In Chicago alone, authorities pinned 75 homicides a year on the gang. He was smart and manipulative, a reader of Machiavelli who tried to project a positive image through food giveaways to the poor. 'King Hoover' or 'Chairman Larry' got a taste for thuggery early in life, pummeling youngsters who teased him for his stutter.

Until recently, the GDs seemed invincible, a pyramid with Hoover alone at the top. Within days, NEWSWEEK has learned, more federal indictments are expected to take down another busload of GDs leaders. The payoff: the team has toppled what amounts to a drug cartel with profits estimated at more than $100 million a year -surpassing those of Barnes & Noble or Mutual of Omaha. Turning the Gangster Disciples' tight organization into a weakness, Safer's federal agents and prosecutors attacked the gang's leadership while deploying crafty street cops to spread confusion-and turn informers-in the lower ranks. This NEWSWEEK reconstruction chronicles the ups and downs of the most ambitious assault on any major gang in U.S. Seven years and seven trials later, Safer has an answer. How would he answer his own kids when they asked what he, a government prosecutor, had done to stop young people with guns from killing one another? As a boy in Queens, N.Y., he had asked his parents what they had done to stop the beatings of civil-rights workers in the South. The prosecutor had personal reasons to stop that from happening. But he had somehow run his vast empire from his cell for two decades, and Safer feared Hoover might soon persuade a parole board to release him. He was in prison for ordering the murder of a man who had stolen dope from the gang. The GDs had spread their drug peddling to cities from coast to coast, and now the 'gang nation's' exalted leader, Larry Hoover, was threatening to make a comeback. I'm outta here.ДЄs the days passed, other thoughts gnawed at Safer. Baby-sit this dead-end case for a few months and. attorney's office in Chicago expires on July 10, 1993. As the supervisor went on, Safer did some calculations in his head. Safer asked if federal agents had developed any informants within the so-called GDs-a paranoid group notorious for killing members who betrayed it. And you're handing me an investigation that in three years has turned up squat about a mob deadlier than Al Capone's. But here's what Safer heard: you want me to take on the biggest narcotics gang in the country, the Chicago-based Gangster Disciples, with 50,000 members in 35 states. His supervisor, Dan Gillogly, was talking up the rich possibilities of a new case. Ron Safer felt his bright future as a federal prosecutor sliding into the abyss.

Larry hoover kids