Death at the Wing Episode 4: Ricky Berry and Chicago’S Flood of Guns

Death at the Wing Episode 4: Ricky Berry and Chicago’s Flood of Guns ⧫ ⧫ ⧫ BILLY MOORE: Yeah, it was the most traumatic time of my life. Just having to -- having to resolve and reconcile in my mind that I just shot another human being. ADAM McKAY (host): It was November 20th, 1984, a brisk morning on the South side of Chicago. Billy Moore hadn't woken planning to shoot anybody. But the last thing he did before he left the house was pull a .22 caliber pistol out from beneath his auntie's mattress. Someone had stolen ten dollars from his cousin, and he was going to her school to get it back. Maybe flashing the gun would help. BILLY MOORE: I went up to Simeon High School and found out, um, basically the situation got resolved because the guy just gave me the money to get to my cousin. ADAM McKAY: With the 10 spot returned, Billy, along with his buddy, Omar Dickson, had nothing to do but kill time. So that's what they did. BILLY MOORE: It had to be around 12 in the afternoon. I was standing on the sidewalk in front of the school, maybe a half a block now from the school — when from behind, I got shoved, uh, real hard to the point to where I almost fell. And when I turned around, the young man just kept walking. And he was very, very tall, like the tallest -- at that time, I would describe him as being the biggest person that I'd ever seen. And one word led to another, and basically it just became a situation where he was so aggressive, that even when I unzipped my jacket, just so he could see the gun, you know, he refused to back down. I never thought that I was going to be in a position to use a gun. I thought I could just bluff, I think we both, as young men allowed our emotions, our pride and ego to get in the way, that didn't allow us to be able to resolve a conflict without it turning into what it did. ADAM McKAY: Billy Moore didn’t know it at the time but he had just shot Benji Wilson, a new Father, son, brother and the number one high school basketball player in the country. 1 BILLY: ..but I kinda, you know, come to a real hard truth that when you pick up a gun, you get gun problems. ADAM McKAY: I'm Adam McKay. And this is “Death at the Wing.” Tonight's episode -- an abandoned city, a flood of guns, and a promising basketball player in the wrong place at the wrong time. ARCHIVAL -- Newsreel “Ben Wilson was no ordinary 17 year old, he was a star basketball player at his Chicago high school, there were stars in his future as well.” Ben Wilson is going to be one of the great players in this state before his career is finished.” “No doubt.” “Tonight, many in Chicago are grieving.” ⧫ ⧫ ⧫ ARCHIVAL - Benji Wilson highlights “..down the lane and has it blocked by Benjamin Wilson!” ARNE DUNCAN: He was like a Magic Johnson, 6’8” point guard, smooth as could be. It wasn't, he wouldn’t come out and score a 30 or 40 or 50 every night, wasn't like that. What I remember more than anything was his passing, not his scoring. ADAM McKAY: That's Arne Duncan, the only former Secretary of Education to play professional basketball and against Benji Wilson. The Obama cabinet member has played his whole life, spent some time as a pro in Australia, but he never forgot the big man with the soft touch and next level court vision from his hometown. ARCHIVAL -- Benji Wilson highlights “Ben Wilson is going to be one of the great players in this state before his career is finished.” “No doubt.” ARNE DUNCAN: Yeah, oh man. Just poetry in motion, just smooth as silk. To be that skilled and that unselfish and be able to see the court like he did. I had never seen a player of his size ever, you know, have that kind of a game. ADAM McKAY: A revolutionary point forward prototype for players like Scottie Pippen, Ben Simmons, or LeBron James. Do it all wings with the size to take it down low and the skills to take it outside. ARNE DUNCAN: He would dominate a game. And he would dominate it, you know, by being a leader. 2 ARCHIVAL -- Benji Wilson highlights “We'll see Wilson on this play, Frank alluded earlier that he’s taller than 6’7”, I’m not sure about that but he sure plays taller than 6' 7" as we'll see right here…” On the court he was a sensation. The first high school player from Illinois ever ranked number one in the country. But off the court? He was just a teenage kid trying to navigate the South Side. Benji had grown up in Chatham. Chatham had once been an almost idyllic escape from the violence of Chicago. But in the 80’s that was changing. RONNIE FIELDS: Oh man, it was shooting, I mean, gangbanging. Drug territory was really huge back then. Carjacking, sticking up. That's Ronnie Fields, another Chicago hoops legend who was a highly ranked high school superstar. And he remembers how the streets of the city were overrun with violence. RONNIE FIELDS: Especially when the drug game picked up and people was getting money, you know, rivalries and all those things, people trying to kill each other for whatever reason, territory. Chicago was being torn apart and that wasn't by accident. The Reagan revolution had been swept into office in 1980 in part as a way to quote, ‘reclaim our national identity,’ ‘to embrace hope over malaise.’ After a decade of depressing news with Watergate and the Vietnam war. ARCHIVAL -- Reagan Speeches I trust you to trust that American Spirit. Some say that it no longer exists. But I’ve seen it. It’s still there. And Reagan was a professional at making people feel good. ARCHIVAL -- Reagan Speeches “Above all, we must realize that no arsenal or no weapon in the arsenals of the world, is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men and women.” But what came with Reagan and his pitch perfect delivery was a darker truth, a narrative of us versus them. And he left little doubt who the ‘them’ was. 3 It was a delivery that Reagan perfected, but one the GOP had been workshopping for decades. ARCHIVAL: Lee Atwater Speech Lee Atwater: You start out in 1954 by saying n*****, n*****, n*****. ADAM McKAY: Lee Atwater, Deputy Manager of Ronald Reagan's 1984 campaign, told an interviewer about how Republicans shifted their language. Lee Atwater: By 1968, you can't say n*****. That hurts you, it backfires. So you say stuff like... ADAM McKAY: It’s stunning to hear a GOP strategist be so blunt about the rhetorical game that was being played. Lee Atwater: You follow me? It's a hell of a lot more abstract than "n*****, n*****, you know? But that was the game being played. And it was one that Reagan knew how to play, down to his bones, by the time he was the GOP's standard bearer. IAN HANEY LOPEZ: He would say, you know, um, ‘I understand your anger when you're standing in line, waiting to buy a hamburger, and there's some young fellow ahead of you buying a T-bone steak with food stamps.’ ADAM McKAY: That's Ian Haney Lopez, a professor of public law at the university of California, Berkeley. IAN HANEY LOPEZ: And there's that idea that Black people are ripping off the welfare system. And not only that, but when they rip off the welfare system, they're doing better than whites. ARCHIVAL -- Reagan Welfare Queen speech “In Chicago, they found a woman that holds the record, she used 80 names, 30 addresses, 15 telephone numbers, to collect food stamps.” ADAM McKAY: With wages being cut and unions being busted up, a lot of white voters were flat out angry. ARCHIVAL -- Reagan Welfare Queen speech “Her tax free income alone has been running $150,000 a year.” And the Republican party was there to channel that anger in one direction, towards race. IAN HANEY LOPEZ: With the idea that, Hey, government can't lift people out of poverty because it's actually being ripped off by people whose culture is lazy and larcenous. 4 ADAM McKAY: Reagan got their votes, and these voters got to feel superior if only for a moment, a cultural con that played with fire. IAN HANEY LOPEZ: But of course, what they were doing was lending their support to a political party whose actual agenda was support for plutocracy, for rule by and for the rich. Massive tax cuts, bigger tax cuts in the country had ever seen before. ADAM McKay: And what did the GOP pair with their socialism for the rich? Austerity for the poor. IAN HANEY LOPEZ: Slash social spending. Big cuts to welfare, big cuts to infrastructure, big cuts to education, to investments in cities. ADAM McKAY: The residents of the South Side and the students of Benji Wilson’s Simeon High suddenly found themselves cut loose from a half century of reforms. Few social services were geared towards them anymore, supposedly so they wouldn't cheat the system, leaving places like Chatham to fend for themselves.

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