In Lollipop, Bob Levin has written a totally honest “memoir” of his year as a VISTA lawyer in Chicago from September in 1967 to September in 1968.
It is totally honest because, as he says in his introduction, “I have made up up (almost) all names of individuals and organizations. I have manufactured dialogue. I have composited some characters and omitted significant others. I have altered time sequences and appropriated events which occurred to others as my own. Some of what I believed happened did not. Some of what I thought I’d made up, I learned from my journal, occurred.”
This is all in legitimate service to telling a story that needs to be told of one young lawyer’s experiences in sixties’ Chicago, that city of Sandburg’s broad shoulders and the Daley administration’s narrow and dangerous mind.
Lollipop might seem a flippant title for a book that at its core is a serious consideration of mid-twentieth America in all its shabby glory. It comes from the following statement by the Black civil rights leader and scholar Roger Wilkins: “What we are talking about is changing the way people live. Everything else is band-aids and lollipops.”
Lollipops are also known as suckers, and Robin Levy, as Bob Levin calls himself here, might have been a sucker for taking on the stone wall of Chicago corruption, racism, and outright murder. But he did, for what must have been the longest year of his life. And the most dangerous. He was dealing with killers on both sides of the law. The Black Panther hero Fred Hampton would be murdered by Chicago police the next year, and Levin, or Levy, would interact with at least two gang members who had each killed twenty or more people, including one who had killed a Chicago detective.
For most Americans, given the cultural lag, the sixties took place in the early seventies and beyond, but Levin’s year in sixties Chicago was not about bell bottoms and tie-dyes; he was deeply involved with the Raiders, a mega Black gang with over 5,000 members in its various branches. They were led by the Big Dozen, including Main Chief Orestes “Simba” Stokes, Vice-Chief Miller “Mad Dog” Burquette, War Lord Anthone “Tater” Poteet, and Spiritual Advisor Jerome “Ice Pick” Duran.
One of Lollipop‘s most vivid and and memorable scenes actually happened before Levin’s time in Chicago, but demonstrates the power of the Raiders. In l965, Martin Luther King made what Levin calls his “unsuccessful assault on Chicago” and called for a rally at Soldier Field. The Raiders, in their red berets, came in force. “They marched across the grassy field, into the stands, to the uppermost row, where they split ranks and marched in one unbroken circle around the rim of the great bowl. That huge, red-topped line impressed many people,” Levin writes.
In the midst of Chicago’s South Side’s deep-set Black poverty, Bob Levin found patches of unexpected gentility and pride. Canvassing a block that was to be torn down in the Strawberry Hill neighborhood, he and an associate encounter Lucy Johnson, a matriarchal grandmother whose living room held “dark beams and bannisters, highly polished and intricately carved; red Oriental rug with gold and silver design; soft, plump furniture, white lace doilies on arms. Behind a brass screen, a fire crackled. On the mantel sat snapshots of children in graduation gowns and military uniforms.”
Levin’s eye for telling detail is matched by his observation that “I was shocked to note my surprise at finding grandmothers on the South Side.”
No small wonder, given the brutality of life there that Levin encountered on a daily and even hourly basis. When Raiders’ chief “Simba” Stokes was assaulted and threatened by two GIU (Gang Intelligence Unit) detectives, Levin set up a sting in which he hoped to film the cops further actions against Stokes.
On his way, alone, to Stokes’s next meeting with the detectives for the sting, Levin admits to himself the difference between him and Stokes: “I was having an adventure. He was enduring another cold night on the South Side.”
When Levin’s “adventure” went sideways, and he encountered GIU Detective Orestes Newcombe up close and all too personal, “I watched Newcombe’s heaving, sweating face. I stood so close to the monster I could smell its breath.”
Levin knew that if he had been Simba Stokes he would have been beaten or shot, but Newcombe’s physical menace nonetheless threatened him until the deus appearance of a captain from Chicago PD’s Internal Investigations unit who defused the situation. Levin, it appears, wasn’t the only one interested in Newcombe’s lawless activities. In a postscript, Levin reveals that the cop Newcombe is based on is doing life in Alcatraz for killing two men for a drug ring for which he moonlighted as a hit man.
Bob Levin has more than a touch of the poet in writing about his year in the wilds of Chicago. In describing an abandoned yard, desolate, with a lone, forgotten child’s slide the only remnant of life, he says simply, “The wind blew in from the lake, and dust swirled in the air like children’s ghosts around the slide.”
He is less poetic in describing the vicissitudes of Boys Court, which he says was “the bottom rung of Chicago’s criminal justice system” and “crowded, noisy, dirty, hot. Personnel were hostile and rude. Due process was minimal. Judges advised the accused of their rights through mumbles, with no effort to ascertain if they were heard or understood.”
Both Kennedys were dead, MLK was dead, Malcolm was dead. After Bobby Kennedy’s assassination on June 5th, Levin says, “I decided it was time for California.”
As fate would have it, his roommate, Woody Snow, had scored a shiny black Cadillac from a dealer in Cicero that he was driving to the owner in San Francisco. They had ten days for delivery. Both young lawyers went AWOL. “We’ll be back before anyone knows we’re gone,” the roomie said, which speaks volumes to what they were actually accomplishing.
In hippie San Francisco, Levin re-connects with Ruth Delhi, whom he had met in a creative writing class at Brandeis University. In her silver Opel, they drove “across fog-swept Golden Gate Bridge” and lay in the sun on Mount Tamalpais, smoked a joint, and Levin ruminates: “I had traveled from the South Side to the mountain. I had left long hours, futile work, people who hated and distrusted me for this quirky view … .”
The view returns to Chicago when the two young lawyers return in another drive-away car to the payoff of the Democratic National Convention that August and the riots of the Chicago police.
One of the most chilling passages in Lollipop is the attack by the forces of the law on the protesters in Lincoln Park: “Policemen, helmeted and gas-masked, advanced, some marching, some breaking into a run, swearing and howling “Kill, kill, kill.”
Kill, kill, kill.
In a footnote, Levin says he never returned to Chicago after 1968 except to change planes.
In 1971, he married the Ruth Delhi of the book in real life.
After Chicago, Levin says, “I represented injured workers in industrial accident claims for forty years – doing good – but still handing out lollipops.”
NOTE: More licks from Lollipop here. The book is available through www.theboblevin.com or by sending $15 to Spruce Hill Press, P. O. Box 9492, Berkeley 94709