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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. through the Freedom of Information Act.
Mr. 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 1950s and 1960s including the Peppermint Lounge. Miniaci supplied slot machines in the 1930s to Frank Costello, and had dined with the mob boss on the May 2, 1957 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 1950s also was part of the distribution network in the Genovese family's heroin trade for which boss Vito was convicted in 1959.
Gay bars were profit centers for all the Mafia families. Among the powerful mobsters who oversaw vast interests in LGBT nightlife were Gambino underboss Aniello Dellacroce, Genovese capo Matty Ianniello, Colombo underboss Sonny Franzese in New York and Joseph DiVarco who ran the Rush Street crew on the Near North Side for the Outfit in Chicago. The Mafia had ties to some of the most iconic gay establishments including the Continental Baths in the Hotel Ansonia from 1969 to 1976 on the Upper West Side which received protection from the Colombo family in exchange for installing its vending machines. Continental owner Steve Ostrow – a classically-trained opera singer – developed such close ties with Joe Colombo that he was performing "The Star-Spangled Banner" at the June 29, 1970 Italian-American Unity Day rally in Columbus Circle when the mob boss was shot.
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. 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 1970s and 1980s. 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 1970s and 1980s.
Over the decades there has been a fair number of gay guys in the mob's ranks including cross-dressing Genovese soldier David Petillo who once was a boy prostitute, hitman Vito Arena from Roy DeMeo's Gambino crew and DeCavalcante boss John D'Amato. 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.
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In this runaway #1 New York Times bestseller, former secret service officer Gary Byrne, who was posted directly outside President Clinton's oval office, reveals what he observed of Hillary Clinton's character and the culture inside the White House while protecting the First Family in CRISIS OF CHARACTER, the most anticipated book of the 2016 election.
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Afghanistan was an American crusade to win the war against the “Evil Soviet Empire” and remake the world in its own image.
This goes right to the heart of understanding the destiny of the Western Dream. Instead of a dream the US is caught in a nightmare. Now Americans long for a spiritual regeneration away from the vision of war as an honorable sacrifice to a vision of peace that serves all. No one seems able to make the process move in the right direction. We assimilated a profound understanding over four decades of how to envision moving from war to peace that is now in our novelized memoir, The Valediction: Three Nights of Desmond at the Kabul Hotel
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TWA 800: The Crash, the Cover-Up, and the Conspiracy
TWA Flight 800 crashed into the Atlantic shortly after takeoff from JFK airport on July 17, 1996, killing all 230 passengers on board. Although initial reports suggested a terrorist attack, FBI and NTSB investigators blamed a fuel tank explosion. But skeptics have long questioned the official story, and new evidence has surfaced that suggests a widespread conspiracy...
In TWA 800, historian Jack Cashill introduces new documents and testimonies that reveal the shocking true chain of events: from the disastrous crash to the high-level decision to create a cover story and the attempts to silence anyone who dared speak the truth.
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DR Fred Whitehurst : FBI Whistleblower, OKC, TWA 800, OJ, Waco....more
Frederic "Fred" Whitehurst is an American chemist and attorney who served as a Supervisory Special Agent in the Federal Bureau of Investigation Laboratory from 1986 to 1998. Concerned about problems he saw among agents, he went public as a whistleblower to bring attention to procedural errors and misconduct by agents. The FBI agreed to 40 reforms to improve the forensic reliability of its testing.
FBI career
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After the Summer of Love and the heyday of the Haight-Ashbury in the 1960s, San Francisco mutated over the next two decades into a city under siege by serial killers, radical under-ground extremists, antiestablishment groups, gangs, and drug wars. The rise in violence brought a spike in murders that put unprecedented pressure on the San Francisco Police Department and its storied homicide squad. Inspector Frank Falzon represents the best of those elite detectives.
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