October 25–November 1, 2001

news|underworld

Junior Mince

The JBM and La Cosa Nostra are getting cozy.

Cops who keep tabs on the local underworld are fascinated by a new alliance that is taking shape between the Mafia and a local group of young black racketeers known as the Junior Black Mafia, or the JBM.

Before the Junior Black Mafia there was the Black Mafia. It came into existence in the late 1960s when a notorious rough and tumble street gang in the 20th and Carpenter area morphed into a local power. The gangbangers turned drug dealers were making more money than they knew what to do with and acquiring criminal connections way beyond the ’hood.

As the gang grew in power and prestige, they renamed themselves the Black Mafia because they admired the long-standing criminal traditions and power of the Italian-American mob.

The Black Mafia appeared at a critical juncture in the history of the African-American underworld. Although it was a black racketeer from the Caribbean known as "West Indian" Johnny who introduced the policy and numbers rackets to the East Coast in the early 20th century, violent and well-organized Jewish gangsters eventually came to control the gambling syndicates in black neighborhoods. The Jewish racketeers reigned for almost 40 years until their power began to ebb in the Philadelphia underworld in the late 1950s.

Black numbers bankers had traditionally relied on the Jewish and Italian mobs for protection and financial backing. In Philadelphia, the liaison to the black underworld for decades was Harry "The Hunchback" Riccobene, who was one of Angelo Bruno’s top lieutenants when Bruno ran the Philadelphia crime family.

But the riots and black power movement of the ’60s ruptured the relationship between the Mafia and African-American mobsters.

Black numbers bankers were not always considered criminals in their own neighborhoods because they sometimes lent money at reasonable rates to small black-owned businesses that couldn’t meet the strict and sometimes discriminatory qualifications for bank loans.

As the influence of the Mafia waned in the ghetto, some of these older black gamblers sought out partnerships with street gangs, in some cases even going so far as to finance the street gangs’ expansion into drug dealing.

But a number of smaller black-gambling syndicates still needed capital to run their numbers businesses, and with the departure of traditional La Cosa Nostra backers, the racketeers turned to the Black Mafia, which was flush with new drug money and looking for places to invest it.

The Black Mafia was more a confederation of shifting alliances among African-American mobsters in South and West Philadelphia than it was a tightly knit organization with one boss.

The Black Mafia was able to forge alliances with powerful Muslim sects that were developing in both the inner city and the state prison system. It happened after one Black Mafia member was forced to flee Philadelphia after committing a particularly bloody murder. He joined the Nation of Islam and became an enforcer for an elite group of bodyguards known as the Fruit of Islam. When the man was finally arrested, tried and convicted, he became the most powerful and dangerous leader of a Muslim sect inside Pennsylvania’s largest prison, Graterford. Police sources claim his sect was really a front for a deadly prison gang that operated behind bars and out on the streets of some of Pennsylvania’s largest cities.

(In the late 1980’s when some of Roofers Union members were convicted on federal charges and headed off to prison, one Roofers boss was captured in law enforcement photographs meeting with a representative of this Graterford Muslim sect at a West Philadelphia mosque in hopes of arranging protection for some of his jail-bound men.)

In time the Black Mafia developed into a sophisticated criminal operation, and from 1973 to 1976 it ran one of the largest car-theft rings in the Delaware Valley. One of the Black Mafia’s partners in this was the infamous Johnston gang in Chester County, Pennsylvania. The Johnston brothers and their gang members were second generation Appalachian Kentuckians who had settled in Pennsylvania and turned to a life of crime. The Johnston gang was so notorious and violent that Hollywood made a movie about them called At Close Range, which starred Christopher Walken and Sean Penn. Norman Johnston, who briefly escaped from a Pennsylvania prison and returned to Chester County two years ago, was the brother of the leader of Johnston gang.

Sometimes the Black Mafia found themselves in partnership with the local Mafia — usually involving drug deals. But at other times the Black Mafia felt powerful enough to defy La Cosa Nostra, like the time in the late ’70s when both the Pagan motorcycle gang and the Philadelphia Mafia asked imprisoned Black Mafia members to kill a fellow prisoner who was a high-ranking Pagan threatening to start his own breakaway drug organization. The Black Mafia refused to carry out the hit because they wanted to go into business with the wayward Pagan.

By the early ’80s most of the original members and leaders of the Black Mafia were either dead or in jail — with the exception of one member who ended up working as a City Council aide.

Enter the Junior Black Mafia. Its core group comprised of the sons, nephews, cousins and younger brothers of Black Mafia members and associates.

In the early ’90s law enforcement was noticing meetings between members of the Joey Merlino faction of the local mob and the JBM.

At the same time, the JBM recruited one of its largest drug dealers, a nice Jewish boy from the suburbs who, as a student at the University of Pennsylvania, financed his way through school working first as an associate and then as the only non-black member of the JBM. The student started out as a high-volume drug dealer for the JBM — selling to his classmates at Penn before becoming a financial adviser for the black mobsters. He showed them how to invest their ill-gotten gains, how to launder money and how to set up bank accounts in countries where the U.S. wouldn’t be allowed to snoop.

In the last several months, police claim to have noticed an emerging relationship between a powerful JBM leader and a homicidal Dominican drug trafficking organization. This same JBM leader is also involved in a real estate venture with an older member of the Philadelphia La Cosa Nostra.

And in the heart of the Italian Market, another JBM member recently bought an Italian restaurant that used to be a hangout for the Philly Mafia.

"We know the JBM and the local mob has worked together in the past," one law enforcement source said in an interview last week. "We’re just surprised that now they’re actually neighbors."

—Jim Barry