African-American organized crime

In many of these newly established communities and neighborhoods, criminal activities such as illegal gambling (e.g. the numbers racket) and speakeasies were seen in the post-World War I and Prohibition eras.

Jean Baptiste Point du Sable was a pioneering figure credited as the founder of Chicago.

[4] Early Black American crime had a major focus on gambling in saloons and then jazz clubs and speakeasies.

[4][5] During the 1920s and 1930s, African American organized crime was centered in New York's Harlem, the largest black city in the world,[4] where the numbers racket was largely controlled by Casper Holstein and the "Madam Queen of Policy", Stephanie St. Clair.

St. Clair later testified at the Seabury Investigation that, during 1923 to 1928, the NYPD continued to arrest her number runners despite her making payoffs.

At that time, Harlem numbers rackets were largely operated by independent policy bankers such as St. Clair; the Harlem rackets later began to receive more protection from police interference following their eventual (partial) takeover by mobster Dutch Schultz and the largely Italian and Jewish "National Crime Syndicate" in the late 1930s.

The Black gamblers eventually left the Republican party to join Cermak's Democratic fold, where they had to pay him bribes to keep operating.

When Cermak died, Edward Kelly became mayor and allowed gambling along with other criminal activity to return to the South Side.

The Black American gangster Bumpy Johnson established close ties with the New York Italian-American Mafia and Jewish Mob in the post-war years, establishing some degree of independence for Black American organized crime groups in Harlem from the dominant New York organized crime groups.

Many of the major drug traffickers in the United States emerged during the early-to-mid-1960s, such as Leroy "Nicky" Barnes, Guy Fisher, and Frank Lucas, taking advantage of the increasing political strength during the civil rights movement.

[citation needed] Previously dependent partially on the political and police protection of New York's Five Families, Black American gangsters were able to negotiate with outside criminal organizations and establish a stronger independent hold over certain territories, and the Mafia's ability to control or impose a "street tax" on criminal operations in Black American neighborhoods began to wane.

Black American and Italian-American organized crime groups in the Northeast and Midwest instead began to cooperate (and at times compete) to a greater extent than in previous decades, increasingly sharing profits and coordinating rackets.

[citation needed] By the early 1970s, the large narcotics empires created by Nicky Barnes, Frank Matthews, and Frank Lucas began expanding beyond Harlem as Lucas sought to ultimately control a large-scale drug trafficking operation by gaining control of a network from Indochina directly to the streets of ghettos across the country.

[citation needed] In the 1940s, thousands of Black Americans migrated from the South into Los Angeles for World War II jobs.

[7] On the West Coast in Oakland, California, Felix Mitchell and his 69 Mob ran a large scale drugs trafficking operation, generating income of nearly a million dollars in monthly business.

The murder of one of the founders, Dwayne Davis (AKA Wonderful Wayne), and a series of federal indictments on 2 of the remaining bosses and 40 of the top lieutenants crippled YBI in 1982.

There were a few lieutenants who survived, one in particular carried on the organization in Detroit and Boston through the late 1980s until crack cocaine became the drug of choice over heroin.

They also created fake community groups, such as the Council for Youth and Urban Development as fronts to receive government funding.