 Welcome to the original gangsters podcast. I'm your host Scott Bernstein. I've been anticipating this episode since we started the OG pod in 2019. I'm very, very proud to bring on board. We specialize in OGs. We know OGs from all over the place. And this guy is the OG, OG when it comes to writing about the Philadelphia Black Mafia. We're going to get into a little Tim Donahue. We're going to get into a little bit of the Philadelphia Italian Mafia. But Sean Patrick Griffin, the esteem, the distinguished. Sean Patrick Griffin, thank you for joining me. This is truly a pleasure and an honor. It's been a long time in coming. We thought this would happen at some point, Scott. So Sean wrote the book Black Brothers Incorporated, which in my opinion, at least for my reading, it's my favorite non-traditional organized crime book. When I say traditional, I mean Italian. And it chronicles the Philadelphia Black Mafia, which was the precursor to what is now in Philadelphia, the JBM or the junior Black Mafia. It all started in the late 60s, early 70s with this kind of collision of crime and civil rights and religion. It's fascinating. Sean, why don't you just tell us about getting into the subject in terms of a researcher and a writer, and then let everybody know that you were also a Philadelphia police officer at one point. Sure. Well, how the project happened is its own fascinating story. When I was a graduate student, my mentor Alan Block, he's since passed away. He's a legendary organized crime scholar. And he was doing research on heroin trafficking along the Eastern Seaboard in the 1960s. He knew partly because of my policing experience, but I also had family in policing. He figured that I would have connections in the Philadelphia police department for these particular heroin traffickers. One was named Frank Moten, one was named Jack Brown. It has nothing to do with Philadelphia's Black Mafia, but anyway. So sure enough, I go to, at the time, Philadelphia's organized crime unit. I meet a bunch of detectives who I didn't know, by the way. They were kind enough to humor me. And I told them what I was looking for. Now, this shows you how long ago this is. This is obviously in the late 80s, early 90s. And they didn't have, there was before computers. So they had the old, you know, Dewey Decimal system, you know, the Rolla Dex, not Rolla Dex, but you know, the three by five cards. They didn't have any files on these guys, but they did have a three by five index card for each of these two heroin traffickers. And that wasn't much of a help or whatever. But the detective who was helping me said, well, why do you care about these two guys? And I told them what Allen was doing. And he said, Oh, well, if you're looking for heroin trafficking, then you need to be researching Philadelphia's Black Mafia. Now, Scott, you and your audience have to understand I was born and raised in the city. My father and my brother were both cops. And I was researching organized crime and grad school. So the odds that I would never have even heard of this group didn't make much sense. So he takes me into a room and there are boxes of files about this group called Philadelphia's Black Mafia. So being as clueless as I was back then, I didn't think anything of it. I went back to state college, reported to Allen and said, Hey, look, nothing on Frank, Jack Brown or Frank Moten, but you're not going to believe this. They have boxes and boxes of Intel files on a group called Philadelphia's Black Mafia. And he said, Well, you're going to write about that, right? And I said, No, because at the time I was doing Italians, just like everybody else. And he said, Are you crazy? As an author who wouldn't love a shot at a title that most people are not familiar with, with access to those sorts of files, not to mention at the time, you know, if you're going back to the nineties, it was dated enough to not be sensitive. So some people in law enforcement would talk to you at least because as as your readers and listeners may know, if something's really hot, if it was happening right now in March of 2024, it's hard getting people to speak. Yeah, it's hard. So he said, you know, they'll be able to actually talk to you and it's not too old where they're dead. So you can actually have the best of both worlds. An author would dream at this. So I actually engaged in this project reluctantly because I knew nothing about it. It wasn't sexy or whatever. And then my goodness, as your intro said, once I got involved in it, I, I just couldn't grasp. And by the way, I give these lectures to my students every semester and people still have a hard time grasping that volatile mix, as you said, of religion, politics and crime. And that's why it's, it's one of those stories where when I wrote that book, that book on my hard drive, if it was just in regular times, New Roman font was 1400 pages. And that was why, because there was so much going on. And I felt obligated, you know, when I was writing it in the 90s, to explain to people who couldn't possibly imagine, well, what do you mean the nation of Islam believed in this and did this? What do you mean the civil rights movement changed from that? You had to do that in addition to the actual just straight true crime story to explain how these people first of all got involved and why they were allowed to go on for so long without any interference from law enforcement. Well, and I also, I always find the juxtaposition in the public interest factor of here, where, and I'm interested to get your take on it, like reporting on Italian mafia, whether you're talking about modern day, definitely more when you're talking about history. There's a romanticism factor of it that makes people feel kind of warm and fuzzy in a weird way. And then you, you transition to this kind of organized crime, which at the end of the day is the exact same thing as the other kind of organized crime, but it's not as palatable. There's nothing kind of warm and fuzzy about it. It's just like brute force, raw criminality, just ruthless, diabolical, violent. So it's, it's, it's a different beast, but it's the same beast at the same time. Well, the problem is there are many things with this topic. I oftentimes in my class, I'll, I'll dissect the Godfather film, because people routinely say romantic or romanticizes organized crime. I think people get caught up in how it's a great film and it's got legendary stars. And of course the dress back then confuses people. That's how everyone dressed. It wasn't just a dress as a gangster where you're wearing jacket and tie or a jacket all the time, whatever. And the music was great and all that. But if you actually look at the story, you have constant people informing on other groups. It happens multiple times throughout the thing. If you really just look at the bare bones crime, it's brutal. Don't care. It tore the Corleone family apart. I mean, one brother kills another brother. The other brother gets killed in a violent mob assassination. The daughter is married to a horrible guy who they end up killing. Yes. So, but, but yet people really do look at that fondly even though if you strip everything away, you go, wow, that's a dastardly business. And by the way, when I was writing Black Brothers in the 90s, that was really in the back of my mind because that also at the time was happening when it came to all sorts of groups. I was in the belly of the beast. You know, I literally had access to almost anything you could want as a researcher. It wasn't just Philly PD. It was the IRS. It was ATF. It was DEA. You know, anyone who ever, for those who don't know, there are two actually two editions of the book. The first book came out in 2005. That book had 104 pages of end notes in eight point single space font. And if you look at those end notes, you say, oh my goodness, it had every federal agency, all the departments within Philly, all the different units that collected data, including many cases that never went to trial, even though they pretty much knew who did what. I did that on purpose because I couldn't get over the fact that people were glamorizing these hustlers who were terrorizing entire sections of the city for decades, who murdered dozens of people, beheaded one person, as you know. The stories were just so outrageous in the idea that people were glamorizing these guys. And some of them, as you know, Scott, because you read the book, some of them actually wound up going into politics. And I wouldn't even say that... The glad that... Ever would have happened, but the thing is, nobody knows a thing about them. But I also would say that some of the glamorization of that group, I think, has grown. I think that almost the Junior Black Mafia almost has more of a sexiness to brag about or to talk about affiliation. I know a lot of the modern day Philadelphia mob guys, the Joey Merlino crew, they love those guys. And vice versa. The JBM loves the Merlino crew, and the Merlino crew loves the JBM. And that's not so far removed from the 70s when the Philly Black Mafia was working with the Italians, Angelo Bruno, Long John, Marorano and those guys. But it wasn't as chummy, I would say. Well, there's also a generational factor here, which is that by the time you get to the 90s, these idiots, these mob stars are bragging about what they're doing. They want the fame. Yeah, the opposite of Angelo Bruno. Yeah. And it's the opposite of Philly's Black Mafia. You never saw Sam Christian or Ron Harvey or any of the heavy hitters doing the nonsense that you would see JBM guys doing, with their big, you know, brash gold knuckles and the chains. Yeah, Bucky, right? You know. So it was a generational thing. But you correctly point out, back in the day, they got along well. You never saw any fighting between the Bruno family and Philly's Black Mafia. And they were hanging out in bars together routinely. They would help each other with drug deals in most cities. There's usually very little intonation fighting. Yeah. Well, I know just again on an aside, I know that just kind of talking about people that we know today, you know, Will Smith, the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, was very close to Bucky Davis, who was the boss of JBM for a period of time before he was assassinated. I think Bucky helped him, allegedly, helped him with a dispute over royalties, over a song or a sample. So this was, you know, Will Smith, it doesn't get any bigger than Will Smith. And he's running around with JBM before, I guess, he became the triple threat that he became. But at that time, he was still a very prominent figure in pop culture, you know, in the music industry. So yeah, the nexus points are varied in Philadelphia Black mob culture going forward, you know, from the late 60s all the way till today. Yeah. Well, the 60s were crazy. I don't know how much you want to get into this. No, let's just talk about it all. I mean, Okay, well, for the audience who may not know, the reason I said earlier that you had this crazy nexus between organized crime, religion and politics is because the civil rights movement starts out in the 50s, very peaceful. And by the time you get to the mid 60s, there are segments in the black community who are not satisfied with the pace of changes. And so it becomes more militant. So you see the black panthers on the scene and the nation of Islam. Well, in Philly, the nation of Islam was headed by a person named Jeremiah Shabazz, his birth name was Jeremiah Pugh. Of the 56 mosques around the country, every city had its own mosque, we were Philadelphia's number 12. Philly was one of the most prominent, probably after Chicago and Detroit, I don't know about New York, but either way, that was there were definitely up there, partly because Jeremiah Shabazz was so close to Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the movement at the time. And of course, it all started in Detroit. It all the movement started in Detroit and Elijah Muhammad took power by for what we think, assassinating Farhad, who had been the guy that founded it. He disappeared. Nobody ever found him. Yeah. Yeah. And so the only reason they figure so prominently in the Philly black mafia story is because most of the leaders in Philly's black mafia were also leaders in the temple. The nation of Islam back then had a thing called the fruit of Islam, which was the paramilitary force that protected the mosque, protected the minister. And they were all the heavies. And in Philly, they were almost all black mafia guys. And when I say black mafia guys, when Philly's black mafia forms in the 1960s, if you look at the leadership, they're all in their late 20s, early 30s, which is important for people who do what you and I do for a living. Scott explaining, well, how, why would that age group be good? It's ideal for somebody whose business is based on extortion. You can only go up to so many drug dealers or pimps or bar owners that are allowing gambling and things to go on in their establishments. You can only go up to them so often and asking for money unless you have some street reputation. Well, these guys were in the sweet spot. They were old enough to have record, record criminal records and reputations on the street, but they were young enough to enforce it. They were literally in their prime when it came to being a street enforcer. So when they form, and they're all these not young, but young-ish mobsters, they're, they're able to impose their will on the street. And because they were tied in with the mosque, the nation of Islam back then was known for being very, very, how would you say, street savvy, they recruited from prisons. Well, that confused everybody. It confused residents and it confused law enforcement because when you have a nation of Islam leader come out and talk to the press and say, well, yes, we've got criminals in our mosque. My goodness, we're actually recruiting from prisons to reform them. So there is no way to weed out. Okay. Well, what part of that is true versus what part is street hustlers who are using the front of the mosque, extorting the heck out of people, terrorizing people and funneling money back into the mosque. There was no way to separate that. This is also at a time period where the FBI is running their co-intel program where they're literally fomenting discord on purpose. I always use the one easy example where they're writing letters to the editor of major newspapers as Elijah Muhammad, but it's actually not, it's them, but they're writing letters disparaging Martin Luther King because they're trying to get the different Black civil rights movements pitted against each other to foment discord. That was Hoover's idea. Well, if you're simply a regular person living in Black Philly at the time, you've got these lunatics who are extorting people, killing people, you hear those stories, you're not quite sure what to believe. You know that they run the mosque and Jeremiah Shabazz is in the news all the time in part because the nation, but also because he was one of the main people who recruited Muhammad Ali into the temple. And so he was, you know, he was a national figure at that time. And you're seeing these hustlers not only with the nation of Islam, they then start getting government funding because this is the, again, you talk about a sweet spot as a gangster. At the time, the Justice Department had this radical idea that poverty caused crime and what better way to stop crime if you just started giving money to people who are causing crime and committing crimes. And so they started doing these things that were called community action agencies. This is when just for a spoon feeding to the audience though, I apologize for people who are offended that I have to, but I just want to make sure I always assume that people are coming to us for the first time, even though I know we have a devoted consumption base, but this is where you see this, this nexus point of civil rights movement, religion and crime all coming together and then helping veil or provide cover for the criminality by veiling it in community outreach, civil rights movement protection behind religion. Yeah. And then you bring in people like Muhammad Ali and Karim Abdul-Jabbar and you have, you know, all time great athletes and pop culture phenomenons that are cosigning. Well, that's the thing when Muhammad Ali would visit Philly, and by the way, these are some of his, you know, his so-called years in exile were spent in Philly. He left Chicago in King of Philly. I believe in Chicago, but he comes to Philly when he's, you know, not sanctioned to fight because he refused the draft. He comes to Philly because there's a person named Major Coxson, Scott knows who he is, but for your audience, Major Coxson was not necessarily a member of Philadelphia's Black Mafia, but he was sort of the hub of the whole thing. He wasn't somebody who was going to extort somebody, but he knew all of them. He's sort of like the Henry Hill of this story, actually. He just knows everybody. And he was somebody that was, did he come from a criminal background? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. But here's the thing. He had a legendary criminal background, but it was all flim flams. It was all like, he was a conman. He was on license plates, financial hustles. He did serve time in federal prison for just for financial frauds, but he actually ran for mayor of Camden, New Jersey in 1972. That's a great story, by the way, because, of course, Muhammad Ali was the one campaigning with him. Yeah, we did. We did a whole episode on the Major Coxson murder, and we got into that, but we wanted to have you on that episode for whatever reason we couldn't. But yes, let's kind of augment that a little bit with Major Coxson was a very prominent, but it just was like ubiquitous in certain parts of New Jersey and Philadelphia in the late 60s, early 70s. The local magazines routinely had him on the cover. Here was a career criminal who was being lauded in the press all the time. He also owned a book. He also owned a handful of nightclubs and bars. And this is where you see the confluence of Bruno family members, Philly Black Mafia guys, Philadelphia athletes, professional athletes, politicians. It was this amazing mix of people who all knew Major Coxson. He had a whole chain of apartments where he would have all the local drug dealers could stash their stuff, cut their deals and all that sort of stuff. He was just involved in everything. But when he ran for mayor of Camden in 1972, there's that great fight with Jerry Quarry and Muhammad Ali. Yeah, I was about to say the first, the first thing Muhammad Ali says after he wins when he gets the microphone, he says, I dedicate this victory to the next mayor of Camden, New Jersey, Major Coxson. And so with Major in Philly, he was also active in the civil rights movement. He wasn't an NAACP leader in like that. But again, he would hang out with the, at the time, the head of the NAACP sees some more. So if you're a resident of Black Philly, and you're just watching Major Coxson hang out with all the people who you're told are Black Mafia guys. And the Black Mafia guys, you know, for a fact are heavy hitters in the nation of Islam. But you also, and not to mention, they're now also getting government funds in these community action agencies. And Philly's Black Mafia opened up at least three of them, probably four, but at least three. And so they're getting press conferences with city council members and judges at the press conferences. You can reasonably say, I don't know what to make of this. Because it's crazy to think that these are murderers who are literally terrorizing entire sections of the city, federally funded gangsters who get to hide behind the veil of religion and civil rights. I mean, it's an amazing, amazing part of organized crime history that very few people know. And the thing was back then, if you look, I mentioned at the beginning of this, that when I started researching in the 90s that I looked at the Philadelphia organized crime unit files, people may not know that organized crime units back then were not called organized crime units. In New York, it was called the Italian Squad. In Philly, it was called Intersect, which was short for internal security against the emerging Italian threat. Everything at the federal and local level was Italians, Italians, Italians. So beyond all the craziness that I just briefly mentioned about civil rights and religion and all this or whatever, and the federal funding, law enforcement's not looking for them. It's not what they're trained to do. They don't know about this. How would they know about this? And the FBI, of course, had its own problems with Co and Telpro. So even if somebody wanted to contact the FBI, if they were being victimized, they didn't trust them. Well, we joked about the Godfather earlier in this podcast. Well, you remember from Godfather part two, there's that great scene where the young veto Corleone says to his buddy, hey, why is he extorting a fellow Italian? And he says because he knows that he can't go to anybody. That's how extortion works. You pray on your own. Going back to the romanticism factor, I do talks in Detroit quite a bit on the purple gang and the Jewish community in Detroit just thinks these were the greatest guys in the world, that these 100 Jewish homicidal maniacs that ran the city of Detroit underworld from 1925 to 1935. A lot of people think they're still around. People ask me all the time, well, what's going on with the purple gang? I'm like, they've been gone for 100 years. But besides that, when I do my talks, I try to explain to all these nice elderly Jewish men and women that want me to come and tell them about the purple gang being Al Capone or sorry, being Robin Hood, protecting them against Al Capone. And I tell them, no, no, Al Capone and the purples work together. And the purples out of the, let's say a thousand people that they killed in that 10 years, 95% of those people that they killed were Jewish. And 95%, if not 100% of the people that they extorted were Jewish. Well, yeah, I'm surprised to hear that. Well, I could say so much about that. I'll make a comment about the Black Mafia in that regard though. When Black Brothers Inn came out in 2005, the original cover had the backdrop was a homicide photo of one of the Black Mafia guys who had been left lying dead at the Philadelphia Naval Yard. And on top of that were the mugshots of all the founding Black Mafia members. Well, I gave a book signing one time and a Black minister came out to me after the talk and he said, you've done the Black community a great service because I've been preaching for years that if you wind up in this life, if you all want to be gangsters, this is what happens. You either wind up dead or you wind up in prison. And I thought, wow, okay, well, that's pretty good. I felt, you know, that's not why I wrote the book, but okay, that's nice. Months later, he calls me and I'll never forget it. He's all dejected and he said, well, I was wrong about that. And here what had happened, in, I never saw this personally, but my students told me about this too. Apparently, people on the Black market took the cover and put it on Black t-shirts. And they were selling it all at SEPTA, Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority. And they were selling out, I bet. Couldn't keep them in stock. Yeah. And so instead of sending the message, hey, don't get involved in that lifestyle, the street took it as, man, they said they were bad MFers and sure enough, they were. They even wrote a book about them. Totally defeated the point of his argument. And let's kind of give an emphatic end to this one part of the story about Major Coxson and how it all played out for him. It kind of exemplifies all this. He loses the mayoral election in the spring of 72. He doesn't last a year. Am I right? Or less than a year, he gets into a real quagmire where there was a missing dope. The Gambino crime family in New York City is missing some dope. They reach out to him. Can you help us find it? If you find it, we'll give you $300,000. He promises that money to his friends in the Philadelphia Black Mafia to help them retain or get the drugs back from the people that stole them. And then the retribution on the thieves, that all gets messed up. And then all of a sudden, it goes from the Gambinos reaching out to Major Coxson for him to help them to the Philadelphia Mafia looking at Major Coxson and saying, you brought us into this whole thing. You made us all these promises. Now you're on the hook for it. And they killed him. Of course. Well, that happened earlier too in the Fatty Palmer story because they're very similar. Fatty Palmer was killed in April of 72 at the Club Harlem for the same reason. I mean, the reason I'm comparing them to is because Fatty Palmer was very close friends with Phillies Black Mafia as was Major Coxson. And it didn't, yes, but it didn't matter to them. It was business. And so in Major Coxson's case, when the actual people who stole the drug shipment from the Gambinos, instead of people just getting the money or getting the drugs, they killed them. Well, the Gambinos go crazy and they say, well, first of all, we're not going to get the money now. We're not going to get the drugs. And now the feds are all over the murders. You know, we're not paying you anything for this. These are not the services we required. And then Sam, Ron and Sam are like, well, guess what? You promised us this. We did this. Now give it to us. And if you don't, you're going to pay the repercussions. Yeah. And that's why, you know, if people read Black Brothers, the reason that I detail the surveillance reports of Major Coxson in the days leading up to his murder, I wanted to demonstrate that he clearly had no sense that he was in jeopardy. He was just living his normal life. He had no idea that he was about to be killed. And that's just how they were. And they came into his house. They came into his house. Yeah. He was neighbors with Muhammad Ali. Right. Muhammad Ali moved to Cherry Hill, New Jersey to live on the same street as Major Coxson. I'm now starting to remember it. Muhammad Ali was born in Louisville, trained in Chicago and Florida. And then when he was exiled, he gravitated to Philadelphia, New Jersey area because of the nation of Islam because of Major Coxson. And then clearly there were a lot of people that were going to Muhammad Ali after the fact. And at that point, Muhammad Ali kind of didn't remember Major Coxson's name. First of all, he not only dedicated the victory in June of 72 to Major Coxson, he was this financial advisor and was always in public, literally campaign with him. You can see TV ads and footage. But then when Major Coxson gets killed, gets killed and law enforcement goes to Muhammad Ali and says, Hey, we want to give you protection because we have reason to think that you might be next because you're affiliation with Coxson. He said, Oh, no, no, no, I wasn't a friend with Coxson. He's not a Muslim. So I can never be friends with him. And they just wanted to get away from that. And then I just, I don't want to get too deep into this, but just to give people that might not understand the stakes that we were talking about. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who in the world of basketball was just as big of a deal as Muhammad Ali was in boxing at that time. And just like Muhammad Ali had converted in a very controversial way at the right when he was becoming a professional. And he was tied to a like a rival sect of the black Muslim family that opposed Elijah Muhammad and said that Elijah Muhammad was like a false prophet. He gave them among other things. Right. He gave these, they were called the Hanafi Muslims. He gave them a mansion to live in in Washington DC. This was owned by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and allegedly the Philadelphia black mafia representing the nation of Islam came to DC and they massacred what eight people, including little kids. I believe it was all happened in a couple of years. Yeah. Yeah. I believe it. I believe it. Well, this, the Hanafi killings were January of 73. They were actually before coxswain. Oh yeah. So it's all the same. Yeah. Okay. It's all the same couple of years or two. Yeah. Yeah. January of 73. They travel eight black mafia guys go down. I believe they killed seven. Four of them were under two years of age. They're all brutal. And that's why if people see the American gangster show that broadcasts on TV every once in a while, they'll hear what I'll tell you again in case people haven't seen it. One of the homicide detectives went into the basement to wash his hands from the crime scene and there was a sink. He went to wash his hands. He saw what he thought was a doll. And in fact it was the nine day old baby they had killed. So it's so tragic. And they, and by the way, there's a great follow up to that story, which is that obviously I have two things to say about that. I hope people who are not familiar with Philadelphia's black mafia are hearing this half hour we're already in or whatever. And they're going, wait, Muhammad Ali, Grimel Guljabar, Nation of Islam, politics, civil rights, slaughtering families. Malcolm X. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's ridiculous that people don't know anything about this. Whereas they can say John Gotti, Al Capone, they can say these relatively trivial people on the grand scheme of things. You wrote a book about this and it's the Bible, but you're talking, you take a subject like Gotti or Bulger or Capone and it's like the either, I don't know if it's the public's interest or the publishing industry's interest, but I just can't get over it. The Greenlight, the 50th book written about Wedi Baldur. This is coming from his third cousin. That one came from his second cousin. And so they're all telling the same story. Oh, I can't, but this story has only been written one time and that's a good thing. But it's just to your point, everybody knows about those other stories ad nauseam, but some of the great stories can really slip through the cracks. And we're hoping that we're, you know, preventing you a gem. Well, anyway, so the follow up to the Hanafi killings, though, is that one of the people, one of the black mafia guys who was there named James Bubbles Price, he didn't like the idea they were killing the kids. His argument was, look, I don't mind killing the grownups for what they said about Elijah Muhammad and the nation of Islam. Fine. But the kids didn't do anything. And they can't, his argument was they can't be witnesses. So why are we killing the babies? And, you know, John Clark famously said, actually it was Ron Harvey who famously said, they have the seed of the hypocrite in them. Meaning they were the wrong Muslim sect. So we have to kill. Well, anyway, he becomes an informant against these guys. That's partly how the case develops against the black mafia guys. He winds up being killed in prison. They killed Bubbles. They killed Bubbles Price in prison. Yeah. Well, he, I don't, I'd love to know the story on this, but we'll never know, obviously. He, he, he took a chance. He decided not to testify. The problem was that his, his conversations were recorded. So they didn't need him. They were just going to play the recordings. Well, he didn't bank on that. And when the warden wanted to put him in solitary confinement for his protection, he wanted to be housed with the black mafia guys. His argument was, no, no, I'll be able to schmooze them and convince them that this is all government lies. Well, you know, that, that, that didn't work out so well. And the, but ironically, the person who is serving time in prison for murdering Bubbles Price, think through the logic of this, is John Griffin. John Griffin was originally convicted on the Hanafi killings, but the course of appeals gets such that Amina Calise is one of the, she, she survives, but she gets tired of the appeals. She, she can't just go through this trauma over and over again. One of the appeals, some of the black mafia guys get cut loose, including John Griffin. Well, had he not murdered James Bubbles Price for being the informant, he would have been free. Free, he wouldn't have been in there. So yeah, he's, he's, he's literally in prison for murdering somebody who testified against him in a murder for which he's been acquitted. Right. Yeah, you, you can't, you couldn't write that irony if you were, you know, the best Hollywood screenwriter and cast with it. So let's kind of get into the 80s for a second. Can I, can I make one quick comment? Yes, yes, please. Because, because the public is seeing this happen today. You know, there's that great, there's that great quote we learn from history would not learn from history. Well, when I got involved in this research, I had also done white collar crime research. And so my whole thought was, well, if Scott Bernstein is a legendary career criminal who's got a rap sheet a mile long, and there's this government money out there, he's not going to put his name on it. He'll put Sean Patrick Griffin's name on it. He's not. Well, when I got access to the documents, it was literally the real names of all the criminals. I couldn't believe it because my mind couldn't grasp, wait, they're actually, that's the plan. You're not hiding your background. That's why you're arguing that you need to community organize to get you and everybody else off the street into more legitimate pursuits. Well, what wound up happening, of course, is these hustlers took that money and manipulated ways, laundering money is an easy one because now you have a place where you can actually have a bank account. You have people you're going to employ. So you and I would employ each other and all our buddies and our crew. So when, when, and now you're going to go get credit cards because when they call to verify your, your employment information, you and I go on the phone and say, oh yeah, Fred works for us. Yeah, John works for us. Yeah, that's his salary. And so they all start getting credit cards and they start renting things like cars and stealing them because none of this is real. This is a whole secondary. They're playing with house money. It's all house money. Yes. And on top of that, all those photo ops that I mentioned earlier where there are, you know, be with the mayor, the head of the NAACP, with prominent business leaders, all these hustlers on TV and they can leverage. Yes. You know where I was going with that. That's exactly what they do. They go up to the street corner or to the bar owner and say, hey, you saw me yesterday in the press, right? I'm piped in. You know, you better pay. If you weren't about worrying about what we would do to you otherwise, whether it's firebombing your place or killing you and your family at a minimum, you now realize we're piped in. So pay up. And so it terrified people. It confused people and for somebody in organized crime, this was, I mean, heaven, heaven. So I'm interested to get your insight into how the organization evolves and then kind of turns into another organization. So a lot of the, and this is, this paradigm is actually probably pretty typical. I know dozens of examples. You had a situation here where you had the guys that were in their 20s and 30s and the 70s that were mentoring teenagers, having teenage kind of errand boys, gophers. And then when most of the Philadelphia Black Mafia is locked up, by the mid-80s, you had these teenagers from the 70s were now in their mid-20s to late-20s. They had come up mainly, I'm told it was a Newdy Mims, Robert Mims, who was one of the original founding fathers of Philadelphia Black Mafia. He had a bunch of these young teenagers that were underneath him. And by the 80s, they wanted to open up shop on their own group. They called it the Junior Black Mafia, but it was a different, the vision was different. The application was different, even though they shared some similarities. Would you say they were more of just a straight drug organization? The abbreviated version to answer your long question about how this developed over time. No, I'm trying to defend my long answer. There are two major prosecutions of Phillies Black Mafia. The first one takes place in 1974. It's a DEA Eureka case that matters for my answer to you because for your audience who doesn't know, the feds don't start getting all these tools that you and I know now are common. They get wiretapping, for instance, in 68. We're just used to that. Well, that was new at the time. Rico is 1970. Things like this, all that late 60s, early 70s, the feds are not only getting these tools, but they're slowly starting to figure out how to use them. So by the time you get to the 80s, and in Phillies Black Mafia's case, the next major prosecution happens in 84. It's actually 84-85. It's a long prosecution. I argue that that effectively ends Phillies Black Mafia as a functioning syndicate. You'll still have people around and doing things, but they're not terrorizing entire neighborhoods, entire sections of the city or whatever. My argument, however, is that if you look around the country, including Boston, I don't know about Detroit, I'll defer to you on that, but New York, Phillie, organized crime for everybody at that time is taking a major hit because the feds finally have all these tools and they know how to use them. By the 80s, it was over with. The Golden Era was over with. The feds had figured out how to weaponize Rico and everybody was living on borrowed time. Well, the other thing too is, look, if you're good at what you do in Phillies Black Mafia was great at extortion because they killed people in public on purpose because they knew no one would testify against them. That was the idea. Well, you can do that only so often, but they made the colossal mistake, like many people do, where instead of just shaking down drug dealers, they go, hey, why not just take over the territory? Well, because if you've got the drugs on you or you're on a drug wire tap, it doesn't matter what a badass you are on the street. They don't need people to testify against you. You're on the wires. My mentor, George Anastasia, I tip my hat to him, one of the greatest quotes ever. You can't cross examine a wire tap. You can't impeach a wire tap. Yeah. By the way, that's why we talked earlier about romanticizing. I don't like when people romanticize old school organized crime and they say, oh, well, they kept their mouth shut. They lived by a code back then. Yeah. Well, we'll never know if they were presented by an FBI agent or somebody else and say, by the way, here's you yesterday. You want to rethink that answer? Right. And then you play them the tape. You know, I mean, this all changed when people didn't have any option, but there was literally surveillance cameras. There's audio tape of all the things that were being done. So all they're, you know, bluff about being tough guys and having a code, that was nonsense. The moment that you actually presented them with real problems, they all started flipping on each other and it was over. Why do you think that the younger guys, the JBM, didn't want to be as diversified as their predecessors? They just kind of wanted to be a, frankly, they just wanted to be a crack game. Well, that's part of it. They didn't care about extortion or gambling or civil rights or religion or trying to get government money. They wanted to run the street corners. Yeah. Well, I think, I think they're more representative of typical organized crime groups than the original Black Mafia guys. It's a shame in a way, as an historian, I understand why people focus on the high profile murders of the Hanafis, Major Cox and I get that I'm not naive, but part of the reason I spend so much time in Black Brothers on the financial frauds and the scams is because these were serious criminals. They, they were not in it for five seconds and they were not impulsive and all that these were like even the Hanafi killers we talked about earlier. They actually took the time to do our surveillance run down to the house first to assess how they could get away, what highways were close. They were so sophisticated in most of the things they did. It was remarkable. They were, they were not a typical flashy organized crime group like all the community action agencies. They had bylaws. They had they had grant writers on staff. I mean, this is monumentally complicated what they were doing. Yeah. And by the time you get to the JBM in 85, I always argue that Philly's Black Mafia ends 84, 85. The JBM starts in 85 and goes until about 92. And they were really a flash in the pan. I have all those. So you know, when I say the JBM, I tell people that JBM still exists today, you're saying that that is not true. There are remnants of it, but not organization. Yes. Right. Yes. There are remnants of them. But, but by the way, they're, believe it or not, there are still remnants of Philly's Black Mafia. No, I know, I know, even though they're way up in years. Like they're, I know, I know, I don't know how many years ago this was. It was sometime in the 2010s though, where Ricardo McKendrick, who was a founding Black Mafia guy, he's in the famous Black Mafia ball picture of December 31, 1973. He was arrested for the largest cocaine seizure in Philadelphia history, you know, within the last decade. So, and I think it was Robert Bob Daddy Fairbanks. It was either he or Roosevelt Fitzgerald. One of those two was arrested for shooting somebody when they were in their 70s. So, you know, they're not coming out of prison for these racketeering charges and going into banking. I mean, they're just, they're on the street, but they're no longer coalescing as a major crime syndicate. Well, and if you just go, I mean, again, neither here nor there, but if you just go, I've declared the Philadelphia Italian Mafia modern era, the Joey Merlino crew, I've declared them the Instagram mafia. They're obsessed with social media. You can pretty much track these guys on a minute by minute basis from wherever you are. It's very unique in the world of organized crime that you have a group of guys that should be thinking more about retirement and social security checks, since they're all getting in their 60s. But they're all very, I've also said that they're the only, the only crime family that cares about cool is the Merlino group in Philadelphia that no other mafia boss cares about being cool or people think they're cool. But it means a lot to the Merlino crew. And I don't know, I'm rambling, but the reason I'm bringing this up is that if you go onto their social media accounts, you go to their Instagrams, a lot of them, even this, you know, just in the recent months back in the summer, a lot of them post photos with JBM guys that were JBM, Benny Goff, Tracy Mason are the two that are popping up in my head right now that are big Merlino guys. But so it's, it's, it's interesting to see that. Well, it's funny that that, that crowd has always been stupid when it comes to this stuff, though, because you'll remember, I wrote about this and Black Brothers Incorporated, when the Merlino guys would go to prison, pardon me, go to trial in the 90s, the JBM guys would show up, would all show up there. And Joey's thinking this is, this is some type of like status symbol or see how many people love me. It's like, no, you should have told them, stay as far away from me as possible. Yes. Yeah. And of course, detectives are literally there saying, okay, that's who's here. Yeah, they're looking at license plate who's sitting with who in the gallery. Yeah. Well, this is, this is awesome. Sean, I really enjoyed talking JBM and Philadelphia Black Mafia and Black Brothers Inc. Tell everybody where they can get all the, all the material, anything you want to do kind of and learn more about this. Obviously, we have our episode that we did about a year, year a year and a half ago on the major, I think we did it on the anniversary of the major Cox and things. So it was probably about a year ago. But Sean, let everyone know where they can consume you. Sure. Thanks. My website, which is www.SeanPatrickGriffin.net, it's also .com, but either one doesn't matter. You'll notice on, on my website, I actually have a subsection for organized crime. I don't update it as much as I used to, but you'll see some updates on there. Importantly, though, now that the 2005 version of Black Brothers is no longer available, I have posted the end notes section on the website. So for anyone who wants to do follow up research, I wanted to make sure people had access to that, all 104 pages of it. And you can follow me on Twitter at SPG Author, SPG Author. I don't post a lot, but it's always, I just typically do newsworthy organized crime and white collar crime things. Well, thank you so much, Sean. This has been one of my all-time favorite interviews. I want to have you back on to talk about your book, Game in the Game, and Tim Donahue. We'll do that soon. Thank you so much, Sean. Been great. Thanks, Scott. All right, for Scott Bernstein, I am Scott Bernstein. For Benny behind the glass, for Sean Patrick Griffin, I'm Scott Bernstein, OG Pod. Out.