Back in 1974, Francis A.J. Ianni published Black Mafia: Ethnic Succession in Organized Crime, which expanded on his anthropological study of a Mafia family two years earlier. It said that it was the natural progression in the order of crime that the Italians will weaken and give way “to the next wave of aspiring ethnics, just as the Jews and Irish did before them.” At the time, New York journalist Pete Hamill blurbed the book and called it “nothing less than a major ethnic succession to power, as Italian-Americans and the remaining pockets of non-Italians give way to the new rulers of the Mob… It is no accident, of course, that now that Blacks are beginning to run numbers, we are hearing more calls for legalization…” This year, when the Daily Beast asked Hamill what happened to the Black Mafia, he said, “Well, I guess I didn’t see the Colombian and Russian mobs coming.” The Daily Beast writes that in all fairness, no one saw them coming. The Black Mafia also relied on drug importing and dealing, which could never last long because it always brings the federal authorities in. The Black Mafia did everything in the moment, Hamill said, and did not have plans past that. Successful mobsters like Meyer Lansky and Frank Costello had five-year plans, but the Black Mafia did not. Plus, by 1976 or so, the “biggest black gangster of that time, Leroy ‘Nicky’ Barnes became such a flamboyant figure that he was known to everyone,” Hamill told The Daily Beast. He was so known that The New York Times did a piece on him. “You can’t have the Times write about you if you are a gangster and expect to get away with anything.”
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