Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
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Also this issue: Repeat Offender? Putting the Fish Behind You Miracle on Market Street The Bell Curve |
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November 7-13, 2002
city beat
Allah Behind Bars
Even La Cosa Nostra members fear the Nation of Islam in jail.
Underworld sources claim alleged gangster Billy Rinick was beaten by a gang of Muslims inside the Philadelphia Correctional Facility two months ago. Rinick, a onetime friend to Joey Merlino’s wife, Deborah, is in prison awaiting trial on murder and drug trafficking charges.
Rinick's lawyer did not respond to calls from City Paper and a spokesman for the Philadelphia prison system said that Rinick had been transferred to federal custody.
Family friends of Rinick confirmed to Underworld sources that Rinick was in a fight with a Muslim inmate but claim it was no big deal. "He was waiting to use the pay phone and this other guy wouldn't get off it and nobody else could make calls. Billy told him to let others have their turn and there was a little fight over it," one Rinick associate told City Paper earlier this week.
So why was Rinick, once associated with Philadelphia mob bosses, targeted by the Muslims?
Mob boss Joey Merlino is in a federal prison in Texas, but last December, when state agents raided Merlino's home they found not only Deborah Merlino, her two daughters and a nanny, but also Billy Rinick, upstairs hiding under a bed.
Rinick later claimed he was a close friend of Joey Merlino and was hanging at Joey's house because he needed someplace to hide out while his house was under police surveillance.
Both Rinick and Deborah Merlino have also denied rumors that they were dating, but underworld and law enforcement sources allege the two were a couple and claim that Joey Merlino was furious when he found out about the affair.
"That would explain why Rinick was attacked in prison," one law enforcement source told City Paper earlier this week. "Merlino put the word out that Rinick was on his own."
At least two sources close to the Merlinos claim that friends of the Merlino family have been going around South Philly mocking Rinick and bragging that he got the beating he deserved for disrespecting Joey.
Underworld sources claim that Deborah Merlino's in-laws are furious with her for associating with Rinick and feel she hasn't been loyal to her imprisoned mob boss husband. Deborah Merlino's attorney did not return calls for comment.
"The Muslims are one of the largest groups in the Pennsylvania prison system," one veteran mob investigator told City Paper. "They're a powerful gang and if you're in jail in this state and you're not with the mob, the bikers, the white supremacists or the Latin gangs, you're in big trouble."
How Muslim gangsters came to be so powerful inside Pennsylvania penitentiaries is a story that goes back in time to the 1960s, and to the mean streets of Philly.
In those days, dangerous gangs of poor and pissed off African-American males were killing one another at a record rate. In 1969, community leaders, city officials and the police stepped in and persuaded the gangs to sign peace treaties; all except two signed on the dotted line. One of the holdouts was the 20th and Carpenter streets gang, a notorious crew of street-corner toughs -- all African-American -- who terrorized their South Philly neighborhood.
Some of the most violent members of that gang later organized themselves into a smalltime crime syndicate calling themselves the black mob, or the black Mafia, and later, after they joined a local mosque, the Muslim mob.
When many of the most violent members ended up in various Philadelphia and state prisons, they began recruiting followers into their Muslim Mafia.
The Muslim mob was into drug trafficking, numbers writing and extorting legitimate businesses. They blasted their way into the collective consciousness of the regional underworld in January 1971, when seven mobsters from the mosque invaded a South Street furniture store called Dubrow's.
The owners of Dubrow's had refused to pay protection money to the black gangsters.
Led by Robert "Nudie" Mims, a former 20th and Carpenter gang member-turned-Muslim mob enforcer, the gangsters took 24 customers and employees hostage. They killed one man, set a second on fire, tortured several others and then tried to burn the building down with all the hostages inside.
Mims fled to Chicago where he served as a bodyguard for Elijah Mohammed, the leader of The Nation of Islam. Mims was part of the Fruit of Islam, an elite corp of gunmen who protected Elijah Mohammed and acted as his personal army.
In April 1972, the Muslim mob killed four people and wounded 26 others in Atlantic City when they opened fire on members of a rival black heroin trafficking ring from Philly. More than 750 people were inside the Harlem Club when gang members opened fire, killing "Fat Tyrone" Palmer and three of his associates. Palmer, the boss of a heroin ring, had escaped to Atlantic City to celebrate the Easter weekend.
One of the suspects in the Harlem Club killings was a former 20th and Carpenter gangster-turned-Muslim who was a captain in the Fruit of Islam -- the praetorian guard of the Nation of Islam.
A year later, another Philadelphia Muslim mob member, Ronald Harvey, an assistant Muslim minister in Philly, led an attack on a house in Washington, D.C.
The house belonged to the Hanafi sect, an African-American Muslim splinter group that dared to criticize Elijah Mohammed and the Nation of Islam. The Hanafis lived in a house donated to them by NBA star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
Harvey and six other gunmen invaded the home looking for the Hanafi leader who had challenged the Nation of Islam. He was not at home, so Harvey and his assassins murdered everyone else who lived there -- two women and five children, including a 9-day-old infant. They shot one of the children six times in the head.
Harvey was eventually arrested and convicted of the Hanafi murders. He was sentenced to prison and died of a heart attack behind bars.
The next time the Muslim mob made headlines was when they murdered Major Coxson and his stepdaughter in Cherry Hill, N.J. An African-American, Coxson was a flamboyant underworld figure -- a car thief, a gangland fixer and a candidate for the mayor of Camden. But Underworld sources claim the Muslims ordered Coxson killed for failing to broker a major heroin deal between the New York Mafia and the local Muslim mob.
In 1975, Lonnie Dawson, also known as Abdul Saleem, took over the Muslim mob after the murder of a local black mob boss, known as "The Jolly Green Giant."
Dawson and the Muslim mob got more heavily involved in the narcotics trade -- making meth and selling to both outlaw biker gangs at the same time -- the Pagans and the Warlocks. At the same time, the Muslims were doing drug deals with local Philadelphia Mafia members like Raymond "Long John" Martorano.
In 1982, Dawson was convicted in federal court of running a large-scale drug ring in Philly and Chester. He was also convicted of the murder and sentenced to more than 100 years in prison.
Dawson was in the same jail at the same time as Robert "Nudie" Mims. FBI agents recorded calls between an associate of George Martorano to Lonnie Dawson and Robert Mims at the prison. Martorano, the son of Scarfo captain Raymond Martorano, was running a $75 million-dollar-a-year cocaine ring; he wanted to sell directly to inner-city blacks and needed to secure the Muslim mob's help to do it.
In the early 1990s, Dawson was sent to America's supermax penitentiary, in Marion, Ill., the same place the government was warehousing Philly Mafia boss Nicky Scarfo.
Until a few years ago, "Nudie" Mims was considered to be the boss of the inmates at Graterford -- allegedly using his position as assistant imam at the prison to organize Nation of Islam inmates -- until state officials transferred Mims to another prison in an attempt to break his stranglehold on Graterford.
But law enforcement sources claim that the Nation of Islam prison gang is still a powerful force in all Pennsylvania prisons.
Calls to the Nation of Islam for comment were not returned.
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