The mafia and the gays

Mafia and the Gays by Philip Crawford, Jr. is a fact-filled book based on FBI files about how the gay and lesbian bars were owned and run by the Mafia before and after Stonewall. Most gay bars and clubs in New York at the time were operated by the Mafia, who paid corruptible police officers to look the other way and blackmailed wealthy gay patrons by threatening to “out.

Thanks to the unparalleled recognition gay men enjoyed in the gay liberation movement of the s, the homintern faded into myth. In the second half of the 20th century, New York City saw a boom in organized crime, with New York and New Jersey at the epicenter of mob rule in the US. Meanwhile, the gay scene had exploded. The Mafia and the Gays. Phillip Crawford Jr.

The Mafia and the Gays meticulously documents how the mob controlled gay bars for decades in New York and Chicago due to their once illicit status, and relies upon an extensive collection of primary sources including FBI files many of which were not publicly available until acquired by author Phillip Crawford Jr. Crawford illustrates how the gay bars historically were integrated into the Mafia rackets. For example, the establishments often were financed through mob-tied coin-op vendors and their related loan companies.

Jukebox king Alfred Miniaci funded dozens of gay bars and other joints controlled by the Mafia in the s and s including the Peppermint Lounge. Miniaci supplied slot machines in the s to Frank Costello, and had dined with the mob boss on the May 2, night he was shot. Gay bars sometimes served as drug drops. Forget about the pizza connection; this was the pansy connection. Club 82 in New York's East Village was a popular club with drag revues, and in the s also was part of the distribution network in the Genovese family's heroin trade for which boss Vito was convicted in Gay bars were profit centers for all the Mafia families.

The Mafia had ties to some of the most iconic gay establishments including the Continental Baths in the Hotel Ansonia from to on the Upper West Side which received protection from the Colombo family in exchange for installing its vending machines. The LGBT community once was married to the mob out of forced necessity but after gay bars became legal the relationship often continued in many establishments out of mutual convenience.

Gay bars no longer were busted simply for homosexual assembly but they still risked raids if serving as sex clubs or drug drops. Accordingly, the mob still had both services to provide and protection to offer particularly during the party decades following the Stonewall riots.

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If a bar had a back room for anonymous sex, operated afterhours or sold drugs or boys, then odds are it was a Mafia joint, and that involved numerous places during the s and s. Indeed, the Mafia hijacked gay liberation for political cover and used so-called Auntie Gays as frontmen for their bars to evade suspicion.

The wiseguys allegedly even infiltrated the Christopher Street Liberation Day Committee and Christopher Street Festival Committee which ran New York City's gay pride parade and some related events for much of the s and s. There is no shortage of bad gays in The Mafia and the Gays , and most disturbing are the allegations of the mob's role in running underage boy prostitution rings.

O autorovi Phillip Crawford Jr. At Bates he was of the Gay-Straight Alliance in , and spearheaded a campaign to oust military recruiters from the campus for their discriminatory policies against the LGBT community. After graduating in he clerked for Chief Judge Judith W. Rogers on the D. Court of Appeals, and then with Judge George H. He practiced law for fifteen years in New York City including several years with the plaintiffs' class action bar, and then retired after exposing his concerns about billing practices.

Professor Lester Brickman characterized him in "Lawyer Barons" as a "whistle blower.