El Rukns

aka Blackstone Rangers

In 1985, El Rukns, one of Chicago's most notorious street gangs, contacted the Libyan government, offering to commit terrorist acts within the United States in exchange for $2.5 million. The ensuing federal trial marked the first in which U.S. citizens were found guilty of planning terrorist acts on behalf of a foreign government in exchange for money.

El Rukns began as the Blackstone Rangers, a teenage street gang that ruled the Woodlawn district of southside Chicago in the 1960s. Led by Jeff Fort, the gang, which later joined with other gangs to form the Black P Stone Nation, established its reputation for extreme violence in battles against a rival gang, the Gangster Disciples.

In 1977, Fort announced his conversion to Islam and asserted that his gang was now a black Islamic religious sect, called the Moorish Science Temple of America, El Rukn tribe. (El Rukn means “The Foundation” in Arabic and also refers to the cornerstone of the Kabaa Islamic temple in Mecca.) Fort changed his name to Malik and became the imam, or spiritual leader, of El Rukns. At approximately the same time, police and federal law enforcement agencies began cracking down on the gang. By the mid-1980s, Fort was in jail in Bastrop, Texas, on cocaine trafficking charges, and more than a dozen other gang members were serving time for serious state and/or federal crimes.

In October 1986, a federal grand jury returned a 50-count indictment against several members of El Rukns, including Fort, Melvin Mayes, and Trammel Davis. The indictment charged that from March 1985 until the time of the indictment, members of El Rukns obtained explosives and weapons with the intent to kill “unspecified people” and destroy “unspecified buildings” in the United States on behalf of Libya.

The conspiracy began in March 1985, when Fort offered El Rukns's services to the Libyan government for $2.5 million, following news that Louis Farrakhan had received twice that amount from Libya. Members of El Rukns then traveled to Libya and Panama to negotiate. On July 31, 1985, an undercover FBI agent sold Mayes a rocket launcher for $2,000. The launcher, which had been rendered inoperative, was fixed with a radio transmitter that eventually led authorities to the El Rukns weapons arsenal. Five days later, federal agents raided two houses in southside Chicago and found the launcher, along with nearly three dozen other guns and grenades. Several gang members were immediately arrested; Mayes, however, remained at large.

During the trial, Trammel, former security chief for the gang, turned government witness. Authorities had recorded numerous phone calls that Fort made from jail to El Rukns headquarters in which Fort talked in elaborate code. Trammel translated the code—a combination of Arabic and street slang—to reveal how Fort orchestrated the conspiracy from prison. On November 24, 1987, the jury convicted five members of El Rukns.

Mayes remained at large until March 9, 1995, when he was captured by the FBI's Chicago Joint Terrorism Task Force. By then, El Rukns had been mostly dismantled through several criminal racketeering trials. It is now primarily a prison gang.

Although the Libyan government denied involvement, and no Libyan diplomats were named in the indictment, a 1997 Department of Defense memorandum about the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 suggested that the El Rukns conspiracy was part of a larger Libyan plot to retaliate for the U.S. bombing raid on Muammar el-Qaddifi's headquarters in 1986.