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UPDATE : Weary Chicago Voters Try the Streetwise : Discontent with the status quo underlies the success of two council candidates with gang ties. Both now face runoffs.

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

Ethel Washington is a power to be reckoned with inside the caged towers of the Robert Taylor homes on Chicago’s South Side. A no-nonsense tenant government leader, she represents 1,100 poor housing project dwellers. When she gets angry, officials flinch.

“People are tired of the same old same old,” she said. “It’s time for a change.”

The political discontent gnawing at Washington and other poor voters appears to be the undercurrent to the startling success last week of Wallace (Gator) Bradley and Hal Baskin--two City Council candidates linked to street gangs who were able to force once-popular incumbents into runoff campaigns. The runoffs will be decided in the April 5 general election.

Despite stern warnings by mainstream politicians and a steady barrage of unfavorable news coverage about their past roles as members of the Gangster Disciples, Bradley and Baskin have found favor among a solid core of voters who are disillusioned with incumbents and are turning to the street for a sense of renewal.

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“Maybe because they came from the street they can get things done,” said Washington, who is one of several prominent housing project leaders backing Bradley.

The 28 high-rise project buildings that form a spine through the blighted Third Ward provided Bradley with the vast majority of the votes he won in the Democratic primary against Dorothy Tillman, who outdistanced the former gang member, 48% to 30%. The 42-year-old Bradley, who acknowledges that he was once an enforcer for the Gangster Disciples, has served time for two theft convictions.

There are few public projects in the 16th Ward. But amid the poor neighborhoods of Englewood, Baskin’s 21% total in the primary against Alderman Shirley Coleman was enough to earn him a second chance. At 42, Baskin is a gang counselor who works with teen-agers in Englewood schools. He is also a former Gangster Disciple who was arrested for an assortment of crimes but was never convicted.

“The people in the projects don’t see their lives changing for the better, and they start wondering why they should vote for the incumbent,” said William J. Grimshaw, a political science professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology and an analyst of the city’s black political culture.

“If you’re a parent with a kid in a gang, or a kid who’s friends with gang kids, gang members aren’t strangers to you,” Grimshaw said. “And to some people . . . they represent order and discipline--in a perverse sort of way.”

“Gator’s got the look of someone who can get things done,” said Willie Jones, 37, who manages Mississippi Rick’s--a rib and catfish joint near Bradley’s dimly lit campaign headquarters. “He doesn’t ride through here in a car. He walks the street, and everyone knows him.”

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That is the sort of acceptance that allowed Bradley and Baskin to talk openly last week about the post-election congratulations they received from Larry Hoover, the head of the Gangster Disciples who is serving a life prison term for murder.

Baskin took a call from Hoover the day after his victory. He said Hoover told him “to keep winning.”

And two days after the primary, Bradley drove with his family to the Stateville prison in Joliet to meet with Hoover. Bradley now proudly displays a snapshot of himself and Hoover posing with Bradley’s 14-month-old son. “He loves little kids,” Bradley said.

Earlier this week, Bradley and Tillman took their increasingly acid campaign to a syndicated television talk show in New York. There, Tillman said Bradley and gang members were to blame for the “destruction of our black families, of our black community.” Replied Bradley: “Gator’s the only one who can change it.”

Despite their surprising show of strength, Bradley and Baskin still have tough uphill battles. Baskin is pinning his hopes on “new voters.” Bradley, too, spent much of last weekend urging campaign workers to find new voters in a weeklong open registration period.

They must win over far more voters than the few needed by their incumbent rivals. That will be difficult in wards plagued by low voter turnout. More than 20,000 registered voters in the Third Ward sat out the primary, while less than 7,000 voted.

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And many voters look dimly on Bradley and Baskin’s vaunted street connections, particularly in wards long mired in gang violence and narcotics trafficking.

Fred Davis has driven Bradley in his cab on several occasions but is leery of his promises of winning more jobs and a gang truce for the ward. “We know one alderman can’t do it alone,” Davis said. “He’s the new face, so some people like him. Me, I don’t trust him. He’s too close to the gangs, if you ask me.”

Conrad Worrill, a historian at Northeastern Illinois University’s inner-city studies department and chairman of the National Black United Front, an activist group, said that voters would be swayed less by the candidates’ criminal records than by their community work. Worrill is backing Baskin but is also supporting Tillman.

“The biggest problem is that so many voters down here are turned off by politics. That’s what gives people like Gator Bradley, unknowns with a little organization behind them, the lift he got. We’ll see how far he goes with it.”

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