AMERICAN SCENE: 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.