country. He's got guys like Lou Rhody and Dalitz, Doc Stacher, Gus Greenbaum, sharp fucking guys, good businessmen, and they know better than try to fuck us."
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Only on the last statement was Dragna suffering a delusionor perhaps he was trying to impress Fratianno. The fact is that whenever Lansky gave an order Dragna jumped.
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See also:
War of the Jews
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Johnson, Ellsworth "Bumpy" (19061968): Black "mafios"
It has become the vogue in recent years to speak of a "Black Mafia," a group emerging with a Cuban or Latin look, eventually to supplant the 50-year reign of the Italian-Jewish syndicate. But black criminals who advance the furthest today are those who cooperate with rather than oppose the Mafia. Harlem's Ellsworth "Bumpy'' Johnson, a black millionaire, was very cooperative.
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A virtual folk hero for four decades, Bumpy was famous for flashing his "wad" as he strode through hordes of his Harlem admirers. His status was acknowledged by the New York crime families, too. When a black in Harlem objected to white control of the rackets, Bumpy got the enforcement contract to handle the problem.
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In that sense Bumpy Johnson was, as cited by Nicholas Gage in
The Mafia Is Not an Equal Opportunity Employer
, an exception to the title of the book. Like a true member of organized crime, Johnson paid his dues, serving three prison terms for selling narcotics and facing a fourth conviction when he dropped dead of a heart attack at the age of 62. In prison, Bumpy had become a scholar in philosophy and history. He wrote poetry and saw several of his poems published in a review dedicated to the black freedom movement.
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Black freedom or no, Bumpy Johnson, as Gage noted, "took the only safe road open for a black gangsterexploitation of fellow blacksand he still managed to die of natural causes."
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Jukebox Racket
The jukebox industry is legitimate, but it has long been attractive to organized crime, which picks its interests by the nature of the business rather than by its legality or illegality. The mob is especially lured to businesses where the skim makes it possible to siphon off profits before any taxes are paid. This makes nightclubs, bars, restaurantsand jukeboxesso inviting. And the Mafia has been in jukes since the early rule of Lucky Luciano.
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The racket is simple and unvarying. The mobsters move in on the jukebox operators' association as well as on the local unions whose members service the jukes. Then territories are sliced up among mob operators, and full monopolies are established. No one is permitted to invade the areas, and any rival jukes are sabotaged. Restaurant or tavern proprietors are forced to accept only mob jukes or be threatened or actually physically attacked. They are further warned that picket lines will be set up around the establishment until the owner is driven out of business. (The same techniques are used in related enterprises, such as cigarette vending operations.)
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The juke business is popular with the mob because it can at times allow the gangsters to make certain special types of payoffs and push careers of singers and musicians they favor. In
Brothers in Blood
Pulitzer Prize winner David Leon Chandler tells how in the 1940s Jimmy Davis, the out-going governor of Louisiana, was helpful in working out a compromise between New Orleans crime figure Carlos Marcello and old-style political boss Sheriff Frank Clancy so that three gambling casinos could open on the New Orleans side of the river while not competing with locally-owned gambling joints on the more populous western side. Chandler states, "Governor Davis's compensation, if any, is unknown." However he noted that in the 1960s the FBI hit on a possible theory. Close to 100,000 old phonograph records were dredged out of New York's East River, most of them copies of "You Are My Sunshine" sung by Jimmie Davis, who had been a country music singer before becoming governor.
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Subsequent FBI investigation indicated that Governor Davis "had done a favor for Cosa Nostra, and in return the mob-owned jukebox companies of America had bought the Davis recordings and placed them in tens of thousands of jukeboxes." After a time, the story went, the ownersand presumably the customershad their fill of "You Are My Sunshine," and the mob had to pull out the records. Having no further use for them, the mob deep-sixed the disks in the East River.
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