African-American organized crime
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, African-American organized crime emerged following the first and second large-scale migration of African Americans from the South to major cities of the Northeast, Midwest, and later the West Coast. In many of these newly established communities and neighborhoods, criminal activities such as illegal gambling (e.g. the numbers racket), speakeasies and bootlegging were seen in the post-World War I and Prohibition eras. Although the majority of these businesses in African-American neighborhoods were operated by African Americans, it is often unclear the extent to which these operations were run independently of the larger criminal organizations of the time. History Prohibition and the Great Depression During the 1920s and 1930s, African American organized crime was centered in New York's Harlem, the largest black city in the world, where the numbers racket was largely controlled by Casper Holstein and the "Madam Queen of Policy", Stephanie St. Clair. St. Clair later testified at the Seabury Investigation that, during 1923 to 1928, the NYPD continued to arrest her number runners despite her making payoffs. At that time, Harlem numbers rackets were largely operated by independent policy bankers such as St. Clair; the Harlem rackets later began to receive more protection from police interference following their eventual (partial) takeover by mobster Dutch Schultz and the largely Italian and Jewish "National Crime Syndicate" in the late 1930s. In Kings: The True Story of Chicago's Policy King's and Numbers Racketeers, Nathan Thompson writes: Post-World War II In the years following the end of the World War II, African American organized crime grew along with the rise of African-American social consciousness and later political, social and economic upward mobility. The African-American gangster Bumpy Johnson established close ties with the New York Italian-American Mafia and Jewish Mob in the post-war years, establishing some degree of independence for African-American organized crime groups in Harlem from the dominant New York organized crime groups. Many of the major drug traffickers in the United States emerged during the early-to-mid-1960s, such as Leroy "Nicky" Barnes, Guy Fisher, and Frank Lucas, taking advantage of the increasing political strength during the civil rights movement. Previously dependent partially on the political and police protection of New York's Five Families, African American gangsters were able to negotiate with outside criminal organizations and establish a stronger independent hold over certain territories, and the Mafia's ability to control or impose a "street tax" on criminal operations in African-American neighborhoods began to wane. African-American and Italian-American organized crime groups in the Northeast and Midwest instead began to cooperate (and at times compete) to a greater extent than in previous decades, increasingly sharing profits and coordinating rackets. By the early 1970s, the large narcotics empires created by Nicky Barnes, Frank Matthews, and Frank Lucas began expanding beyond Harlem as Lucas sought to ultimately control a large-scale drug trafficking operation by gaining control of a network from Indochina directly to the streets of ghettos across the country. Other criminal groups started smuggling marijuana and cocaine in cities