Jurors hear gruesome testimony of burial at Black Souls racketeering trial
Black Souls gang trial

Megan CrepeauContact Reporter
Chicago Tribune

The order from Donald Hughes’ gang bosses was clear that day in June 2002, Hughes testified: Take this shovel and dig a hole.

So Hughes and a fellow Black Souls street gang member found a spot in a gangway between abandoned two-flats on West Monroe Street and dug a hole 7 feet deep, he told a Cook County jury.

Someone nearby yelled “po-po” — a signal that Chicago police were near — and Hughes took off running, he said.

When he returned, he testified, he saw men standing over the hole, which had been filled up with garbage, burned boards from the nearby abandoned building — and a body.

“Facedown,” he said. “He had his little gym shoes outside the hole. … They was covering him up.”

Some 15 years later, jurors heard the gruesome details as six reputed high-ranking leaders of the Black Souls face charges in the county’s first-ever racketeering trial.

Authorities said the body in the makeshift grave was Charles Watson, a 23-year-old drug dealer beaten to death after his bosses, Black Souls gang members, accused him of stealing drugs and money from them.

Watson’s slaying is one of at least eight killings that prosecutors allege the gang carried out while running a violent drug operation on the West Side.

Watson’s body was not discovered until months after his crude burial. A Chicago police officer acting on a tip from an informant started digging in the gangway and found a gym shoe — and then a bone.

On Thursday, a prosecution witness testified that Cornell Dawson, the gang’s top reputed leader who is on trial, bragged to him later about his crew burying someone.

“They beat up some guys, and they put them in a lot,” said the witness, Alex Williams, an informant who cooperated extensively with police in their investigation of the Black Souls.

In earlier testimony, Jubali Stokes, 43, testified that he was affiliated with a different gang but sold drugs with Watson for Stokes’ uncle, a now-deceased Black Souls member known as “Chuck.” Court documents identify “Chuck” as William Redfield.

Stokes told jurors that his uncle had called him and Watson to a West Side backyard that day in June 2002 and accused them of taking money and drugs.

“My uncle started stating that we were bogus, stealing from work,” Stokes said.

The uncle and two other men pulled out large sticks and started beating them, Stokes said.

The attack lasted an hour, but their punishment was just beginning, Stokes said. His hands were bound together with red tape, he said, and he and Watson were put into a van, then driven to an abandoned brick two-flat in the 4000 block of West Monroe Street — in Black Souls territory — and dragged inside.

Watson was taken upstairs, Stokes said, while Stokes was taken to the basement.

His uncle was there, Stokes testified, along with three other Black Souls, including Dawson and Clifton Lemon, who is also on trial.

Stokes was not beaten in the basement, he said, but he could hear Watson screaming upstairs.

“I just heard a lot of hollering,” he said.

Stokes said he was let go after convincing the men that he had not stolen anything.

He never saw Watson again, Stokes said.

Defense attorneys were quick to note that Stokes never alleged that any of those on trial had beaten him. And no other prosecution witnesses had testified Wednesday afternoon about Watson’s fate in that abandoned two-flat, before he was discovered months later buried in the gangway.

More than 20 alleged Black Souls members were charged in 2013, the first arrests made under a state racketeering law passed a year earlier. Hailed as a powerful tool against gangs, the statute is modeled after federal racketeering laws and allows prosecutors to hold high-level bosses accountable for the actions of the entire gang.

All but the six defendants on trial at the Leighton Criminal Court Building have previously pleaded guilty.

Prosecutors have tied the Black Souls to slayings stretching back to the 1990s. A spokeswoman for the state’s attorney’s office would not specify exactly how many slayings the Black Souls collectively stand accused of, but court documents list at least eight.

In addition, authorities have said the Black Souls ran an $11 million-a-year drug operation from their territory in the West Side’s West Garfield Park neighborhood.

The trial began in early October after nearly two weeks of jury selection and is expected to last two months or longer.