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

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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 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.”

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ARCHIVAL - Benji Wilson highlights “..down the lane and has it blocked by Benjamin Wilson!”

ARNE DUNCAN: He was like a , 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.

For Benji Wilson, this neglect may have cost him his life. After he was shot, he was rushed to a hospital, but then waited hours to be seen by a doctor. The facility was not equipped to handle his wounds.

Billy Moore knows the story all too well.

BILLY MOORE: They sent Benji to a hospital that didn't have a trauma surgeon. Uh, there wasn't a trauma center, you know, and that's kinda like the narrative of Chicago. In spite of so many gun victims and shootings in Chicago, there's not a real major trauma unit on the South Side.

ADAM McKAY: According to Benji Wilson's family, he wasn’t given oxygen or even an IV. He was assumed to be just another gang member.

BILLY MOORE: He had bled internally for maybe almost three hours before he went into surgery.

ARCHIVAL -- News Clips “Ben Wilson was no ordinary 17 year old. He was a star basketball player at his Chicago high school.”

BILLY MOORE: His mother actually had signed off on them pulling the cord because he had lost too much blood.

ARCHIVAL -- News Clips “And today Ben Wilson died.”

5 ADAM McKAY: By this point, Billy Moore had been arrested. Sitting in a jail cell, awaiting charges.

BILLY MOORE: I didn't find out until the next morning, maybe about six that morning, that he had actually had passed.

ADAM McKAY: As word of Benji’s death spread, Billy Moore and Omar Dixon found themselves caught up in a justice system that was no place for two boys. I say boys because they were 16 and 15 years old.

And in order to charge them with murder as opposed to manslaughter, there had to be a motive. So, according to Billy, the police came up with a story that the two boys were trying to rob Benji. And without representation from a lawyer, the boys signed a confession.

BILLY MOORE: Basically they forced myself and Omar Dixon into signing these confessions. Which was a fabrication. It was a lie.

ARCHIVAL - Benji Wilson Funeral

ADAM McKAY: Just six hours have gone by since Mary Wilson took her son off life support, but the grief was already setting in as she spoke to the students of Simeon High.

ARCHIVAL -- Benji Wilson Funeral Mary Wilson: “I taught Benji to think positive in every situation. I want you to know today that I find it difficult right now to think positive about Benji’s leaving us.” Jesse Jackson: “The Lord must return to our hearts as well as our streets.”

ADAM McKAY: But as Reverend Jesse Jackson gave a stirring eulogy at Benji Wilson's funeral in front of 10,000 people…

Jesse Jackson: “We cannot live by the law of the jungle.”

… people kept getting shot.

ARCHIVAL -- News Clips “But the law of the jungle did prevail through the Holiday weekend, frightened parents hurried their children home from school near the project Wednesday, as the rumors of more violence persisted.”

ADAM McKAY: And the reason that violence combined with poverty turns into gun deaths? That's a gun problem.

6 BILLY MOORE: When you pick up a gun, you get gun problems.

And that's a very American problem.

That's coming up next.

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ARCHIVAL -- Film Clips *gunfire*

ADAM McKAY: Since the very beginning in America, guns have been part of our mythology.

ARCHIVAL -- Film Clips “Are you handy with a gun?” “Yessir. Reload!”

You think of The Minutemen grabbing the musket, the citizen soldier, going to fight for freedom...

“Do it!” *gun shot* “Do it!” *gun shot* “Do it!”

The whole idea of gun control never really occurred to anyone in the 19th century. Until of course, they started thinking about the fact that they didn't want Black people to have guns.

So in 1865 and 1866, the first efforts at gun control were used for this reason.

They were part of the so-called Black codes, laws implemented in Southern states to restrict the rights of African-Americans. Among those restrictions -- no guns.

Fast forward to the 1960s and the civil rights movement, and you find white officials desperate to keep guns out of the hands of the so-called “troublemakers.” Even Martin Luther King Jr., a total pacifist, had his application for a permit to carry a weapon denied.

But it was the Black Panthers that really scared white folks.

ARCHIVAL -- Black Panthers “The Black Panther Party for Self Defense calls on the American people in general, and Black people in particular, to take careful note of the racist California legislature…”

7 In 1967, the Panther staged a protest at the California State Capitol, armed with a collection of three .57 magnums, 12-gauge shotguns and .45 caliber pistols. A well-armed militia, if ever there was one.

ARCHIVAL -- Black Panthers “...racist police agencies throughout the country are intensifying the terror, brutality, murder and repression of Black people.”

ADAM McKAY: As local news stations broadcast these images all around the state, the then governor signed one of the first modern gun control bills, known as the Mulford Act, into law.

ARCHIVAL -- Reagan Mulford comments “There is absolutely no reason why out on the street today civilians should be carrying a loaded weapon.”

ADAM McKAY: Yeah. Of course that California governor was... Ronald Reagan. Who else did you think it would be?

And the NRA, of course, during all this time was doing exactly what you think they would be doing: They were celebrating Earth Day, and they were fighting to protect the polar bears. I'm actually not kidding. That's really what they were doing.

See, back then, the NRA was a sportsman's club. They were all about marksmanship, gun safety, appropriate behavior.

They even were in favor of the 1968 Gun Control Act, which was passed in the wake of the assassinations of JFK, MLK, Bobby Kennedy...

ARCHIVAL -- NRA “The National Rifle Association has fought long and hard for tactical and sensible gun laws aimed in the right direction, keep guns out of the hands of the criminal, juvenile, mental misfit, the dope addict, the habitual drunkard.”

In other words, back then the NRA has supported smart, sensible gun control. So what the f*** changed?

Well, Frank Smith, author of “the NRA, the unauthorized history,” knows the exact moment the NRA went from saving the planet and gun etiquette to the NRA we know and have feelings about today.

FRANK SMYTH: In 1977, the NRA underwent something that its leadership today does not want to talk about, but that remade the organization and created the modern NRA as we know it today. And that event was the ‘Cincinnati Revolt,’ when at the NRA annual meeting a group of

8 hardline activists in the NRA managed to organize a takeover, with a strict take on gun rights, that there would be no compromise, something the NRA has maintained to this day.

But it also began efforts to start rolling back gun regulations and ultimately rolling back even that 1968 law, by 1986 within eight years.

ADAM McKAY: In 1986, just two years after Benji Wilson was shot and killed, Congress passed the Firearms Owners Protection Act, the first federal bill to ever loosen restrictions on guns in America. It prohibited a national registry of dealer records, limited ATF inspections to once per year and allowed licensed dealers to sell firearms at “gun shows.”

All in all, it made it easier to sell guns and ammo to anyone, anywhere, for any reason.

FRANK SMYTH: And what it did is it began to open the flood gates even further for handguns in particular to proliferate throughout American society and especially in inner cities.

ADAM McKAY: Chicago was smart. The city actually passed laws in the early ‘80s that effectively made it illegal to register a handgun. But it wasn't enough.

FRANK SMYTH: Chicago has gun control and Illinois has gun control, but other States do not. It's very easy for someone to go to a state like West Virginia, where the laws are quite lax and then buy a trunk full of weapons, drive to a city and then sell them illegally.

ADAM McKAY: It's as simple as that, the more legal weapons, the easier it is for anyone to get their hands on them. It doesn't take a genius to recognize what comes next.

FRANK SMYTH: These weapons end up fueling, uh, crime activities, throughout these, these communities.

ADAM McKAY: A street corner in Chicago can feel a million miles away from the halls of Congress or the offices of the NRA.

But there's a direct line.

FRANK SMYTH: So this is an organization that is far more radical than what it was before, and it was continuing to promote their gun rights agenda.

ADAM McKAY: With gang violence spreading throughout the city and illegal guns flooding in over the state border. A fuse was lit. That is yet to go out. This created an opportunity for the people in power, a chance to turn Chicago into the ultimate dog whistle, the boogeyman that would scare white America.

And to argue not for fewer guns — but for more.

9 ARCHIVAL -- REAGAN Speech NRA “The NRA believes that America's laws were made to be obeyed, and our Constitutional liberties are just as important today as 200 years ago.”

Now Ronald Reagan was all for gun ownership, so long as it was the right sort owning them. And if a few slipped through the cracks and caused some carnage, well, that was just the price of freedom. A black and white problem, with only one side paying the price.

ARCHIVAL -- REAGAN Speech NRA “The Constitution says the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

We’ll be right back.

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ARCHIVAL -- Chicago news archival “A 28-year-old woman, her 9- and 5-year-old daughters, and their 7-year-old cousin, all murdered last week on Chicago's South Side.”

Gun violence has continued to plague the city of Chicago in the decades since Benji Wilson's death. And so has the anger that results from lives being lost for seemingly no good reason.

Arne Duncan, the former basketball player who went on to serve in Obama's cabinet, who actually played against Benji Wilson, well for years he held onto a hatred against Billy Moore.

But after his time as Education Secretary, he returned to Chicago and began to work on an anti-violence initiative. And something remarkable happened.

ARNE DUNCAN: I'm on a peace march and someone says,’ Billy Moore is here, do you want to meet him?’ And I was hesitant to do so, but I'm like, ‘okay.’ So Billy Moore and I walked and talked and um... I heard his story. He served 20 years and has devoted his life to try and reduce violence

ADAM McKAY: Arne didn't just find forgiveness with Billy. He found a common purpose.

ARNE DUNCAN: Um, Billy Moore now works with me, Billy's on my team. And, um, I would trust Billy Moore with my life. And he is a remarkable leader in the community, helping us to reduce and fight violence. So it's a, it's a complicated, complicated world.

ADAM McKAY: So complicated, that 34 years to the day that Benji's life was taken, Billy Moore found himself in the last place he ever thought he would be.

10 BILLY MOORE: Uh, November 20th, 2018. I had the opportunity to sit across the table with his two younger brothers, you know, and actually apologize to them for, you know, what took place between me and their brother.

I needed to look them in the face and give them what they wanted from me. One of the brothers kinda still held, you know, a lot of resentful energy. Because he told me that I was in a state of denial. Like, I really couldn't understand what I had done to them.

And I told him, I say, ‘well, you have a brother sitting right next to you. I had a son. My only son was killed in 2016. My only son was killed.’ I say, ‘you still got a brother sitting next to you. I don't have nothing. My son is gone. So I totally understand the grief that I caused you. That's why I'm sitting here today.’ You know, and I think once he understood that, a big weight lifted in the room, and we were able to embrace each other.

And Anthony Wilson, the youngest brother told me, he said, you know, ‘you took my brother away from me. And now you have the responsibility of being my brother.’

And that was kinda like mind blowing. It blew me away.

ADAM McKAY: The reconciliation that Billy had with the Wilson family and the Chicago community is truly one of the more remarkable, beautiful things I've ever seen.

And everyday in Chicago, there are people working with kids in communities to make life better. Ronnie Fields, the Chicago basketball legend, is one of those people.

He knows there's no quick easy solutions, but every day he gets up and he does what he can.

RONNIE FIELDS: So, it's showing them outside of their environment. Life is not all about drugs and gangbanging and all these other things. But these kids don't know if they've never been out of it. And sometimes they just go up in a difficult situation. It's not ... in this past alone generation to generation until one in the family of someone that changes it.

ADAM McKAY: But investing in these communities, breaking the cycle, that costs some money, money that has been drained from them, or used against them.

BILLY MOORE: So here's the thing like Chicago, the police budget is $1.8 billion a year, right? And we have six times as much violence in Chicago than we do in New York, which, you know, they three times the size of Chicago. So the police don't really go about trying to prevent crime. They just respond to it. You have to invest, the way you invest in police, you have to invest in the social and economic standing of communities that suffer the most violence, that suffer the most homicides that, you know, the disinvestment and the neglect that these communities produced, four, five hundred killings a year.

11 ARCHIVAL -- Benji Wilson Highlights “Here’s Wilson, so talented, what an acrobatic, nice move to the basket.”

ADAM McKAY: As for Benji Wilson. Well, he hasn't been forgotten, not in Chicago, not if you look at , Nick Anderson or , all of whom have worn his number at one point or another.

Wilson never got the chance to make it to the NBA, but a generation of Chicago players he inspired did.

But Wilson's greatest legacy may have come off the court.

At the time that Benji Wilson was shot, the rule in Chicago was you take the victim to the nearest hospital, whether they have a trauma center or not. That's how Benji Wilson died. He didn't get the proper care.

But Benji's story led to the establishment of a trauma unit on the South Side of Chicago, and to the protocol change of ambulances taking gunshot victims to hospitals with trauma centers. It's hard to even calculate how many lives have been saved by this change.

But without large federal and state funding, the problem has gotten worse.

Now every generation seems to have another Benji Wilson, a rising talent or sports star whose life has ended far too soon by senseless violence.

ARCHIVAL -- News clips montage “Brandon Hendrix was a success story in this South Bronx neighborhood, graduating from high school days ago, he was headed for St. Johns to play basketball. But last weekend, he was gunned down at a barbecue.” “..a 6-foot-6, 14-year-old basketball phenom...Miller was shot and killed before 2pm on this corner in South LA.” My son was my heart, no one knows how I feel, I don't know how I feel.”

No matter what Chicago does, the problems seem to get worse.

The budgets get cut, the guns get more powerful. And the NRA, well, they're not so concerned about Earth Day anymore.

It's hard to find hope in this dire situation, but that's exactly what Billy Moore has done.

ARNE DUNCAN: What Billy says is that if the guy who killed his son came into our program, that he would take him under his wing and mentor him, that he can't ask for forgiveness and reconciliation, if you can’t give it.

12 And so, coming from a guy who I hated most of my life, um, he's teaching me a lot about forgiveness and healing and humanity because I have two kids. If someone, I have my son playing in all these neighborhoods.

Now, if something happened to my son, would I be able to bring that person into our work? I don't know if I'm that good a person to be able to do that, but I know, I know, um, Billy was beyond sincere, um, is beyond sincere in that commitment.

ADAM McKAY: In the United States right now, by some estimates, there are between 300 and 400 million guns on the streets.

Assault rifles can be purchased in retail stores. Like they’re a leaf blower.

Both my daughters have had to sit in bathrooms in their schools during four or five hour lockdowns because of people with guns in the parking lots.

Last year was a record year for gun sales. But we don't know exactly how many guns are being sold every minute, because the gun industry has lobbied to prevent federal tracking of firearm sales. And we don’t know how many of those guns will end up on the city street.

We can probably guess how we'll find out though, we'll hear about it on the evening news.

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