[9] By 1964, they had grown significantly and law enforcement named them as a primary target for their various illegal activities, including robbery, theft, assaults, battery, intimidation, and extortion.
Those featured in the film include Bobby Gore, Kenneth "Goat" Parks, Eddy "Pepilo" Perry, Don McIlvaine, Leonard Sengali and William Franklin.
An introduction of narcotics into the Lawndale neighborhood during this time, along with a rapid increase in crimes involving intimidation, extortion, and murders of business owners who refused to pay for "protection" were perpetrated by the gang.
The younger Vice Lord leadership attempted to conceal the gang's true intentions with another camouflage campaign, this time by adopting Islamic ideologies.
[9] According to the U.S. Department of Justice, the Vice Lords Nation has between approximately 30,000 and 35,000 members operating in 75 cities and 28 states, primarily in the Great Lakes region.
[12] Vice Lord street gangs use a variety symbols to identify themselves, including a rabbit wearing a bow tie (the Playboy logo) as well as a red/gold 5 point star.
As a teenager growing up on Chicago's West Side in the 1960s, Willie Lloyd joined the Unknown Vice Lords, a faction based along 16th Street in the Lawndale neighborhood.
While incarcerated, Lloyd wrote The Amalgamated Order of Lordism, a 61-page manifesto on the Vice Lord command structure in the prisons and on the streets.
He was briefly a guest lecturer for a class called "Street Gangs in Chicago" at DePaul University, which was controversial, in part due to field trips in which Lloyd took the students to the West Side.
Rumors persisted that Lloyd still wanted to collect a "tax" from the Vice Lords as its leader, even though he had supposedly left gang life.