The Long Rise and Fast Fall of New York’s Black Mafia

 

'You can’t become known as a gangster. Once you’re known you’re finished. The old-timers understood that.’

By C.J. Sullivan

In 1974, it looked like the Godfather model was fading amid indictments and hits on its leaders and as middle-class white residents poured out of America’s inner cities.

That was when Francis A.J. Ianni published Black Mafia: Ethnic Succession in Organized Crime, expanding on the idea at the end of A Family Business, his anthropological study of a Mafia family two years earlier, that it was a natural progression in the order of crime that the Italians “must weaken and give way to the next wave of aspiring ethnics, just as the Jews and Irish did before them.”

Legendary New York journalist Pete Hamill blurbed the book, calling it “nothing less than a major ethnic succession to power, as Italian-Americans and the remaining pockets of non-Italians give way to the new rulers of the Mob… It is no accident, of course, that now that Blacks are beginning to run numbers, we are hearing more calls for legalization…”

I asked Hamill this year whatever happened to the Black Mafia. He laughed: “Well, I guess I didn’t see the Colombian and Russian mobs coming.”

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Source: The Daily Beast