to flourish, thus enhancing their influence on the street. Overview The "Black Mafia" was formed to coordinate and consolidate historic inner-city crime in numbers, prostitution, and extortion of legitimate businesses, while combining with the rising drug demand in Philadelphia. It can be argued that their success drove legitimate black business and capital, such as the numerous successful African American owned banks, medical practices, stores, landlords, and other African American businesses to escape the city as segregation pressures faded. Angelo Bruno, the don of the Philadelphia crime family, discouraged drug dealing in South Philadelphia, but could not prevent deals being made by the New York mafia families such as the Gambino Crime Family, which were doing business with the growing black organized crime that became the Black Mafia until black New York drug lord Frank Mathews became their supplier. Bruno turned a blind eye to many of the renegade Italian gangsters who "did business" with, or supplied, the black drug lords, so long as they met their financial obligations to him and to the New York families. In fact, a rough outline of Italian organized crime (OC) east of Broad Street, with Black OC west of Broad Street, became a shorthand to describe South Philadelphia's hidden forces for decades, damning efforts at urban renewal. History The earliest documented act committed by the Black Mafia was the April 19, 1969 murder of one of the group's founders, Nathaniel "Rock and Roll" Williams. Williams arranged a crap game above a barbershop at Broad (14th) and South street. As usual, several Black Mafia leaders participated in the game. Curiously, Williams was absent from his own crap game. Thus, when two gunmen busted into the room and robbed the pot and the players, suspicions arose. The Black Mafia leadership almost immediately heard in the street what they already suspected, that Williams had engineered the stick-up, using neighborhood gang members, and that Williams had driven the getaway car himself. An hour and a half after the robbery, witnesses saw two men marching Williams out of a bar at 15th and South street at gunpoint. Williams' corpse was found in an isolated area near the Naval Base in South Philadelphia. Four bullets had been fired into his back. Police would later characterize the homicide as a "Black Mafia execution." Jerome Barnes was arrested for Williams murder on August 12, 1969. In a trend that would be repeated