Major Coxson was a career con artist with ties to thieves, drug dealers and mobsters of all stripes. He successfully avoided capture by fleeing to Chicago and Detroit, only to reappear in one of New Jersey’s most infamous crimes. Police believed Christian was the person who shot Palmer in the face, and a warrant was issued for his arrest.
The shootout that followed resulted in the deaths of Palmer, his bodyguard, and three women in their company. For reasons that remain debated, on April 2, 1972, Palmer was visited by five Black Mafia members as he enjoyed the music of Billy Paul from a stage-side table at Atlantic City’s iconic Club Harlem.
Tyrone “Fat Ty” Palmer was one of the most consequential heroin dealers on the Eastern seaboard in the early 1970s. Under Christian’s leadership, the Black Mafia’s presence was both felt and feared. In hopes of disrupting his criminal network, authorities then “traded” Mims to Minnesota for that state’s worst prisoner. While incarcerated at Graterford, Mims became a leader in an underworld of drug dealing and prostitution so corrupt that in 1995, Governor Ridge ordered 650 Pennsylvania state troopers to raid the penitentiary.
Among those convicted for the horrific crimes was Robert “Nudie” Mims, who was sentenced to life in prison. Police observed Christian at the scene, but he was never charged. Before they left, the men shot a janitor to death, looted the shop, beat and bound its employees, and set them and the store on fire. It was during those heady and complicated times, beginning in the mid-’60s, that Christian and his crowd terrorized scores of people along the East Coast, committing crimes that remain legend to this day.Īn Inquirer columnist called what happened on January 4, 1971, “one of the most cold-blooded and inhuman acts in the long criminal history of this town.” Eight Black Mafia members entered DuBrow’s Furniture store on South Street. Along with several Black Mafia compatriots, Christian rose to the rank of captain in the Fruit of Islam, the NOI’s elite paramilitary unit. His friends on Facebook did the same.Ĭhristian had changed his name decades earlier after joining the Nation of Islam, then headed by Elijah Muhammad. Nuriddin asked Muslims “to pray for Beyah’s soul” and to “ask Allah to forgive him” so that he might enter Paradise. Imam Kenneth Nuriddin recalled how Christian loved his Islamic faith and instructed others in its practice in prison. On Tuesday, however, about 600 mourners at the Philadelphia Masjid mosque in West Philly paid homage to another side of Christian, known as Beyah. In consolidating power, Christian and his followers left a bloody trail of more than 40 bodies, including the decapitated head of a noncompliant drug dealer outside a North Philadelphia bar and the sawed-off hands of another dope peddler. Later, they’d develop high-level moneymaking schemes, tapping politicians for a cut of the windfall of federal funds pouring into impoverished areas. He happened to be one of the most feared gangsters in the history of Philadelphia.Ĭhristian was the founder of the city’s notorious Black Mafia, and under his leadership in the mid-1960s through the ’70s, its members operated a complex criminal enterprise wholly separate from the Italian Mob: numbers-running, drug trafficking, extortion and prostitution. Two weeks shy of age 77, he had been in declining health and was living in a local nursing home. Sam “Beyah” Christian died last Sunday without so much as a single headline to note his passing. Samuel Christian’s FBI Most Wanted poster from late 1973, a mugshot from 1968, and a funeral announcement.
0 kommentar(er)
