsin in 1992, nearly six years after their king is already dead.

So, here’s the question I keep coming back to, and I want you to think about it before we get to what happens next. Was King Neil genuinely trying to build something different in East Garfield Park? Or was he just smart enough to understand that a king with a breakfast program and a baseball team is harder to kill than a king who only has soldiers? Maybe both things are true.

Maybe neither fully explains him. What I know is this. The community respected him in a way that had nothing to do with fear. And in that neighborhood, in that era, that was the rarest thing in the world. Remember Thomas Wills? Thomas Diablo Wills, the man who founded the Traveling Vice Lords in 1962, the man whose exact words named the whole organization.

Before he built the Travelers, Wells was an Albany vice lord. I keep coming back to that because in October of 1986, it is the Albany vice lords who come for King Neil. The gang that kills him shares the same founding bloodline as the gang he leads. This isn’t a war between strangers.

This is a family destroying itself over drug money. Chicago will do that to you. Here’s how it starts. 1986, the crack era is hitting the west side like a freight train. Money everywhere. Paranoia everywhere. Alliances cracking under the weight of it all. The traveling vice lords and the Albany vice lords get into a dispute over bad drug deals.

The kind of dispute that in another world gets resolved in a meeting room. In this world, it gets resolved in blood. King Neil’s chief enforcer, a man named Jetty Williams, known on the street as Bo Diddley, ends up at the center of it. Bo Diddley kills a man from the Albany Vice Lords, a man they called Lucky. The conflict is now open.

Blood has been spilled and the Albany Vice Lords want it returned. But the men who ultimately come for King Neil, the Wade brothers, Aaron and Alvin, aren’t acting for Lucky. Federal court records are specific about their motive. Neil Wallace had ordered the shooting of their brother.

This wasn’t just gang war. This was personal. King Neil ordered a hit. That order created the men who would kill him. There’s a word for that. Several words, actually. None of them are comfortable. October 14th, 1986. Early morning, Wallace, 30 years old, living at 4,319 West Thomas Street, goes to an allnight food store at 2,950 West Roosevelt Road. Routine stop.

Late model sports car parked outside. He comes out of that store and walks across the parking lot. Two men get out of a vehicle. One of them shouts a gang name. Then they open fire. Four shots. He is hit in the head, the neck, the shoulder. Any one of those could kill a man. Together they should drop him immediately.

But Neil Wallace does not drop. He staggers across that parking lot. shot four times until he reaches a police squad car already rolling in on reports of gunfire. The Tribune will later report the responding officers rush him to Mount Sinai Hospital. But before the police reach him, the store manager, a man named Robert Williams, runs outside, finds Wallace on the ground, asks who did this, and Wallace tells him, “The Wade boys did it to me.

” He knows exactly who shot him. He says the name clearly right there in that parking lot bleeding out. He gives up the truth. Then the police officer arrives, leans down, asks the same question, and King Neil, shot four times, dying, changes his answer. He tells the officer he does not know who shot him. Three unknown black males.

And then he says the words that I think about every time I come back to this story. He says he will handle the situation himself. Shot four times, dying in a parking lot on Roosevelt Road. And he is still in that moment the king still running the code, still refusing to give the streets to the police.

He named his killers once to a civilian in what the courts would later call an excited utterance. Then he swallowed it back down. That second statement, I don’t know who did it, was ruled inadmissible at trial. 6 hours later, Neil King Neil Wallace was pronounced dead at Mount Si Hospital Medical Center. He was 30 years old, built everything he built, held everything he held, and was gone before most men have figured out what they want to do with their lives.

6 years. That is how long it takes for anyone to officially answer for the murder of King Neil. 6 years in a neighborhood where everybody knew, where people were standing in that parking lot where the king himself with his last coherent words named the men who shot him.

The code of silence didn’t just protect the killers. It buried them so deep that it took until 1992 for Chicago police to make an arrest. 6 years after the shooting, Aaron Wade and his brother Alvin are finally charged with the murder of Neil Wallace. The trial court itself acknowledged the delay. The judge’s exact reasoning preserved in federal court records attributed the silence to what he called, and I’m quoting directly, the code of silence in the cult of settling these sorts of events.

The cult of settling these sorts of events. A sitting judge describing the West’s street code in open court. And he’s not wrong. That code is the same one King Neil invoked when he looked up at that police officer. Shot four times. and said he didn’t know who did it. The code that built him also buried him.

The key witness at trial is a woman named Elsie McCoy. She testifies she was present at the shooting. She says Alvin Wade got out of the car first, approached Wallace, started talking, then Aaron Wade stepped out, walked over, and shot King Neil in the head. And the defense goes after her hard.

inconsistencies between her grand jury testimony and her trial testimony, questions about her motive, whether she’s testifying out of justice or out of something more personal. The judge notes the weaknesses, notes the six-year gap, notes the complications, and still convicts. September 1993, Aaron Wade guilty of firstdegree murder, 35 years.

The Illinois Supreme Court denies his appeal. Alvin Wade, also convicted. The Wade boys, as King Neil called them in that parking lot, are going to prison for what they did on Roosevelt Road. Justice came nearly 7 years late, built on a dying man’s retracted accusation and a witness who waited 6 years to speak. Make of that what you will.

Now, the legacy. When King Neil died, the title of King died with him. The TVL elders never gave it to anyone else. That tells you something. You don’t retire a title like that out of bureaucratic convenience. You retire it because the man who held it was unreplaceable. Because what he represented, that specific combination of street authority and genuine community investment, never walked through that door again.

For years after his death through the late 80s and into the ‘9s, you could find his name on walls all across East Garfield Park. King Neil, King Neil, spray paint on brick, the neighborhood’s version of a monument. And here is the thing that genuinely fascinates me about his legacy.

It is more durable than almost any other Chicago gang leader of his era. Young travelers today, decades removed from 1986, still know who King Neil was. Meanwhile, ask somebody on the west side today about the leaders who ran these same streets in the same era. Most of those names are gone. King Neils isn’t.

The man who built California Gold and ran break dancing competitions in his record store has outlasted men who ran empires 10 times the size of his. But the streets he loved, they didn’t become what he tried to build. The 2,700 block of West Floro Street, the exact block where Thomas Diablo Wells gathered those teenagers in front of Zion Travelers Church in 1962 and named the Travelers.

That block became the focus of a federal drug investigation in the mid90s. 15 convictions, life sentences for at least 10 people. Then in 2017, 30 years after King Neil dies in that parking lot, federal investigators launched Operation Shut Travel Down. More than 50 people charged. Heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine, crack.

Same block, same gang, same street corner where it all started. The operation was named with a certain federal bluntness after the gang it was designed to destroy. Neil King Neil Wallace is buried at Oakidge Glenn Oak Cemetery in Hillside, Illinois. Quiet suburb, manicured lawns a long way from Roosevelt in Sacramento.

He ran a breakfast program. He ran a record store. He held break dancing competitions when nobody believed hip hop was going anywhere. He built a baseball team to keep kids off corners. He told his soldiers to go to college. And in a parking lot, shot four times and dying, he chose the code over his own life one final time.

Was he a king who tried to build something real in a place the city had already decided to abandon? Or was it always going to end there? on that asphalt in that dark outside that mini mart. The corner of California and Florenoa is still there. The walls have been repainted, but everybody who grew up on those blocks still knows the name.