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Pure Torture, From the Chicago Reader of December 3, 1999 --continued "All my guys were real rough looking," he wrote from prison. "And I do mean rough and were the best fighters I ever seen. When I first started running with them I used to drift off like I was [an] innocent bystander and take notes on how they got into confrontation with bigger, older rival gangs, outnumbered like five to one. And before I knew it, I saw grown men running away, getting flipped on their backs by 12/13/14/yrs old friends of mine. It was like a gladiator or free fall wrestling show. You had to see it to believe it." The Apache Rangers operated mostly in the Bush, a neighborhood that bordered the old U.S. Steel plant on the southeast side, not far from the police department's Fourth District headquarters. The group seems to have been relatively insignificant, a small band of adolescents and teenagers. In those days, Patterson says, gangs on the southeast side were not so quick to resort to guns. He describes meeting the Apache Rangers' rivals in the middle of the week for a good fight and then meeting them again on Saturday to play football. Elsewhere in the city, Patterson says, gangs were doing a lot of shooting, and the fighting his group specialized in—"with fists/belts/bottles/sticks/ bats/garbage can tops/etc."—was going out of style. A few times, Patterson says, one of his comrades, a young man known as Snag, "came very close to getting us killed by journeying in areas where getting beaten up wasn't an option. Those guys wanted to gun us down." Patterson says he became the gang's strategist, determining who they would fight and how they would make their approach. "We used to go to el stations and bus stops after school looking for rival gangs. At first they felt confident they could beat us since it was only about seven of us. But once the fight started they eventually ran or pulled a gun out and started shooting at us. After a few times if they saw us coming they would run or deny they were in gangs." "I enjoyed the camaraderie and trust we had to rely on each other in a tight pinch . . . " Patterson wrote. "My rules were simple. No fighting amongst each other. No stealing from each other, no rapes, or armed robberies of innocent persons. No fucking each other's women. No younger members under 16 could smoke cigarettes, sell drugs, skip school, or use guns. If any older members tried to influence or hit younger members they got punished. . . . We felt honorable and rebellious at the same time. . . . I was like the conscience of all of them. They knew I was fair and clean cut." Patterson described himself as skinny, tall, and innocent in appearance in those days, and he said his "good boy image" protected him. Members of rival gangs might immediately recognize Patterson's friends as trouble, but the policeman's son looked different and went to a different school. "Even the police couldn't figure out who I was. I always got away after fights or blended in with the crowd watching. I'd put my school jacket on and act like I didn't know anything. "Detectives finally figured out I was the ringleader and that I used to wait on the bus stop for guys or go into school and tell them to cut class. One day I was on the bus stop waiting for them and detectives drove up on the sidewalk and pinned me to the wall so I couldn't run. I tried to play innocent, saying I was waiting on my girlfriend to get out of class. They knew I was lying. They told me, 'We been watching you for awhile. You are somebody!' I denied all of that. They put me in the car and took me to a rival gang's high school and made me get out in front of all those guys I'd beaten up before and was wanted by. The detective car pulled off and there I was standing there about to get beat down. But the rivals were so shocked to see me dropped dead into their laps I had just enough time to run like my pants were on fire. Once I got the first step, ain't no catching me! A whole group of them chased me to the viaduct but stopped there since it was my hood on the other side. While I'm running, I see the detective car riding down the street next to me, honking the horn and waving. It was funny to them and confirmed that I was in a gang!" Lieutenant Patterson recalls that he threw Aaron out of the house not long after discovering his tattoos. The lieutenant has no precise memory of the timetable of his confrontations with his son, but he has a vivid memory of a day—perhaps a year later—when Aaron paid a surprise call at his office. "He just came in and said, 'Could I see you for a minute?' I said, 'Yeah, come on in.' He showed me a letter from the city that said that he had taken the police test and he had scored in the 97th percentile. And I never knew that he had even taken the test. He is a very bright kid. He just sort of misdirected it. He was doing it, basically I think, to appease me. I doubt if he had any real interest in the police department. I was often angry with him because of his gangbanging career and constantly getting him out of jail and stuff like that. So I guess to appease me he went down without my knowledge and took the police test, and I guess he wanted to wait until he was sure that the results were favorable. Then he came over to see me, and he was proud. "So I ran into my boss's office. Marty was the commander of my district and I was his community relations sergeant at that time. We were very, very close. I said, 'Marty, Marty, look, look, look at this. Read this.' Marty, with his long cigar, says, 'Well, I'll be damned. Maybe this will be the exact thing that will turn him around. When he gets through his drug test and all that stuff, tell him come see me. I will see what I can do for him.' "I have never expressed this to Aaron, but when he walked into my office that day with that letter, my chest must've reached out to there. But I would never tell him that, you know. Because to me the greatest honor that a son can bestow on his father is to tell his dad that he wants to do what he does. And my sons, neither of them had ever expressed a desire to do what I did, and then all of a sudden, without my knowledge, he made some attempt to. That was mind-boggling. That really elated me." Aaron recalls taking the police exam and scoring well, but he has no recollection of going to his father's office to show him the results. Aaron thinks the results were mailed to his parents' house and he went over there to pick them up. What is certain is that in April 1986, not long after the exam results came in, some detectives knocked on the Pattersons' door. "We just chitchatted for about five minutes or so," the lieutenant recalls, "and what I thought they were there for was to do his background check. I don't know why I was so naive, but I knew a background check had to be done, because when I took the test even my mother in Virginia was interviewed. "After about five minutes they said they were looking for Aaron in connection with a shooting of some gangbanger in the gang opposite to his own." Patterson was not a typical gangbanger. He graduated from De La Salle and had plans for his future. He enlisted in the National Guard, went through basic training, and liked the military enough to then enlist in the army. Ten months into his training, he broke his ankle. He was given a medical discharge and returned to Chicago, and though he fell in with the old gang again, he also began attending the University of Illinois. For a time he worked at a McDonald's, and during one Christmas season as a handler at the post office. He took up residence with a girlfriend. He says he found it hard to hold down a job, attend college, maintain a relationship with his girlfriend, and run the gang, so he dropped out of school. During this period he also extended his rap sheet at a fairly rapid rate, becoming a regular visitor to the police department's Fourth District station in South Chicago. From May 1983 through April 1986 he was arrested seven times for battery, three times for aggravated battery, twice for attempted murder, twice for armed violence, and once each for damage to property, aggravated assault, criminal trespass, and possession of marijuana.