Bill Tomes

Lloyd DeGrane

From “Brother Bill,” June 1, 1990

In 1983, when Bill Tomes showed up at Saint Malachy’s, a onetime Irish parish now serving the Henry Horner Homes, the church was converting its gymnasium and garage into a shelter and soup kitchen. A year earlier, Mother Teresa had sent Saint Malachy’s six nuns from the Missionaries of Charity. “Bill told me he wanted to work among the poor, too,” remembers Father Stephen Mangan, pastor of Saint Malachy’s at the time. Tomes volunteered at Saint Malachy’s a couple of days a week, staying in the gym at night to keep it safe.

Soon he became a pastoral associate at the church; he received room and board and, eventually, pay. He took over a room on the third floor of the rectory. The small room contained a chair, a bed, and a television, but Tomes removed them. “I wanted to participate with the poor,” he explains. “I wanted to give up material things as a sacrifice.” Over the four years Tomes called the room home, it was bare except for a telephone and a rug, on which he slept.

Tomes did odd jobs for the church, like helping to restore the stained glass and pink marble in the sanctuary, but in time “he started working the neighborhood,” says Father Mangan. One day Tomes came downstairs to find Mangan completing the church bulletin. “I’m going to call you ‘Brother Bill’ because you need some form of religious identification,” Mangan said. When Tomes pointed out that he wasn’t a member of any religious order, Mangan replied that he was a brother in the sense that “everybody in the world are brothers and sisters,” Tomes remembers.

He assumed a hooded cassock made entirely of blue-jeans patches. Mangan encouraged Tomes to wear his cassock constantly. “That might save you,” Mangan told him. “People will perceive you as the salt of the earth. They are victims too.”

His first day at Henry Horner, Tomes strode the length of the project. The teenage boys there had never seen anybody like him, and the next day, according to Tomes, the council of the Disciples gang took a vote on whether he should be killed. “But they thought I was a good guy and agreed to protect me,” Tomes says. “We thought he was crazy,” says Demetrius Ford, a Disciple who has since gone to work at Saint Malachy’s. “What the fuck would you think?”

Odd as Tomes seemed, it became clear to the kids that here was a nonjudgmental, friendly, even helpful presence. “Brother Bill hung around,” says Demetrius Ford, “talking to people, taking ’em to McDonald’s or out to the sand dunes. He became just Brother Bill. He’s cool, a nice man of God who is out for peace.”

“Other people might want to change these kids,” Tomes says, “but I recognize them for who they are, and for how great they are as children of God. They need to respect themselves; it’s when they don’t that they shoot at each other.” Tomes never issues advice except when asked. “I give information, is all,” he explains. “I don’t make a recommendation except if I think the person is ready to follow my bullshit anyway.”

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Passive intervention has become Tomes’s signature. When gangs are fighting, he stands between them to still the violence. One summer afternoon a half-dozen years ago, Demetrius Ford recalls, some Disciples and Vice Lords were shooting it out on the blacktop behind two buildings at Henry Horner. “Bill just came right up through the middle,” says Ford, who was standing on the periphery. “Nobody wanted to hit a white-man priest and go to jail for any murder, so there was a cease-fire.”

In 1984, Cardinal Bernardin asked to meet Bill Tomes. Tomes made such an impression that Bernardin put him on Catholic Charities’ payroll as a consultant. The agency allowed him to expand his turf to include Cabrini-Green as well as Henry Horner.

“I went to a Cobra Stones building, then a Disciples building, and I got . . . um . . . a cold reaction,” says Tomes, recalling his first day at Cabrini. “Some drug dealers gave me the silent treatment.” The one bright spot was an encounter with a young man named Elbert O’Neal, a Cobra Stone who lived with his mother and siblings on the 15th floor of 1150 N. Sedgwick. “You are a sign from God,” O’Neal told Tomes. No, Tomes said. “Yes, you are,” said O’Neal. “God sent you as a sign so I’d change my life.”

O’Neal became Tomes’s protector. “Elbert was the only kid who welcomed Brother Bill to Cabrini,” says the boy’s mother, Bessie O’Neal. “Elbert would take him into our building and keep the other young men from doing anything to him.” At the outset the gang members took Tomes for “a crank out to get their money,” says Darryl Webster, a Disciple. But in time, Tomes was again accepted.

The most dangerous turf at Cabrini-Green was long said to be Hobbie Field, an expanse of blacktop near adjoining buildings ruled by three separate gangs—the Disciples, the Vice Lords, and the Cobra Stones. On warm-weather afternoons and evenings, battles would break out there with bottles, pipes, and sometimes guns. In 1986, Jerry Drolshagen, a Jesuit seminarian, was skinned on the arm by a bullet while with Tomes at Hobbie Field. “We were with Vice Lords,” says Tomes, “and some Disciples ambushed us. We went back that same night to show we weren’t afraid.”

Tomes remembers all the dead, the troublemakers as well as the blameless. Laketa Rodgers, for example, perished on August 5, 1985, at Cabrini-Green. She was nine years old. “She used to run out to us; she was so sweet,” says Tomes. “She was killed out on the blacktop. Some gang members were shooting at each other, and she got hit. Afterwards, I went to see the boy that killed her. He didn’t mean to do it. He got 80 years.”

In August of 1986, Johnny Bates, who was 21, was shot on a seventh-floor balcony at Henry Horner. He tumbled into the stairwell, crumpling on the landing a half floor down. “He gave out the most horrible scream you ever heard in your life,” says Tomes. “I got to him five minutes before he died. I tried to prepare him for death. ‘God loves you,’ I told him.”

In December of 1988 a 25-year-old named Sammy Hatcher was gunned down in an entranceway at Cabrini. Tomes baptized him with a handful of snow before he was hauled away to Northwestern Memorial Hospital, brain dead on arrival.

Aron Buckles, a Disciple, used to call to Tomes across Hobbie Field. “Brother Bill, give me some love,” he’d say, and Tomes would respond by putting one fist on top of another, which is the gang symbol for love. “Aron was a tough guy, but we were close friends,” Tomes remembers. “He wanted to go straight. They killed him for trying to leave.”

In the spring of 1985 Tomes’s protector, Elbert O’Neal, told him he expected to die soon. “Oh no, Elbert,” Tomes sighed, but O’Neal was convinced. O’Neal was trying to keep his distance from the Cobra Stones, and various Stones were leaning on him. It was a bad situation that concerned Tomes all the more when he found out that O’Neal had received a college grant. One afternoon, O’Neal interfered with some toughs beating up another young man in the lobby of O’Neal’s building. One tough, Washington “Snake” Green, pulled a gun and shot O’Neal in the mouth, chest, and stomach.

Tomes rushed to Henrotin Hospital and found his friend in a coma. For two weeks Tomes stayed with O’Neal, passing the nights on the floor by his side. Because he thought O’Neal would want it, Tomes baptized him using a rag and water from the sink. O’Gorman delivered the last rites, and after O’Neal died the funeral was held at Saint Malachy’s.

Washington Green was finally apprehended in Wisconsin and charged with O’Neal’s murder, Tomes went to visit him at the Cook County Jail. Green, 21, entered the visitors’ room, saw Tomes across the bullet-proof glass, and turned on his heel.

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