It was late, somewhere past midnight, in the South Side of Chicago, and the stairwell of Building 4040, deep inside the Robert Taylor Homes, was silent except for occasional footsteps echoing from a floor above. Surrounded by blocks of crumbling public housing just off State Street, in one of the city’s most segregated and neglected neighborhoods, a young man walked into the building with a clipboard and a survey, asking strangers a question that now felt painfully naive:

How does it feel to be Black and poor?

A group of men laughed at him, then took his bag and told him to sit tight. So that's what he did for hours, under threat and suspicion of being from a rival gang, unsure if he was being held or merely ignored. No one had told him when he could leave or if he'd ever walk out of the place alive. He hadn’t eaten. He hadn’t moved. At some point, he had even wet himself in the dark.

It wasn’t the kind of fieldwork training he’d received at the University of Chicago. But it was the beginning of everything for the Chennai-born sociology graduate student Sudhir Venkatesh.

Morning arrived with a proposition. A sharply dressed man, calm and confident, revealed himself as J.T, the leader of the local Black Kings chapter. He invited Sudhir to find out for himself how it feels to be poor and Black in America. Through this relationship that would unfold over nearly a decade, Sudhir embedded himself deeply in the fabric of the projects. And this plunge into Chicago’s underground economy became the electric hook of 'Gang Leader For A Day', a stirring memoir that reads as an anthropological thriller.

Sudhir got into sociology because he was trying to make sense of a world that didn't make sense to him. Having arrived in the U.S. at a young age, he was searching for a way to understand both what he was feeling and what he was seeing around him. Sociology offered him a language for that understanding. When he realized it could also be approached as a science, he saw the possibility of a career in it; especially appealing given his background as a math major who appreciated intellectual rigor. What took him by surprise, however, was the people part of it. Sudhir didn’t set out to disrupt the field by immersing himself in street gangs or tech companies; in his view, he was simply returning to the roots of sociology.

"Sociology started with ethnography. The early thinkers — Du Bois, Weber, Park — they didn’t sit behind desks crunching numbers. They went into the world. They walked streets, sat in kitchens, listened to people’s lives," he shares. "Over time, the field got more abstract — more surveys, more models, more distance. All important tools. But something very human got lost along the way." When he embedded with the Black Kings, he wasn’t trying to be bold, he was just trying to understand a world that didn’t fit the textbook. "And what I found blew my mind," he notes. "JT, the gang leader I spent years with, was running a more efficient and responsive operation than most city governments. He had spreadsheets, rules, dispute systems. He was a CEO, a mayor, and a father figure — all in one."

Sudhir earned his stripes the old-fashioned way: by showing up. As he befriended J.T., he was gradually woven into the gang’s intricate network across its small-time drug crews, street-level prostitution rings and even its shakedowns of local businesses and relationships with public figures . Among the characters he encountered was Ms. Mae, J.T.’s mother, who fed him in her apartment and served as a matriarchal beacon in the projects, C‑Note, a hustler repairing cars and making ends meet, and T‑Bone & Price, J.T.’s trusted lieutenants, who managed financial ledgers, which unintentionally granted Sudhir access to the gang’s hard data.

Years of this transactional data transformed his field notes into empirical gold . These records allowed him to chart profits and losses in the underground, validating findings like the meager $3.30/hr wages for street dealers and profiling how revenue trickled upward . In collaboration with economist Steven Levitt, he later showed that street prostitutes earned about $30–$35/hr and that women who worked under pimps earned more and had fewer arrests.

Documenting these lived realities, Sudhir painted a portrait of exploitation layered atop opportunity in the harsh micro-economies of the projects. All of this including some outrageous, straight-out-of-a-movie incidents in his time with the gang, like a drive‑by shooting that left Price, J.T.’s head of security bleeding in the lobby, and a takedown of a violent pimp, is documented in 'Gang Leader For A Day'.

Before the book came out in 2008, Sudhir also published 'American Project' (2000), tracing the rise and collapse of Chicago public housing. In 'Off the Books' (2006), he delved deeper into the grey economy of the urban poor, garnering Slate.com’s Best Book Award and the C. Wright Mills Award. Each successive book — a trilogy culminating in 'Gang Leader For A Day', built a richer understanding of how poverty, systemic segregation, and illicit economies intertwine.

"The title of my, 'American Project', comes from the parallels between my community and the wider American landscape," he shares. "People often assume the word “project” refers to public housing — and it does. But I also meant it in a bigger sense. This wasn’t a book about “the other America.” It was a book about people trying to join America. JT and the people around him were chasing the same things most people want: a safe home, a sense of community, purpose, dignity. The methods looked different, because they were poor, but the goals weren’t."

'Gang Leader For A Day' not only became a bestseller but was honored by The Economist and Slate, earned praise from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, and even won acclaim from Mark Zuckerberg as his 2015 pick for 'A Year of Books'. His narrative style — immersive, unflinching, yet respectful, got him the title of 'the rogue sociologist'.

His writing ran in the New York, The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, as well as on radio shows like Fresh Air and This American Life.  He would later go on to serve as Research Advisor to the FBI, lead integrity efforts at Facebook and Twitter, chair Columbia’s Tech & Society Lab, and host a top-ranked podcast. Through it all, he applied what he had learned in Chicago: rigorous fieldwork, empathy without romanticism, and a readiness to do the work — even when it got ugly.

America has always cast gangs solely as antagonists; as violence incarnate. They're denounced by policymakers and moralised by the media. By stepping inside the machinery of the Black Kings, Sudhir shifted that narrative, highlighting that what looks like criminality can also be community structure under duress. Through an unflinching anthropological lens, he traced how these networks arise not from inherent evil but from systemic neglect; how within treacherous conditions, ordinary people build businesses, enforce order, and care for families just as any formal institution might. His work became proof that to dismantle destructive systems, we must first understand their internal economies and social contracts.

Sudhir realized how JT's operation wasn't so different from how other immigrant and working-class communities had organized themselves in the past. "The Irish, the Italians, Polish Americans — they all had their own street organizations, which we later called “gangs.” In many neighborhoods, those groups provided protection, jobs, political connections," he says. "The Black Kings were doing something similar. It didn’t make it right — but it made it understandable. JT's aspiration was to be like immigrants before them, except he understood that, as a black man, he was absolutely unlike those other immigrants."

Culturally, 'Gang Leader For A Day' shattered stereotypes, showing that the denizens of public housing are not faceless victims or villains, but nuanced actors negotiating power, safety, and dignity in an unforgiving landscape. For sociology, his rigor transformed ethnography from theoretical academic exercises into moral imperatives, bringing what's a fairly passive study right into the streets. And for the public imagination, Sudhir redefined the imaginary line dividing good and evil and us and them and reframed how we can and should think about crime, class, and community.

You can buy Gang Leader For A Day here.

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