Friends of Ours Blogger Debuts Mafia Book



The Mafia and the Gays by Phillip Crawford Jr., the Friends of Ours blogger, is available at Amazon either as a Kindle e-book for $2.99 or a trade paperback for $9.95.

The Friends of Our blog is a must-read for anyone interested in crime -- it offers a comprehensive focus on criminal activity impacting America, including but not limited to traditional organized crime, including the various Mafia grows that expanded beyond Italy.

Since 2009, Philip has blogged about organized crime at Friends of Ours. He is the leading authority on the Mafia's historical role in gay bars and has been cited as a major resource in numerous books, foremost among them Alex Horts's The Mob and the City and John Strausbaugh's The Village.

According to the blog: "The Mafia historically controlled gay bars as part of their vice rackets in many cities across the United States including New York and Chicago due to their once illicit status. A common misunderstanding among the general public is that the wise guys were eliminated from the gay bars following the 1969 Stonewall Riots in New York City. However, organized crime kept a hidden hand -- often through violent means resulting in a few murders -- over many watering holes for the gay community at least into the mid-1980s if not later. Indeed, the Mafia even hijacked gay liberation for political cover and used so-called Auntie Gays -- the Uncle Toms of the gay community -- as frontmen for their bars to evade suspicion. The Mafia and the Gays provides a comprehensive look at the mob's involvement with gay bars from the post-war years through the mid-1980s when federal prosecutors targeted the Outfit in Chicago and the Genovese family in New York for their alleged protection rackets and skimming operations involving some establishments.

"Phillip Crawford Jr. is a retired attorney from the New York bar. He attended Bates College in Lewiston, Maine from which he graduated with a B.A. in English in 1985. At Bates he was President of the Gay-Straight Alliance in 1983, and spearheaded a campaign to oust military recruiters from the campus for their discriminatory policies against the LGBT community.

"He attended George Washington University Law School where he was a Notes Editor for the Law Review. After graduating in 1988 he clerked for Chief Judge Judith W. Rogers on the D.C. Court of Appeals, and then with Judge George H. Revercomb on the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. 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.”


Comments

  1. I really do not like that blog. A lot of (his) the posts are couched in personal opinion. He really does not like a lot of politicians and lets you know by name. Bitter Queen? Drama Queen is a more apt moniker.

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  2. W...T.....F............!!!!!

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  3. Is that Pizza Boy from Gangster BB?

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  4. I'm done with all of them. They are ignorant homophobic lowlives and they all have the same name: John. Trying to glide through life on a grandfather's reputation is pathetic. They can trash me all they want on Twitter, that's the extent of their fantasy domain. John Junior would never give me an interview, as one family member supposedly was going to facilitate. It was a ploy to try to stop me from writing about Junior. Well, I'm done with Junior. He's not that interesting and he knows I'm the one reporter he can't bullshit.

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  5. why wont junior give you an interview ed he gives them to everyone else that's because you will ask questions that they will not and you wont listen to carisis warnings like them before interviews start

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  6. He tilts the field in his favor, right off the bat, by having a reporter go to his turf. This is a way to psychologically dominate someone. (Look at how his nephews told me to come and they'll show me his files... it was a threat, of course, and that is the same thing Junior is doing but on a subtler level.) If there were a powerful reporter like a Walter Winchell around today, which will never happen, he'd have Junior meet him in Howard Beach and make an ass out of him.

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