Philadelphia, Pa. -- While the HBO TV program "The Sopranos" has swung the public spotlight onto the Italian Mafia, an equally menacing, violent force operated on the East Coast for many years, without much fanfare at all -- the Black Mafia, according to a Penn State researcher in a new book.
Nearly two decades after its demise, the Black Mafia is in the spotlight again through the Philadelphia mayoral election where both candidates have been linked by the media to a former member of The Black Mafia and its spin-off organization, The Junior Black Mafia.
"The Black Mafia's legacy is ruthless violence, but they were very successful for quite some time," said Sean Patrick Griffin, associate professor of administration of justice at Penn State Abington and author of the recently published book, "Philadelphia's Black Mafia: A Social and Political History." "The Black Mafia and Italian Mafia split South Philadelphia along Broad Street, and the Black Mafia group at one point actually crossed Broad Street and began extorting white numbers runners. It almost led to a war, but police were proactive and diffused the situation," Griffin said.
The Black Mafia terrorized parts of North and South Philadelphia from 1969 through 1984, according to the book. Key characters were Robert "Nudie" Mims and Ron Harvey.
"Mims was involved in one of the worst crimes of the past century in Philly, the 1971 Dubrow Furniture Store case. He and some accomplices robbed the store, bound and tied up employees, doused some of them with gasoline and lit them on fire," said Griffin, noting that Mims later "ran" Graterford Prison in Montgomery County from the inside as a prisoner there. In fact, Mims was so powerful and despised he was eventually "traded" to the Minnesota penal system for that state's most dangerous prisoner, he said.
Ron Harvey was involved in an equally brutal and high profile murder case in 1973, according to Griffin. He and some of his cronies broke into the Washington, D.C., townhouse of basketball star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar -- a Muslim -- in search of one of Abdul-Jabbar's friends who was living there. The friend, Hamaas Abdul Khaalis, was a leader of the Hanafi sect of Muslims in Washington, D.C., and he had proclaimed Elijah Muhammad -- leader of the Black Muslims -- a false prophet.
Neither Abdul-Jabbar nor Abdul Khaalis were home that fateful night, but that didn't stop the Black Mafia members from murdering seven people, including five children.
While committing violent crimes -- and often getting caught -- landed many Black Mafia members in jail, what ultimately did the group in was greed with a fair amount of arrogance, said Griffin, who joined the Penn State Abington faculty in August.
"Like all gangsters, the Black Mafia got greedy. Instead of extorting drug dealers, they decided to do the dealing themselves," he said. "If you're going to extort people, the prosecution needs witnesses to testify against you, and drug dealers aren't going to do that. The Black Mafia murdered several witnesses. Once you start dealing drugs, you either have (drugs) on you or you don't. If you do, it's easy to prosecute, and you're going to go away for a long time."
In addition to drug dealers, the Black Mafia extorted bookmakers, brothel owners and anyone else involved in illegal activity, said Griffin. Unlike the Italian Mafia, which often was linked with labor unions in Philadelphia, the Black Mafia got much of its bankroll from bogus community development grants.
After so many of the original Black Mafia members were imprisoned and the group all but dissolved in the mid-1980s, Mims was able to help found the Junior Black Mafia from his cell at Graterford Prison. This group, which began as an ultra-violent drug-running group in the Germantown section of Philadelphia, worked with both the Black and Italian mafias to some extent, before its demise around 1992.
During his research, Griffin had to comb through thousands of sources, including a 1974 article in Philadelphia Magazine titled, "Underground on the Brink of War," which chronicled the situation.
"I was actually trying to get information for a colleague, and so I called the Philadelphia Organized Crime Unit," said Griffin, a former Philadelphia police officer who patrolled some of the toughest areas in the city. "While going through the information, I noticed that they had a lot of material on the Black Mafia, and I took some notes on it. Once I decided to pursue the topic and talked to some law enforcement officials, it was amazing how many people contacted me with stories that helped to fill in the blanks."
In addition to police departments throughout much of the Mid-Atlantic Region, Griffin has been in contact with the FBI, DEA and a host of local and federal agencies as part of the project, as well as victims, witnesses and community activists.
"The response to the book has been great. I've had many people call me up who had been involved in one Black Mafia case or other many years ago, and say to me, 'so that's what happened with so-and-so,'" said Griffin. "It's been neat to be able to put so many pieces of the puzzle together and tell the complete story of this brutally compelling organization."
"Philadelphia's Black Mafia: A Social and Political History" is published by Kluwer Academic Publishers.