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Several times a year, Brother Bill takes a group of gangsters to Notre Dame, to football and basketball team practices and games. The gang members guest-lecture to students and faculty at the Center for Social Concerns and university workshops. "They treat us like movie stars," says Paris. "I like going down there and telling them what our life is like and learning about theirs."
In one case a Gangster Disciple scheduled to execute a rival returned from his dinner with the Fighting Irish basketball team too guilt-stricken to go through with the murder. Others simply take a liking to a life not spent looking over their shoulder. Brother Bill has other gambits too. Realizing that many gangsters spend countless nights holed up in apartments watching sports on television, he recently introduced them to a foreign concept: the sports bar. Initially they turned to Brother Bill to guide them on unfamiliar turf. Nowadays they freely go to Champions near O'Hare Airport and the Alumni Club in downtown Chicago to watch their favorite teams.
Brother Bill has helped a few gangsters on the road to employment--one now works as a freight-elevator supervisor, another as an electrician--but most aren't interested in the regimen of daily employment or in earning a minimum wage, and that's not how Brother Bill keeps score either. As the outside world rolls on, William Wylie Tomes Jr. continues to cruise the projects in that silver Park Avenue, conducting his nonjudgmental, never-ending search for his people.
And wherever he finds them, his message is the same as it was a decade ago, when he discovered a 21-year-old gang leader bleeding to death in a dark stairwell from four gunshots to the chest. As the faint siren of the paramedics' vehicle sounded, too far away, Brother Bill spoke softly into the ear of the young man the last words he would hear on this earth:
"God made you. He loves you. He wants you to be with him forever."