In 1989, Sudhir Venkatesh, a young, fearless and slightly naive sociologist, was sent to conduct a poll in the poorest black ghettos in Chicago. Armed with a stack of questions like "How do you feel to be black and poor?," He goes to a half-abandoned high-rise building, where he is immediately grabbed and interrogated by local gangsters who decided that he was a Mexican spy. In the morning he is saved by JT, the young and charismatic leader of the Black Kings gang. "That way you know nothing," he will say. "Why don't you hang out with people?" Under the fictitious name "Black Kings," most likely, the Gangsta Disiples gang, which controlled the circulation of crack cocaine throughout the country in the 90s. Sudhir will spend the next ten years in Robert Taylor Homes, one of Chicago's worst ghettos, completely under the control of two gangs, and will speak to people - gangsters and policemen, prostitutes and pimps, house managers and tenants, squatters and lodgers. He will be invited to gangster parties, basketball games, funerals and to his kitchen. He will witness shootings, beatings, widespread corruption, lawlessness and the amazing ability of people to survive in any conditions. He will even get access to the gangsters' accounting reports and the opportunity to lead the gang for one day. His research will completely flip the view of urban poverty and earn him a teaching position at Harvard, where Venkatesh befriends economist Stephen Levitt, with whom they will devote a long time to studying gang economics. The article "Why gangsters live with mothers" will be included in the book "Freakonomics." Venkatesh would return to the subject on his own in his book "American Project," and then, many years later, would release that book.