The Black Mafia gained power in local neighborhoods by intimidating people to prevent anyone from reporting the group's activities to the police.
Members initially participated in holding up crap games, extorting drug dealers, and working as numbers men and illegitimate businessmen, but they eventually ended up controlling entire rackets and gaining influence with local politicians.
Law enforcement officials had difficulties prosecuting members of the group, however, because witnesses would rarely cooperate, fearing retaliation, and cases were dropped more often than not.
The "Black Mafia" was formed to coordinate and consolidate historic inner-city crime in numbers, prostitution, and extortion of legitimate businesses, while combining with the rising drug demand in Philadelphia.
Bruno turned a blind eye to many of the renegade Italian gangsters who "did business" with, or supplied, the black drug lords, so long as they met their financial obligations to him and to the New York families.
The earliest documented act committed by the Black Mafia was the April 19, 1969, murder of one of the group's founders, Nathaniel "Rock and Roll" Williams.
In a trend that would be repeated numerous times throughout the Black Mafia's tenure, charges against Barnes were dropped when police were unable to line up witnesses who could identify him.
[2] Recent academic works in criminal justice are filling in the gaps using FBI, court, and police records to substantiate the long association of Shabazz (aka Jeremiah Pugh) with the growth of organized black crime in Philadelphia.
The difficulty this precedent created would play out dramatically when the FBI overheard two high-level heroin dealers complain that they were being overly extorted by Shamsud-din Ali aka Clarence Fowler, the imam who had replaced Shabazz.
"Cutty (Shamsud-din Ali's nickname, short for "cutthroat" for beating a murder rap of a well-known Reverend) ...be walking with kings," the dealers lamented.
[citation needed] As the gang gained local control, separate meetings were held for those holding positions of power and those who were general members.
City residents and local law enforcement who saw the gang war unfolding in the streets, though, knew that the Black Mafia was behind the Council.
[citation needed] One of the first incidents to be attributed explicitly to the Black Mafia by law enforcement officials was the severe beating of Pennsylvania Deputy Insurance commissioner David Trulli in May 1969.
Trulli, then investigating an insurance fraud case, was beaten with a lead pipe by Richard "Pork Chops" James apparently at the request of a third party.
Camden Police Department intelligence files state that James was sent to New York at the orders of Eugene "Bo" Baynes to fulfill a murder contract.
The files state that James's subsequent overdose in jail was in fact, a "hot shot" administered to him by other Black Mafia members.
Once all were inside, they pulled guns on the twenty employees present and forced them to lie on the floor in the back of the store where they bound them with tape and electrical cord.
[6] By far the most well-known act of crime that the Black Mafia carried out, the 1973 Hanafi Muslim massacre was what gained them national media attention.
The difficulty in obtaining evidence to successfully prosecute the crime fomented a breakdown by Khaalis as he sought to draw attention to the case of his murdered family, eventually resulting in the 1977 Hanafi Siege.
It has expanded and evolved into a powerful crime cartel with chains of command, enforcers, soldiers, financiers, regular business meetings and assigned territories.
In September 1974, 21 members and group affiliates were arrested in an early morning raid by federal drug agents and the Justice Department's crime strike force.
The Black Mafia would fracture and reform several more times, each generation remaking itself more light, agile, and deadly, with growing political influence.
The Black Mafia are suspected in the unsolved murder of Taazmayia "Taaz" Lang, the manager and girlfriend of Philadelphia singer Teddy Pendergrass, who was shot dead on the doorstep of her home in 1976.
[8] In the 1980s, the JBM developed out of the street culture of Philadelphia and represented an attempt to form an organized crime syndicate modeled on La Cosa Nostra (LCN) and the original Black Mafia.
The JBM espoused an amalgam of characteristics which purposely emulated LCN and Black Mafia control over organized crime and its fondness for symbols and ceremony.
The JBM is composed exclusively of young Black males, with female participation nonexistent except in the supporting roles of couriers and fronts for rentals and purchases.
To strengthen group resources and to broaden the base of distribution, the JBM founders began to recruit friends and associates who already had established drug networks in various parts of the city.
What began as a loose criminal association quickly evolved into a lucrative drug network, with a total distribution estimated at 100 to 200 kilos of cocaine per month at its peak.
[citation needed] In accordance with this, one theory suggests that the original members of the 1970s-era Black Mafia organized African American youths into the JBM to thwart the Jamaicans Yardie control of drug distribution in the affected areas in Fort Carson.
[citation needed] Samuel Christian, (also known as Richard Carter or as Sulieman Bey), formerly a high-ranking member of the Black Mafia, waged an unsuccessful attempt to gain control of the JBM after his release from prison in late 1989.