was this tidbit considered common knowledge when Mario Puzo included it in his novel? Did any mafia bigshot publicly acknowledge anything of this sort? Are there police statistics from early in the drugs epidemics to substantiate that a lot more drugs were being sold in black neighborhoods than in white ones?
I’m not sure. However, Paul Castellano, head of the Gambino crime family, had no-drug trafficking policy. It was a policy that one of his capos, John Gotti, violated repeatedly.
I doubt this very much. Mario Puzo put it in the story, to give the impression that the Mafia worried about its public image.
The Mob sold drugs to whoever wanted them-and in the 1970’s, they sold through pizza shops in NYC (like some heroin with that large cheese to go?).
OTOH, in my old neighborhood we had a genuine Italian-American, under police surveilance mob boss. He was very much in the Vito Coreleone mold – well-dressed, middle-class lifestyle, friendly to children, hell, he even had a vegetable garden. Drugs weren’t his thing, but he was very careful to run his rackets only in select neighborhoods.
I think it’s more likely that mobsters made a business decision about where they could get away with selling drugs – and they had a better chance of getting away with it when they stayed out of rich, politically powerful neighborhoods. Certainly the stereotype of suburban white kids going into bad neighborhoods to get drugs was around before Puzo wrote his book. You only need to look at the opening line of Allen Ginsberg’s 1956 poem, Howl