Former Vice Lords Chiefs Now Going a Round for the Kids
On the streets of Lawndale, in the area surrounding 16th Street and Hamlin Avenue, Brown and Fitzpatrick are legends. People either know or fear them, or both.
One Lawndale mother, Paula Williams, said of Brown: “A lot of kids looked up to him, they looked up to that life. He was the boss and they had a whole lot of respect for that. I thought he was a rotten human being. He sold drugs, he was a bully.”
Brown doesn’t deny any of that. And Fitzpatrick doesn’t dispute a similar description. Reputations in the Holy City die hard.
“Doesn’t matter what we tell them,” Brown said. “They still know us as Shotgun and Black.”
Brown was a student at Penn Elementary growing up — “I was whupped by about every teacher there,” he said. Last spring, as he and Fitzpatrick worked the neighborhood for the anti-violence group CeaseFire, they noticed the chaos each day as school let out.
“I was sitting in front of Penn school watching those kids just going wild, fighting, throwing rocks at cars,” Brown said. “I looked at that and I said, ‘That’s me. That’s Derek.'”
Brown and Fitzpatrick had already launched a boxing program for kids in the neighborhood.
They saw an opportunity to recruit kids into the program by doing some training right outside the school, and before long Moore-Ollie embraced them and the school environment began to change.
Whether from intimidation or admiration, the boys at Penn listen to them, a fact never clearer than during a weekly boxing lesson.
Jab! Jab! Jab! Jab!”
Brown stood before a line of more than a dozen young men, foam pads strapped to his hands, feet positioned in a boxer’s stance.
He was coach Brown. Not Shotgun, not Derek. Coach.
Fitzpatrick, in a voice that once struck fear on the streets outside the school gymnasium, bellowed: “If anyone comes into my class with their shoes untied or their pants hanging down, you WILL give me 25 push-ups and five laps.”
