High Noon After Nightfall

The nearly all-black village of Brooklyn, Ill. (pop. 1,700), a fragmented checkerboard of streets lined with shanty houses, is hardly the stuff of legends. With most of its residents on welfare or receiving some other form of public assistance, Brooklyn has depended for its existence chiefly on the raffish trace of night life it provides blacks and whites who after hours cross the Mississippi River from nearby St. Louis, Mo., to visit the village's all-night bars. Recently Brooklyn gained another kind of notoriety when it became the scene of a drama full of Western overtones and old-style bravado. TIME Correspondent Barrett Seaman reports:

The trouble began in the late summer and fall of last year, when Paul Latham, a black militant from nearby East St. Louis, came to Brooklyn to try to activate community and civil rights programs. Latham's brand of militancy grated on the Brooklynites, particularly when rumors began circulating that he was trying to "take over" the village.

James Bollinger, a local hustler, gambler and gun fancier, went to Mayor George Thomas and the village board and offered to run Latham out of town.

Since the six-man police department was woefully weak, Thomas and the board deputized Bollinger and a dozen or so sidekicks. Bollinger and his men promised to persuade Latham to leave and, in a gunfight--in which no one was killed--they did just that a year ago.

Bollinger thereafter served notice that he was in charge in Brooklyn, and for a year he and his gang of badged deputies ran the village, freely roaming the streets armed with pistols, sawed-off shotguns, rifles, even machine guns. Bollinger himself toted a snub-nosed .30-cal. semiautomatic carbine "enforcer," which he kept tucked in the waist of his Levi's. The police department was so cowed by Bollinger and his bully buddies that, in effect, it ceased to exist.

Hard Drugs. At first the Bollinger gang rounded up gamblers and other troublemakers, but then it started its own reign of terror. Some gang members began to smoke pot, and later took to hard drugs, including heroin. Dr. John Riley, the village's only physician, was bullied into supplying them with drugs and forced to give them methadone when the heroin ran low. So persistent were the demands that Riley, 47, was driven to a nervous breakdown. He died of a heart attack this July.

Gambling and prostitution flourished in Brooklyn under Bellinger's direction; he took over the cigarette and jukebox vending operations in the village, made whites (even truck drivers who delivered liquor to the village bars) unwelcome, and frightened the late-night white bar clientele away. Bar owners and patrons were compelled to pay the gang protection money, sometimes as much as $500 a month, and some small shop owners were forced out of business when they were unable to meet the payments.

Those who resisted found their windows smashed--or worse. One man who resisted turned up dead in the street; and though the crime was never solved, it is widely believed that the Bellinger gang was responsible. Things got so bad that one resident went to Richard Jackson, manager of one of the village's bars, and told him that he had been robbed. "Why don't you go to the cops?" suggested Jackson. "Because it's one of them who robbed me," the man replied.

Jackson, 26, had several tense run-ins with Bellinger. One time Bellinger and his men denied him entry into his own bar and, he believes, wanted to kill him. Finally, Jackson went to his friend Frank Skinner, 39, a 6-ft. 3-in., 290-lb. onetime Brooklyn police chief who operated his own bar not far from Jackson's, and the two determined that Bollinger had to be stopped. Skinner went to Mayor Thomas, who had felt powerless to resist Bellinger. "It's time," he warned. "The man's been messin' with the people of this town too long."

Thomas, anxious to restore peace, agreed. He promptly made Skinner the new police chief. Skinner then deputized Jackson and two other men, and set out last month to round up the Bellinger gang. In the village's only patrol car, Skinner and his men prowled the streets, found Bellinger's men one by one, stripped them of their guns and badges, and ordered them out of town. By sundown of the same day, all of them had been found--except Bellinger.

Run for Cover. At about 8 p.m., Skinner, Jackson and another deputy found Bollinger standing in a patch of street light in front of a Fourth Street bar. As the three men approached him, townspeople began to run for cover. Skinner stopped ten paces away, his police riot gun loaded with two deer slugs.

"I guess you're lookin' for me," said Bollinger calmly.

"That's right," replied Skinner. "I'm lookin' for you, man. I know you've heard I'm the police chief now."

"I'm not giving up a goddam thing," said Bollinger. His hands moved quickly to his gun, but before he had it out of his Levi's, Skinner's first deer slug ripped through his chest. Witnesses claim that Bellinger's body spun three times in the air, and a second slug exploded into his head. He was dead before he hit the ground. Bellinger's girl friend walked over and stood above the body and said, "He lived like a man. He died like one too." He was 38.

With the Bollinger reign of terror at an end, night life in Brooklyn has picked up, the late-night white clientele is trickling back, and more people walk the streets at night. Says Skinner with a smile: "There are only six men carrying guns in Brooklyn--all police. The Wild West show is over."

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