Video After The Jump
He liked to tell people he was “the Black John Gotti of the Ohio”, as he swaggered around American crime and corruption capital Youngstown, and Riddle had became a trusted lieutenant of Youngstown mafia leader Lenny Strollo in the late 1980s and 1990s.
Mentored in the treacherous Motor City underworld by the legendary Giacalone brothers (Anthony “Tony Jack” Giacalone and Vito “Billy Jack” Giacalone), Usher went on to become the biggest African-American drug kingpin in the state of Michigan during the mid-to-late 1970s. Ruling the streets with his Murder Row gang, Usher was nicknamed by longtime Detroit mob street boss Tony Giacalone in honor of the former Chicago mob boss Frank (The Enforcer) Nitti.
“You’re always late, late for your own F’ing funeral” this is what Tommy D played by Joe Pesci says to Samuel L. Jackson as he puts a pistol to the back of his head and pulls the trigger. And so ended the saga of the first guy on our list Pernell “Stacks” Edwards.
Edwards was born in the South Bronx, to parents from North Carolina and Northern Virginia. He was said to have been chubby at 6'0", 300 pounds, but became muscular from his visits to prison. He was a bodyguard to Muhammad Ali. He met mobster Tommy DeSimone as a struggling blues-rock musician, singer and songwriter on Queens Boulevard sometime during 1967, earning money as a street performer. At the time DeSimone was selling stolen Rolex watches.
Henry Cogwell – Founder of the Cobras street gang on the westside of Chicago in the 1950s, Cogwell rose to be the Windy City black underworld’s liaison to the Italian mafia, known locally in the Chicagoland area as “The Outfit.” That sounds kind of cool, I guess, but the reality is quite dark. When Heroin usage became endemic in some parts of black Chicago the Mafia sought him out personally and cut a deal to supply him with H as they knew his Cobras controlled certain public housing projects that would be perfect, and did become, the epicenter of drug dealing in the Windy City even till today.
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