The man in the tan jail uniform at the defense table in Courtroom 404 is short–five-foot-one from his cornrows to his white sneakers. But for years Jettie “Bo Diddley” Williams has cast a long shadow on the west side. He’s been a brutal lieutenant for a notorious gang, though he says he’s through with all that, a notion that makes police and prosecutors roll their eyes.
Bo Diddley was charged with the shooting a month after it occurred, and in 1989, after 34 court appearances, he pled guilty to attempted murder. He says he didn’t shoot Lucky and made that plea under duress–a transcript of the plea deal shows that the judge threatened him with 45 years if he went to trial and was convicted. He got only 9. With the day-for-day credit that convicts were given on their sentences back then and the credit for the time he’d been in jail while the case was pending, he spent less than three years in prison.
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He ditched school regularly and soon “just curved off into the streets.” Small but fearless, he says he didn’t start fights but never backed down from one either. “I might be shooting dice,” he says. “Somebody might tell me, ‘Little pussy motherfucker, I’ll take your money.’ ‘Bitch, you ain’t gonna do nothin’ to me.’” At first he got his “butt tore up,” but soon he was beating bigger opponents.
He joined the Unknown Vice Lords in his early teens, helping them sell amphetamines and quaaludes and then heroin. At 17 he started snorting heroin and quickly got addicted, and he was charged with shooting a woman in the stomach during a holdup. He pled guilty and was sentenced to ten years.
In 1986 he was shot and paralyzed again. This was the shooting Bo Diddley was charged with. Cronin tried to interview Lucky at the hospital afterward, but he was on life support and couldn’t answer questions.
The clearest evidence he didn’t do it, Bo Diddley says, are the small-caliber bullets Lucky was shot with. “Cronin know–long as I was in the street, he will tell you, what was Bo Diddley known to carry? A .44 Magnum. I rode with that or with a Mac 11 [a machine gun]. I didn’t shoot no little bitty gun. If I was gonna shoot you I was gonna shoot you for real.”
