Remembrances of NYC Crime Bosses Past

There's something fundamentally criminal about America -- we love to steal and con people out of money, we love to grab anything and anyone we want, we love to hoard money or get into debt if we don't have enough of it, we love getting stuff -- in short, we love our hyper-capitalist materialistic society.

It's one of the reason we had the Red Scare, McCarthyism, the Cold War and Vietnam -- how dare anyone envision a society that isn't centered around money or based on greed.

And that's why we love crime bosses -- think Don Corleone or Donald Trump.

In NYC we've had a few colorful crime bosses. Here are two examples, one very well known, another much less known. 

There's a new Netflix doc about John Gotti, the late 1980s, early 1990s boss of the Gambino crime family. Gotti's career as the most famous crime boss in NYC - the Dapper Don, the Teflon Don -- was relatively short-lived but he made a memorable impact. (I remember as a kid watching him always get arrested, always standing trial, always getting acquitted until he was finally convicted in 1992 and died in prison in 2002 -- in friggin' Missouri of all places!). 

But another NYC crime boss is probably less familiar -- Stephanie St Clair, the young lady crime boss of Harlem who was queen of the rackets. Her story is far less known but no less fascinating. She was African immigrant who fell in love with the American dream -- with a vengeance.