Organized Crime
Prohibition didn't create organized crime — it funded it at a scale that made everything that followed possible. Five articles covering Capone, Luciano, Schultz, the massacre, and the bootlegging industry.
Organized Crime
Prohibition-era bootlegging was a vertically integrated industry with syndicates, distributors, and retail speakeasies — generating billions in today's dollars and training the men who built modern organized crime.
Organized Crime
Dutch Schultz controlled Bronx bootlegging and the Harlem numbers racket until the Commission ordered his murder in 1935 — killed before he could assassinate prosecutor Thomas Dewey.
Organized Crime
Lucky Luciano reorganized New York's criminal underworld in 1931, created the Commission, and built the structure the American Mafia followed for the next fifty years.
Organized Crime
Al Capone ran Chicago's bootlegging empire from 1925 to 1931, generating $60 million a year — and was ultimately brought down not by murder charges but by five counts of tax evasion.
Gang History
The complete history of Chicago's gang wars — Gangster Disciples Vice Lords Black P Stones Latin Kings Folk Nation People Nation and drill music.
Gang History
Chief Keef recorded "I Don't Like" on house arrest at 16 in a South Side basement — by spring Kanye had remixed it and drill music had named a global genre.
Gang History
Folk Nation and People Nation weren't born on the streets — they were built inside Illinois state prisons by rival gang leaders who needed a way to manage violence in lockup.
Gang History
The Latin Kings formed in Humboldt Park in the 1950s among Puerto Rican migrants displaced by urban renewal — one of the oldest Latino gangs in the United States.
Gang History
The Vice Lords formed in 1958 in a juvenile detention facility ran restaurants on federal grants in the 1960s and went back to gang violence when the funding was cut.
Gang History
Jeff Fort turned the Blackstone Rangers from a War on Poverty grant recipient into a gang convicted of negotiating terrorist attacks with Muammar Gaddafi's Libya.
Gang History
Larry Hoover ran the Gangster Disciples — 30000 members and $100 million in annual drug revenue — from inside Illinois state prison for two decades.