“…everywhere I looked in my life there were pool sharks, cardsharps, pimps, drug dealers, and moonshiners. Hustling was a normal, often lucrative, line of work. Men like my father, who held a good city job until his retirement, were the rare exceptions. But whether you worked above ground like Daddy or underground like my uncle RC, you had to have a special determination to survive…”
Daddy Dan, ghetto fabulous fashion designer, on post- World War II Harlem from his memoir Made In Harlem.
The music world was always just marginally above ground, because it was so intimately attached to underworld. In both worlds the line between legal and illegal, between on and off the books, was as thin as a blues man’s nylon socks. Studying the black music world, one could use record sales and chart positions trace its history. The journey of the black underworld was charted by trends in prostitution, gambling, numbers running, and since the ‘60s, through which drugs were consumed and sold. The histories of black music and the black underworld connect through the shift from heroin to angel dust to crack, which roughly parallels the transition from soul to funk/R&B and to hip hop.
In the ‘70s in Harlem, Brooklyn and other urban centers black gangsters of stature, on a daily basis, wore suits, ties, dresses, big coats and sought an air of outward respectability no matter how unsavory their activities. I’m excluding pimps, who tended towards dandified color and cuts of clothes (since, for them, respectability was way out of reach.) The major “policy” figures (also known as numbers bankers), gamblers, major racketeers and mobsters didn’t necessarily dress to attract the attention of “squares”, though their choice of fabrics (often silk aka shark skin) and shoes (Gators or lizard skin, sometimes Italian with pointy toes) made clear they didn’t work a “slave.”
FRED WILLIAMSON IN BLACK CAESAR (1973)
(That’s not to say that on special occasions these gangsters didn’t flaunt their wealth. The historic 1971 Muhammad Ali vs Joe Frazier bout at Madison Square Garden was fashion show of epic proportions with men peacocking as hard as the ladies. Legend has it that drug king pin Frank Lucas first came on the Feds’ radar screen by wearing a white and black fur coat to the fight. That uncharacteristic flamboyance sparked a series of events that eventually send Lucas to jail.)
Many took the self-serving rhetoric that they were simply businessmen to heart. Ask them and you’d be told that only racism and lack of a college degree kept them from profiting on Wall Street and Main Street. Were they prosperous looking? Yes. But ghetto? Not necessarily. They sought to move through the world like a wealthy industrialist and so they dressed accordingly. No matter how a successful black gangster was he or she still had to navigate a hostile white world, especially once the suburbs opened to prosperous black folks in the ‘70s. Their upwardly mobile dreams demanded a home outside the hood, a legit business front, and good schools for their kids.
So, announcing your criminal enterprises to real estate brokers, loan officers, insurance salesmen, and other white gatekeepers, people suspicious of any form of black success, could be bad business. Mid 20th century black underworld figures wanted what the Irish gangsters (see Joe Kennedy) had already achieved and the Italians were driving for: access to the political and financial power to wash dirty money clean. The truth was black underworld money could only be so white washed since you couldn’t erase race. A few fortunate souls lived the integrationist dream to the fullest, but that country club invitation was gonna be hard to come by.
SCENE FROM GORDON’S WAR (1973)
Back in the ‘70s it was widely held in law enforcement circles that the cycle of succession in American crime would move from ethnic whites to people of color. During that period author Francis A. J. Ianni’s spend 18 months studying “the emerging but as yet not clearly identifiable process of succession of blacks and Puerto Ricans in organized crime in the United States.” In his 1974 book ‘Black Mafia’ he concluded that “if this pattern continues, we shall witness over the next decade the systematic development of what is now a scattered and loosely organized pattern of emerging black control of organized crime into a black Mafia.”
Scholars weren’t the only ones to take note of this possibility. The crime soaked late ‘60s/ early ‘70s movies of the new Hollywood movies made this an unannounced theme. For me The Godfather, Superfly, Shaft, Serpico, the French Connection, Gordon’s War, Crazy Joe and Across 110th Street constitute threads in a single narrative centered around white fear and corruption, black greed and pride, with the battleground being New York City.
The Godfather, arguably Hollywood’s greatest film, has a plot that pivots on a simple question: whether or not the Mafia should mass market heroin with black addicts the target market. Its why a reluctant Don Corleone gets blasted outside in Genco Olive Oil company in Little Italy a Sonny Corleone gets his cap peeled at a Long Island toil station. After a lot of family drama and a bloody gang war the Don makes the peace and the heroin sales begin. At the crucial sit down its decided the white powder should be sold in black neighborhoods. After all, as one of the family heads explains, “They’ve animals anyway. Let them lose their souls.”
The Godfather was set in the 1940s. Fast forward to the late ‘60s to Serpico and The French Connection, both based on the real-life stories of obsessive, heroic New York cops. Both films posit a city where NYPD has been so corrupted by dope dollars (Serpico), so outsmarted by drug couriers (The French Connection) and is so morally compromised (both films) that they are helpless to prevent heroin’s conquest of what then Mayor Lindsay dubbed “Fun City.” The tenements and alleys through which Al Pacino’s Frank Serpico and Gene Hackman’s “Popeye” Doyle chase crooks, woo lovers, and point guns are primarily black and Puerto Rican. Literally and metaphorically the people and the streets that are backdrops for these white protagonist are dark and, as both films suggest, doomed from reel one.
In Gordon Parks’ blaxploitation blockbuster Shaft, a film that addicted me to turtleneck sweaters and leather jackets, the plot revolves a battle for Harlem between the established Mafia and black gangsters represented by Moses Gunn as Bumpy (based on the legendary real life Bumpy Johnson). Bumpy’s daughter is kidnapped by the mob to pressure Johnson into submission. In an improbable plot twist black radicals are convinced to join the black detective in liberating the girl from white crooks. In another the film Gordon’s War, a squad of black Vietnam Vets become vigilante’s determined to push dope dealers out of Harlem.
The most sophisticated of these films about race and heroin was Across 110th Street, which had no illusions about white corruption or black complicity in urban crime. A desperate trio of black men rob a Mafia run numbers bank in Harlem. At the same time a black detective joins a traditionally white, morally degraded uptown precinct. In Across 110th Street neither Anthony Quinn’s jaded white detective nor Yaphet Kotto’s ambitious black investigator is given the moral high ground. Kotto is a representative of the black urban succession and, implicitly, the films asks, “Is having a corrupt black cop superior to a corrupt white cop?”
My favorite review of the film came was in the NY Times: “(Across 110th Street) manages at once to be unfair to blacks, vicious towards whites and insulting to anyone who feels that race relations might consist of something better than improvised genocide.”
With an eye towards moving on up the sharpest operators tried not to make their truly respectable “Negro” neighbors (doctors, teachers, preachers, first generation black corporate executives, ball players) nervous since that would make life difficult for the aspirations of their mate or children (even if you didn’t personally give a damn what the bourgeois thought.) Invitations to join the local NAACP chapter, the Elks or visits to Martha’s Vineyard’s Inkwell were all dependent on a prosperous, middle class veneer. Well into the ‘80s the traditional black underworld existed within the confines of racism, their activities hemmed into ghetto hoods with little opportunity for expansion. So, clothes communicated a seriousness of purpose that belied the fact their fortunes were made preying on other black folks.
[PART TWO OF THIS ESSAY COMING LATER THIS WEEK]