Well, hey, all you wiretappers out there back here in the studio of Gangland Wire.

As most of you know, this is Gary Jenkins, retired Ken City Police Intelligence Unit Detective.

Today, I'm going to talk about the top ten black gangsters in all of kind of recorded history, if you will.

Now, going back before the war, back in the 30s and 20s, there were black

gangsters, but nobody really talked much about them. We're going on up into the 40s and 50s,

especially the 50s. Newspapers started covering that kind of thing, and so there was quite a few

pretty well-known guys that were

part of their community. And they were, you know, professional criminals. They had an organization.

They, they weren't exactly the mafia, but they, they had something going on. Uh, it was all

built around drugs, I believe, and because that was the crime that you can make some real money at.

So a big rise of this in the 60s and 70s as civil rights came in and, you know, like after the riots of 1968, there's a huge shift in really in the black communities and in covering by the newspapers and covering black crime and by the police

and their response to black crime. So let's talk about those days, you know, New York, Detroit,

Chicago, Philadelphia, or kind of the most well-known cities when it comes to the history of

black organized crime. There were syndicates

like the council headed by Nicky Barnes in New York and Philadelphia's Black Mafia.

He may have heard of that. I think I did a show of us around the more later black mafia with

Sean Patrick Griffin. A man named Samuel Christian led that one in Philadelphia, in illegal gambling and drug

trafficking, but they also got into fencing.

And in Kansas City, we had a black mafia, or at least what the newspapers called,

a black mafia led by a guy named doc dirburn and his partner

Eugene Richardson and then the Kelton brothers had an organization and I remember we even stopped

a kid named James Calvin Bradley who just got out of the penitentiary he was an arm robber

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