This is the first installment in a brand new series focusing on Black mobsters who became powerful during the 1960s and 1970s in New York, some of whom became so wealthy and powerful that local and federal law enforcement began viewing them as the new breed of organized crime in the city. They were referred to as the “Black Mafia” — mobsters who sometimes worked in conjunction with, and sometimes competed with, the city’s better established Italian mobsters and the traditional Five Families of Cosa Nostra.
From time to time, Button Guys will be providing thumbnail sketches and larger profiles for some of the Black Mafia’s more significant members.
Our first story delves into the colorful life and bloody career of a New York City gangster who has arguably been described by both federal and local law enforcement agencies as the most powerful Black mobster during the height of his underworld career.
Known throughout the New York City underworld as Black Caesar, according to DEA officials, during his meteoric rise, Frank Matthews became the biggest and most voracious narcotics dealer in the United States and a multimillionaire many times over in the process.
By 1975, he also had become the underworld’s most mysterious and a criminal legend of his own time.
And now, without further ado, meet Black Caesar.
Frank Larry (Black Caesar) Matthews — aka Pee-Wee, Frank McNeal, and Mark III — was born in Durham, North Carolina on February 13, 1944. He came from a poverty stricken family and legend has it that Matthews began his criminal career at the tender age of 14. Local police claim that he became something of a “feather-fingered Fagin,” accusing him of organizing a group of young 8 and 9 year old boys into a gang and teaching them to steal chickens for him from coops on area farms that he would then sell for profit.
According to various police departments and confirmed by his police record, by his late teens, Matthews had become a drifter who traveled from state to state committing petty thefts and other crimes of opportunity.
Often Imitated. Never Duplicated. Button Guys of The New York Mafia...There's Only One!
