At age 13, he wound up moving to the south side of Chicago with his grandmother, Geneva Llopice. “I got real rebellious,” he says, “because I didn’t know why I was taken away from my mother.”

Before long, Chief Drew was running streets with the Valvadors and, later, the Egyptian Cobras. ”I enjoyed it,” he relates, “because I felt as though the gang was my family.”

All the while, Chief Drew attended church. His grandmother, who’d promised his parents that she’d look out for him, insisted on it. She told him, “Son, you don’t have to worry about nothin’. The Lord will always take care of babies and damn fools, and you’re at the top of this list.”

As it turned out, the trappings of gang life proved more alluring than the gospel. Eventually, Chief Drew, having been implicated in a burglary, found himself before a judge.  “ ‘You’ve got your choice,’ ” he recalls being told: “ ‘either go to the penitentiary or the military.’ ”

Chief Drew underwent training with the Army’s 101st Airborne unit, as a paratrooper. In 1962, he arrived in Vietnam. One day, while he was walking through a rice paddy in Fubai, near Denang, an enemy bullet found the right side of his chest. While recuperating in Newbrooke, Germany, he was diagnosed with cancer and would up having his right breast removed.

Like many Vietnam veterans, he returned stateside only to discover that people, as he puts it, “didn’t know me anymore. Then I turned militant against society.”

Running with the Blackstone Rangers, a gang on the south side of Chicago, he lived the life of an outlaw—stealing and dealing drugs to feed a heroin habit that he’d picked up in Vietnam.

Even after getting married, fathering a daughter and settling into a job at Sherwin Williams—where he worked as a lithographer, printing labels for paint cans—junk was a part of his life. Eventually he sought medical help, at a VA hospital, after having walked out on his job. (When his supervisor raised his voice, Chief Drew struck him in the head with a wrench.) But it wasn’t until witnessing a murder that he summoned the determination to kick the habit for good.

It was his brother-in-law, an attorney living in Los Angeles, who originally suggested moving out west. Arriving in 1976, Chief Drew, along with a friend, formed a maintenance company focusing on masonry, landscaping and roofing. Before long, he had enough money to make a down payment on a house.

Meanwhile, however, his marriage was on the rocks. His wife was a Jehovah’s Witness. “She went her way and I went mine,” says Chief Drew. “I wasn’t going to join no Jehovah’s Witness. I’m a Catholic, I’m gonna stay that way.”

After the divorce, he adds, “I started going to church, because violence start to come on my mind again.” He owned a rifle, and there came a day when, fearing what he might do to his ex, he decided to hand it over to a priest he knew. Ever since, he has attended Mass regularly.

Turned out that the woman who would become his second wife—Jacqueline Le Falle—was a church-goer, as well. “For about a year and a half,” recalls Chief Drew, “both of us watched each other. Then we started dating. For about six months, even before we kissed, we dated. Never tried to hit on her sexually or nothin’, because I wanted to find a real spiritual woman.”

Wedding bells chimed in 1992  At the time, Chief Drew was working as a mason for the federal government, in the engineering department of a VA hospital. The work eventually claimed his right kneecap, requiring an artificial replacement. After a brief stint working in procurement for the VA hospital, Chief Drew decided to embark on a second career. He enrolled in the National Educational College, in Commerce, Ca., eventually obtaining a degree in biomedical electrical technology. 

In his spare time, he’d play congas and make second-line regalia. “Everywhere I go,” he says, “I never gave up my tradition. I tried to give it to a wider community.”

Indeed, even back in Chicago, Chief Drew found time to show off his dance moves and his finery. At parties, he and some cohorts would sometimes second line to entertain themselves and their friends. They called themselves the New Orleans Shake ‘Em Down Second Liners.

In the 1980s, in Los Angeles, Chief Drew came into contact with a group of transplanted New Orleanians known as LA LA (translation: From Louisiana to Los Angeles). The group put on a festival around Mardi Gras time, but Chief Drew found their presentation lacking. “ ‘How would y’all like to have some second liners?’ “ he recalls asking. “They say, ‘We got second liners.’ I say, ‘No, you don’t. You got some ragged-ass people in blue jeans—ain’t doin’ shit.’ I say, ‘I’m gonna show you some real second liners.’ ”

The initial Los Angeles incarnation of the Shake ‘Em Down Second Liners consisted mainly of members of Chief Drew’s extended family who lived in the area. They first hit the street, with a live band, as part of the LA LA event in 1988. It was, according to Chief Drew, an arresting performance, what with “drawers goin’ everywhere, butts goin’ this way and that.” 

The group also strutted their stuff at church parties and other functions involving L.A.’s African-American community, often raising eyebrows. The public, says Chief Drew, “wasn’t ready to accept it in California—a bunch of adults shakin’ their behinds.”

Eventually it dawned on him that the Shake ‘Em Down Second Liners would pack more of a wallop—and command more respect—if they were teamed with a Mardi Gras Indian gang. Unbeknownst to his second liners—and with encouragement from Donald Harrison, the late chief of the New Orleans-based Guardians of the Flame Mardi Gras Indian gang—he began stitching away in his garage.

“I said, ‘No, it won’t.’ I raised my garage door, here’s a fully completed Indian suit.” Doc reacted as if he’d been confronted with the handiwork of a mad scientist. “ ‘Oh, man,’ ” Chief Drew recalls him saying. “ ‘What you been doin’?’ ”

Appearing along with his second liners in the Martin Luther King Jr. parade in 1990, Chief Drew, got up in a white suit, made quite an impression. Joining the ensemble, in genuine Apache regalia, was Richard Hothai. A Native American whose sacred name is Walking Deer, he worked at the same VA hospital as Chief Drew. “We blowed the public’s mind,” says Chief Drew. For his efforts, he received the Katherine Dunham Award, in recognition of having  presented the best-dressed folk art performance at the parade. Another venue where Chief Drew showed off his Mardi Gras Indian regalia was the Orange County Pow Wow, an annual gathering of Native Americans. He’d been turned on to the event by a Navajo elder from Laughlin, Nev., Jack Isaac. They’d met at the VA hospital, where Isaac, an artist, had been hired to paint a Native American mural.

Chief Drew and Richard Hothai

Something about Chief Drew’s appearance had drawn Isaac's eye. “ ‘What are you looking at, man?’ ” Chief Drew asked. “And he said, ‘Man, you Indian—you have Indian in your blood.’ I say, ‘Yes, sir. I also have French, Spanish and black in me.’ ” The elder wound up inviting the Mardi Gras Indian to Laughlin to partake in Navajo rituals. 

Squatting buck naked in a darkened sweat lodge, as elders poured water over red-hot rocks, Chief Drew underwent what he describes as a “manhood test.”  “They take a plume, like rub it on you, and tell you: ‘Don’t move, my warrior. We have a rattler around.’ ” Chief Drew didn’t flinch, even though it felt as if a critter might have been crawling on him, and thus was adopted as a “brother.”

By definition, Mardi Gras Indians pay ritual homage to Native Americans, who provided refuge to runaway slaves in colonial times. Yet few, if any, New Orleans-based practitioners of this traditional form of folk art can claim to have immersed themselves as deeply in “real” Indian culture as Chief Drew. (next page)