United States v. Edward Williams

POSNER, Chief Judge.

The El Rukns were a street gang active on Chicago’s south side for two decades ending in the late 1980s. The gang’s main activity was the sale of illegal drugs. Its members committed many murders, and engaged in much other violence, in the turf wars that are endemic to the trade in illegal drugs. The trial from which these appeals come to us was the last of five trials in the Northern District of Illinois of different leaders of the El Rukns. The defendants in this trial as in the other ones were convicted and sentenced to long prison terms. But the convictions in all four…