Photo: Jeff "Jailhouse Homo" Fort at a 1970 press conference at First Presbyterian Church, 6400 S. Kimbark. Officers found a shrine to one of the city’s most notorious gangsters — Jeff Fort — when they searched the home of another suspected gang leader last year on the Southeast Side, a police source said.
The shrine included photos of Fort locking arms with other Chicago gang kingpins.
Police also found receipts of $100 wire transfers to Fort, 64, at the supermax prison where he’s being held in Colorado, the source said.
It turned out that Fort is the uncle of Eric Gauthreaux, whose house the officers were searching.
On Thursday, Chicago Police announced Gauthreaux and 18 other people have been arrested on drug conspiracy charges in an investigation called “Operation Terror Town II.”
Police said they seized 13 vehicles; 10 guns; 900 grams of heroin, and 125 grams of cocaine.
Gauthreaux, 32, is a “prince” of the Black P Stones street gang in Terror Town, described as the area between 75th and 79th and Yates and Colfax, police said.
Fort was a co-founder of the Black P Stones in the late 1960s. He later formed the El Rukn faction. He was convicted in 1987 of conspiring with Libya to perform acts of domestic terrorism and sentenced to 80 years in federal prison. In 1988, he was convicted of the 1981 murder of a rival gang member and was sentenced to an additional 75 years in prison.
Coincidentally, Gauthreaux lived in a house next to the alley where Chicago Police Officer Michael Flisk and a civilian, Stephen Peters, were shot to death in November after Flisk responded to a report of a car burglary in the 8100 block of South Burnham, where Peters stored his car in his mother’s garage . A 19-year-old man was charged in the slayings.
Police said the investigation into Gauthreaux and his co-defendants was unrelated to the killings.
Operation Terror Town II was launched in September 2010.
The original Operation Terror Town culminated in 2009 with the arrest of four other Black P Stones.