Fatman: The Drug King Who Built West Pullman’s Deadliest Crew — Then Lost Everything 

October 13th, 2005. A Thursday night on the far south side of Chicago on a block most of Chicago has never had a reason to drive down. Four men stood on a porch on Parnell Avenue. It belonged to a woman named Iska Tony. She had known men like them sometimes, these exact men, for more than 30 years.

 Nobody on that porch was a stranger to her. That is the first thing you need to understand about this block. Everyone already knew. Everyone had known them for decades, long before anyone needed an alibi or a witness or a reason to look away. Evans, Bethany, Long, and a fourth man. The record only ever calls Peanut.

 Four names, one porch, one night. Nothing about the moment looked like the beginning of anything. Men stood around on porches on Parnell Avenue most nights of most years. That was the neighborhood’s ordinary weather. Then these four men walked off it toward a house three doors down 12,210 South Parnell, a crack house that belonged to a man named Robert Duffy Jr.

5 minutes passed, maybe 10, then gunshots. An eyewitness heard what Duffy said just before the first one. Don’t shoot. Don’t shoot. It ain’t worth it. Don’t kill me. He was right. Nobody who walked off that porch that night came out ahead. Not even the ones who walked away breathing. Tony heard the shots from where she stood. She didn’t move.

 Four men left that porch back the way they had come. And the street went quiet again, the way it always did. I want to tell you what happened to each of those four names because that turns out to be the whole story this documentary has to tell. Three of them eventually stood in a courtroom. One of them never did. Not a charge, not a mug shot, not a name beyond the one his friends used for him on that porch.

He ran off Parnell Avenue in October 2005. As far as any public record is concerned, he is still running. His name was Rashad Bethany. This is what made him. He was born into a household that was already inside the drug economy, not as consumers who had fallen into it, but as workers who ran it.

 His mother used heroin and cocaine while she was pregnant with him. That was the environment before he had taken a single breath inside it. There was no clean moment in his life before the thing that would eventually define it. Most children learn what their family does for a living by watching it happen at the kitchen table.

 He learned the same way. The kitchen table was just doing something different. At 3 years old, he took a blow to the head that needed 32 stitches to close. 32 stitches on a skull that size is not a scrape. It is the kind of wound that puts a toddler in an emergency room and leaves a scar a grown man still carries without remembering how he got it.

 Nobody who has spoken publicly about this case has ever explained what caused it. The record gives you the wound and stops there. At seven, his family taught him how to bag marijuana, not as a lesson in criminal enterprise, as a chore, the way another family might teach a seven-year-old to set a table or fold laundry or take out the trash.

 That was the job in that house. Everyone had one. His was measuring out product into plastic bags with hands still small enough to need help tying his shoes. By 10, he was sitting in on gang meetings. By 11, he was packaging cocaine. Seven years old to 11 years old, four years, and an entire trade learned before most children have finished learning to read at grade level.

 Nobody enrolled him in that curriculum. It was simply the only one on offer. Somewhere in there, the record says he was nine. A pitbull attacked him. Whether it was his family’s dog, a neighbors, a stray nothing, public says. What the record does say is that he needed stitches to close what the attack did to him and that the number of stitches was never written down anywhere anyone can find.

 9 years old and an animal put teeth into him badly enough that it left a paper trail even without a number attached to it. Hold on to that fact. It comes back. He attacked six teachers in a single year. Not one, six. Every one of those was a separate morning when an adult whose entire job was to reach a child instead ended up on the wrong end of him.

 That is not by itself a discipline problem. A school counselor writes up and files away. That is a nervous system that had already learned by age 10 that violence was the language spoken fastest in his house and understood everywhere else. He was shot in the spine at 14. His brother was paralyzed in a separate shooting when by whom over what? No public record says a word about either question.

 Two brothers, two shootings, two silences sitting where an explanation should be. I don’t know what it does to a family to carry two of those at once in the same house without ever getting to name why. I know it does something. Nobody wrote a report on that. Nobody had to. At his federal sentencing decades later, his own attorney stood up in front of a judge who was about to decide how many years of Rashad Bethy’s life belonged to the federal government and said this.

 He was born and bred into a crucible of crack and addiction and violence and he never had a chance. I want to be careful about what that sentence is doing. It is a defense attorney’s line offered strategically in a room where strategy is the entire point of standing up. It is also true a prosecutor could have stood up right after Brenley and said, “So what? He grew up.

 He made choices nobody made for him.” That would also be true. Both framings are correct at the same time and neither one is sufficient by itself. And I’m not going to pretend the gap between them closes just because a judge eventually picked a number. Because here is what that same childhood produced a man who a decade later would take that same species of animal or pitbull, the exact kind of dog that had once torn into him at 9 years old and turn it on somebody else entirely and laugh while it happened.

 Between the boy who took that blow and the man who was running in what people on those blocks call killing crew by his 20s, there is everything the record doesn’t have. 12,12 South Emerald, 11,952 South Egleston, a few blocks apart in a Chicago neighborhood called West Pullman. Open every hour of every day. These were not stash spots in the way people picture stash spots.

 a locked room, a hidden compartment somewhere. These were houses. People lived in them, slept in them in shifts, worked in them around the clock because a 24-hour operation needs bodies at every hour of the night as much as the day. Bethy’s crew kept both addresses running like that for years, close enough to each other that moving product or trouble between them was never a real logistics problem.

 The workers inside those houses were addicts. They were not paid in cash. They were paid in product the same drug they were selling handed back to them as wages, which meant they were never quite employees and never quite free. Cash you can save. Cash buys a bus ticket out of a neighborhood. Product gets you high enough that you stop wanting the ticket. That was the design.

and whether anyone in that house ever called it a design or just called it the job. To protect two houses running that kind of volume, the crew needed guns and guns bought in Illinois come with paperwork that eventually traces back to a name. So they used straw buyers, people with clean records, no prior, nothing to flag purchasing weapons legally across the state line in Indiana, then handing them over once they were home.

 The paper trail stopped at somebody who had never touched a drug in his life and had no idea on paper what he was arming. This is the neighborhood that made both of those houses possible. West Pullman had been a working-class white neighborhood built up around jobs at the Pullman rail car plant. The Pullman company itself dissolved in 1968 and the manufacturing side hung on into the early 1980s before it too finally closed.

 The demographics flipped within a decade from 99.8% 8% white in 1960 to 90% black by 1980, while unemployment in the neighborhood settled at 19.9%, more than double the citywide average of 8.4. That is not a neighborhood the city simply forgot to invest in. That is a neighborhood whose one major employer left and was never replaced by anything comparable.

 Two crack houses running 24 hours a day were not an aberration from that collapse. For a few years, they were among the only employers still hiring in a nineb block radius that had once built rail cars for the entire country. Back to the two addresses and to what kept them running. At some point, one of the workers lost $150 worth of cocaine, misplaced it, or someone took it from him.

 The record doesn’t specify which. Bethy’s response was to turn a pitbull loose on him and just watch. $150. That was the threshold. Below it, you got the dog. I’m not going to explain what that detail means because you already know what that same breed of animal did to Bethany himself at 9 years old in the last act. I’ll say only this.

 The record doesn’t call what happened to that worker irony. It just calls it routine. Whatever got handed down to Bethany in that house, it wasn’t only the skill of bagging product. It was an entire economy of who gets hurt and who gets to walk away. And by his 20s, he had learned exactly which side of that economy he intended to stand on.

 Federal prosecutors describing all of it years later in a single sentence at sentencing put it this way. The defendants instituted a regime of control and intimidation to make sure that they were able to sell their crack. That is the driest possible language for what actually happened inside those two addresses.

 Control and intimidation in this case had a name and four legs. There were 11 murders in that nineb block radius in 2004 and 2005 alone. Five of them prosecutors said at sentencing with the cruise work. None of them ever resulted in a murder charge. Five people were dead. Rashad Bethany never spent a single day in custody for any of them.

 I want to say their names clearly because no jury ever heard them. Shelton Golden, July 2003. Bethy’s DNA, according to prosecutors, was later found inside Golden’s apartment. That is the entire public record of his death, a name, a month, a year, and a forensic detail sitting in a court filing that never turned into a charge against anyone.

 No trial, no verdict, just a sample in a file and a life that stopped in an apartment in West Pullman. A man who had been talking to police was shot dead in May 2005. A drug dispute was the official reason given at the time. Fear was the real reason. Nobody on that block would confirm it then or since. Because saying out loud that a man died for talking to police is its own kind of talking to police.

 And everyone on that street understood the arithmetic of that risk without anyone teaching it to them. Dante Dixon, 20 years old, January 2006 in Rosland, the neighborhood next door. 20 is younger than Bethany was by then. 20 is an age where most of what happens to you next hasn’t happened. yet college, a job, a family, whatever version of a future a 20-year-old on the far south side was supposed to get to plan for.

 Dixon’s story stops at his name, his age, and the month he died. Nothing else about him survives in anything I was able to find, which means the last documented fact of Dante Dixon’s life is also the fact of his death. Three names, three deaths nobody was ever convicted of or even charged with. A detective told the court exactly why when prosecutors asked him directly, neighbors had seen things and then neighbors had left some to other parts of the city, some out of state entirely rather than say what they saw to a police officer, a prosecutor, or a jury

of strangers who would go home afterward while the witness stayed behind on that block in that same house for years. ATF spokesman Tom Mahern put a number on what that silence cost the investigation. It took six years to assemble a group of witnesses with the intestinal fortitude to testify against him.

 6 years is not an abstraction. It is 6 years of a federal agency actively looking for people willing to risk their own safety to say one man’s name out loud on the record in a room he would eventually be sitting in. It is six years of people deciding individually, one conversation at a time, that silence was the safer bet.

 Not because they didn’t know what they had seen, because they done the math on what talking would cost them. And the math came out the same way every time it was run. Here is the part of this that isn’t obvious until you sit with it. All three of these names. Golden, the man from May Dixon, come back one afternoon at Bethy’s federal sentencing hearing, recited out loud in open court as history rather than as charges.

 A prosecutor can stand in a federal courtroom and describe a killing in specific documented detail and still not be prosecuting it. That is not a loophole in the law. It is closer to a design feature of it, one built for a different kind of case than the one these deaths actually were. I’m not going to turn this into a lesson about gang culture or about why people in neighborhoods like this one don’t talk to police.

 The reasons here are not complicated and they are not abstract and they don’t need a sociologist to explain them. They are Shelton Golden’s name attached to a DNA sample and nothing else. They are a man shot dead and made for reasons everyone on that block understood and nobody would say aloud. They are Dante Dixon, barely into his 20s, whose entire recorded life fits into a single sentence and whose death fits into the sentence right after it.

There was a fifth name. That one was different. We’ll get to it. Aisha Tony had known Rashad Bethany and Shannon Evans since they were children. Her porch on Parnell Avenue was not a strange place for them to be. It was just another night the way it had been countless other nights across 30 years of knowing these men or men just like them before any of this had a reason to matter.

 Here is the fuller version of what happened on that porch. Because the opening of this documentary only gave you its shape. Evans, Bethany Long, and Peanut stood there on the night of October 13th, 2005, and then walked together toward a house at 12,210 South Parnell, Robert Duffy Jr.’s house, three doors down, a place Tony had watched people come and go from for years.

That walk took less time than it takes to explain long enough for whatever was about to happen to already be decided and not long enough for anyone watching to stop it. An eyewitness named Patrick was sitting in his car across the street when he saw Duffy limp out of the house followed closely by Evans and another man both holding handguns.

Duffy turned to face them, put his hands up like he could block a bullet with his palms, and said it, “Don’t shoot. Don’t shoot it. Ain’t worth it. Don’t kill me. Evans shot him several times. Then he picked up a bag Duffy had been carrying and ran. Stopping to grab the bag on your way out is not information about the crime itself.

 It’s information about how little panic was actually running through that man’s body while he did it. Another witness, a man named Hosea West, saw what happened right after the shots. Long and Peanut running from the direction of Parnell Avenue. Bethany behind them not running, just walking. And when he passed West, he glared at him.

 The kind of look that carries its own instructions. West would later say Bethany had set the whole thing up. Evans West said, was the one who pulled the trigger. Two different men, two different jobs, the same 10 minutes. At Duffy’s funeral, Evans pulled Tony aside. He told her he was afraid of being framed because the house on Parnell had been his own dope spot before it belonged to Duffy.

 And he asked her days after the murder whether she’d heard anything about who did it. She told him no. She was standing at a funeral being asked by one of the men who had walked off her porch whether she knew who had killed the man in the casket. Look, call it whatever you want. I’m not buying grief for a second.

 You don’t walk up to somebody at a funeral and ask if she’s heard anything about who pulled the trigger unless part of you needs to know exactly what’s already circulating. Standing over that casket doing damage control in a black suit. She had already told a grand jury more than that. Under oath before any murder charge existed, Tony testified that Evans admitted being part of it, that he had helped steal Duffy’s money and his drugs.

 The night Duffy died, the state paid her $1,745 for moving expenses and a security deposit once she said under oath that she no longer felt safe living where she was. At trial, when prosecutors read her own grand jury words back to her in front of the man she had named, she said this. I was asked those questions and you say I answered that.

 Evidently, I answered that. I don’t think that’s betrayal. I think it’s survival spoken in the only language available to her. She told the truth once to a grand jury under oath when the truth still felt like it might be safe to tell. The state paid her $1,745 to do it. That was apparently what the math looked like from her side of the table.

 one month’s rent in exchange for being the person who said a name out loud in a city where the people she named were still walking those same blocks past that same porch every single day she kept living on it. The porch in the end is the same logic as the crack houses just at human scale. A worker who gets paid in product can’t really leave.

A witness who gets paid $1,745 can’t really leave either. Tony had known these men for 30 years before any of this happened, and she stayed close enough afterward to see the house from her own front steps. Shannon Evans went to prison for 65 years for Robert Duffy Jr.’s murder. He says he didn’t do it.

 Two people later signed statements saying they saw two other men chase Duffy out of that house and shoot him men taller than Evans. Men nobody has ever named in any conviction. The courts heard all of it on appeal and habius review for more than a decade. His sentence never changed by a single day. Evans is still inside. Rashad Bethany walked out with the drug sentence.

 Duffy’s name was never in the charge against him. Ricky Long got 15 years the same day on the same drug charge. And Peanut got nothing. Not because he was cleared, not because anyone proved he was innocent, but because no file anywhere has his name in it at all. He ran that night in October 2005 and the record never found him. Three men from that porch have a case number somewhere. He doesn’t.

 and real talk that gets under my skin. Six years of wires and informants, a whole apparatus built to take this crew down. And the one guy who bolted that night is the one guy it never even bothered running down. Call it what it is, a system that only chases the ones still standing there when it finally shows up. The ATF had been watching this crew for six years.

 What they finally charged Rashad Bethany with was selling crack. Before the ATF charged anyone with anything, there were people who had already paid. Ricky Long shot a woman on Bethy’s order. She survived. She eventually testified. Her name does not appear anywhere I could find. She is a woman who took a bullet meant to silence her, did the opposite of what that bullet was for, and then disappeared from every document that followed, as if testifying were the last thing she was ever allowed to be known for.

 A second woman was beaten badly enough to break her arm after she was accused of stealing crack and cash from the crew. She too has no name anywhere in the record. Two women, two acts of violence, specific enough that prosecutors could describe them in a courtroom. And neither woman has a name the public was ever given.

 Two women, one shooting, one beating. Neither of them shows up in a single headline about this case. They show up only in a DOJ press release as a general description of a regime of control and intimidation. four words standing in for what actually happened to two specific human beings whose injuries were real enough to describe and whose names apparently weren’t important enough to keep.

 This is the pitbull logic again, just without the dog this time. Somebody crosses a line real or accused and somebody else decides what the cost of that crossing will be in blood and bone and silence afterward. The investigation that eventually reached Bethany started around the year 2000.

 A joint operation between the ATF and Chicago police watching, listening, waiting through years that included the murders you just heard about in the last act. Somewhere in the middle of it, a confidential informant agreed to wear a wire and was paid more than $11,000 to do it money that bought hours of recorded conversation and a series of controlled drug buys.

6 years after it started in May 2006, that investigation ended with Bethany and Ricky Long in handcuffs. Do the arithmetic with me for a second. Five murders attributed to this crew. Six years of federal surveillance, two women unnamed who paid in blood and bone for what they knew or what they’d taken. And at the end of all of it, one charge selling crack cocaine.

It took three days in a federal courtroom in March 2013 for Judge Harry Linen Weber to decide what those six years were worth. He gave Bethany 25 years. and he said out loud in that courtroom that he had not factored the murders into that number when he said it. Bethany after his arrest allegedly told federal agents something that sounds almost like a thesis statement for his own life.

 Just because you have a gun, that doesn’t mean you’re safe. Everyone can be gotten. There’s always a time when you can be gotten. Sit with that sentence for a second because I think it’s the most honest thing he ever said on record. That’s not a man rattled after getting cuffed. That’s a man handing you his whole philosophy on a platter.

Two decades of his life built on that one principle cashed in plenty of times before the law ever caught up. And when it finally did, he didn’t deny the logic. He sounded almost proud somebody had finally gotten around to applying it to him. The sentence has not stood still since 2013. In 2019, a federal judge cut it down to just over 20 years after ruling that Bethy’s original lawyer hadn’t done an adequate job the first time around.

In 2020, a federal appeals court sent the case back again. A change in sentencing law meant Bethany might have already served enough time to satisfy even the reduced number. No public record says what happened after that. Three of the four men on that porch have an entry in a federal or state court record. The fourth one doesn’t.

 Rashad Bethany was taken into federal custody in May 2006 arrested alongside Ricky Long. A court sent his case back for review in 2020. Whether that review ever landed on a final number or whether he’s walked out already, this documentary could not confirm. Shannon Evans is still inside serving his 65 years.

 Every appeal he has filed state federal habius has been denied. The affidavit naming other men as the real shooters change nothing about the number attached to his name. He maintains his innocence to a system that has by every available record stopped listening. The five murders were never charged and the door on them was never actually locked.

 In Illinois, murder has no expiration date. Prosecutors said so themselves at Bethy’s own sentencing hearing, noting he could still face charges someday for any of it. Golden the man from May Duffy Dixon. None of their cases has moved an inch since the legal door has been standing open for two decades. Nobody has walked back through it.

 West Pullman Trigger Town in the language of gang geography is still marked as active gangster disciple territory and records kept into the 2000s. Whatever this documentary just told you happened between 2000 and 2013, the map didn’t change because of it. The blocks are still the blocks. Think back to the pitbull one more time.

 A 9-year-old absorbed what an animal did to him and never fully put it down. A grown man used that same species of animal on someone weaker than himself and laughed. A system spent six years and $11,000 on one informant alone trying to hold that same man accountable. And what it finally held him for was a drug weight, not a body count.

 The pitbull was never really about the dog. It was about who gets to hurt somebody and walk away and who doesn’t. By the end, Bethany is both halves of that question. At once, the boy who absorbed it and the systems answer for what to do with a man who had. I keep coming back to what Duffy said in the seconds before the first shot.

 Don’t shoot. Don’t shoot. It ain’t worth it. Don’t kill me. He was right. It wasn’t worth it for any of them. Evans is serving 65 years. Bethy’s drug sentence is one nobody can currently locate the end of. Long served his 15 and is gone. The fourth man was never inside anything to begin with.

 Whatever system holds Evans and Bethany in place right now, simply never reach far enough to find him. He was there. Two witnesses said so under oath in documents you can still read today. Whatever the rest of his life turned out to be, nobody wrote it down. Nobody charged him. Nobody named him publicly. Nobody, as far as any record shows, ever went looking very hard.

Peanut ran off Parnell Avenue in October 2005. As far as the public record is concerned, he is still running.