7 Ways the Mafia Made the U.S. a Better Place: 'Renegade History'

by Thaddeus Russell

Imagine an America without jazz. Imagine an America in which alcohol is still illegal. Imagine an America without Broadway, Las Vegas, or Hollywood. Imagine an America with no racial integration or freedom to be gay in public. In my new book, A Renegade History of the United States, I show that all you have to do is imagine American history without organized crime ... Here are 7 ways that gangsters made America a better place:

By the end of the 19th century some 300 Sicilian mafiosi controlled substantial portions of the New Orleans economy, most significantly the many brothels, saloons, and nightclubs that defined New Orleans as the pleasure capital of the South. When respectable Americans shunned the new music called "jass" as black and criminal jungle music but many others demonstrated a willingness to pay to hear and dance to it, New Orleans gangsters happily made it their business. The first buildings in which the music eventually renamed "jazz" was played professionally – brothels in the Storyville district near the French Quarter – were owned by Sicilian mobsters. In 1917, a teenaged Louis Armstrong received his first wages for playing the trumpet at a tavern owned by Henry Matranga, leader of the Matranga family and arguably the most powerful criminal in the early 20th-century United States. Armstrong and the other black inventors of jazz such as Buddy Bolden, Freddie Keppard, and Joe Oliver also received their first pay from George Delsa, manager of Anderson's Rampart Street café, one of the first clubs to feature jazz, who used his Mafia connections to protect the club and the prostitutes who worked there from the police.

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