All Blog Posts Tagged 'Barnes' (9)

By Gangsters Inc. Editors

The career of 84-year-old Lucchese Mafia family acting boss Matthew Madonna (photo above, middle) has officially come to an end. On Monday, he was sentenced to life in prison following his conviction for the 2013 murder of…

By David Amoruso for Gangsters Inc.

For a few years, the New York Mafia seemed to have quieted down. Increased scrutiny from law enforcement coupled with RICO made mobsters rethink their violent deeds, opting for less conspicuous ways of getting…

By David Amoruso for Gangsters Inc.

Who said the New York Mafia lost its teeth? The Lucchese crime family, one of the city’s five La…

By David Amoruso



Leroy "Nicky" Barnes is a legend of African American organized crime history. Once a dope fiend himself, he kicked the habit, and became the main distributor of heroin in Harlem, NY. In 2007 his autobiography "Mr Untouchable: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of Heroin's Teflon Don" was released. In it Barnes tells his story. How he…

By Gangsters Inc. Editors

The drug game is played with lots of players and without borders. Something police discovered once more during Operation Goodfellas when they took down several members of an international narcotics pipeline stretching from Mexico to Virginia.

Nearly 150 law enforcement officers from the…

By David Amoruso

The year is 2017 and it is business as usual for the Lucchese crime family, one of New York’s infamous five Mafia families. While many thought the American mob had lost its teeth – gangland murders had become a rarity – prosecutors say that the Lucchese family proved them wrong in 2013 with one cold-blooded slaying…

By Thom L. Jones

When you mention Rao’s to someone, you can see their eyes light up. Probably they’ve never been there-you can’t get in the place-but they’ve heard about it: the location, the ambience, the mystique, all those stories. You can only image what it’s like. And then one night, you get lucky. You get in and find out…

Many of the books written about the black gangster have been, for the most part, lengthy tomes focusing on the kingpins of the gangland scene, gangsters with names like Nicky Barnes, Frank Lucas, Lorenzo Fat Cat Nichols and…

By Seth Ferranti



In the 1970s the heroin market in the United States was dominated by a black distributor named Frank Matthews who operated out of New York. He was the most notable black figure on the east coast at the time and one of the first major independents who challenged the mob for supremacy in the criminal underworld. The Black Caesar, as he was known, was a new kind of super-criminal ruling a nationwide empire of dope. He was…