Starting with a extensive biography Button Guys recently released about the life and criminal career of Harlem drug kingpin Frank (Black Caesar) Mathews, we mentioned that periodically we would create profiles and thumb-nail sketches about other prominent New York City Black narcotics kingpins and racketeers, and, when possible, do our best to also recreate the gang structure of the narcotics organizations these men headed.
Although their road to fortune and fame — or infamy — as it were, was paved with heroin, some of the men we will introduce to you also dabbled in organized prostitution, robberies, gambling [especially policy-numbers and dice games], and other types of criminal rackets.
These were the men the Federal Bureau of Narcotics & Dangerous Drugs (BNDD) — the precursor to the Drug Enforcement Administration — and the New York City Police Department’s Criminal Intelligence Division labeled the city’s “major” drug violators.
Where available, we will also include mugshots and breakdowns of the organizational structure of their respective drug gangs. We will also name some of their favorite Harlem hangouts where much of their business was conducted and where they liked to mingle amongst themselves.
These were the men who strutted their stuff on the streets of the Big Apple, brashly dressed to the nines — “Harlem style” — replete in full-length white mink coats, fur hats, $1,000 suits and alligator shoes straight from the exclusive Leighton’s Mens Shop in midtown-Manhattan’s West Side where many of the city’s top black gangsters, pimps and drug dealers liked to shop.
Hanging out nightly at Small’s Paradise and other Harlem venues with their Cadillacs, Lincoln Continentals, Jaguars and Rolls Royces illegally double and triple parked out front, while they kicked back inside, doing cocaine and drinking Dom Pérignon Champagne, while entertaining the flocks of beautiful women drawn to them.
That is, of course, until it all came crashing down around them.
But while it lasted, they reveled in throwing tens of thousands of dollars around nightly, sniffing the finest cocaine and bedding the finest looking women their money could buy.
Button Guys found these 1960s and 1970s era “Black Godfathers” of the so-called “Black Mafia” to be an interesting bunch. We suspect you will too.
So, without further ado, we now introduce you to Hollywood Hal.
A Very Rough Start
Future drug kingpin Harold “Hollywood Hal” Munger — aka Broadway Hal — was born in Harlem, New York on March 6, 1938. His father was believed to have been a man named Benjamin Dozier. His mother was Sophie Munger.
Munger’s parents had a brief sexual affair that resulted in Sophie getting pregnant and Benjamin disappearing off the scene quickly thereafter, with the child being born out of wedlock. Because his parents were never married and his father was never part of his life, subsequently, Harold carried his mother’s surname.
The family was dirt poor, as Sophie raised her son in a tiny two-room apartment, largely devoid of furniture, in the ghettos of West Harlem. Young Harold only knew poverty, squalor and despair.
At the age of 18, he enlisted in the United States Air Force. He served between the years May 21,1956 and January 15,1959. After being discharged Harold returned to his Harlem neighborhood and soon began a career as a petty criminal and thief on the mean streets of Upper Manhattan. But it didn’t take long for him to see that house burglaries and muggings were a quick road to nowhere.
After all, Harold was no dope and soon realized that the business of “dope” was where the real money was to be had.
So, Munger began dabbling in the drug business and before long he started making good money. The heroin business apparently agreed with him, because within a few years time, police reported Munger was enjoying a meteoric rise within the city’s drug underworld and was now rubbing elbows with the big dogs and considered a top dog himself among Harlem’s drug trade.
Often Imitated. Never Duplicated. Button Guys of The New York Mafia...There's Only One!
