10. Frank Lucas

Frank Lucas capitalized off the heroin trade in the 1960s and 1970s by using an East Asian connection during the Vietnam war, cutting off the Italian mafia who  controlled the trade in his Harlem at the time. Lucas, originally from North Carolina, employed members of his family to take over the heroin trade in New York and New Jersey. Lucas would claim to have sold one million dollars worth of heroin a day in his prime and claimed to have a net worth of over $52 million on top of a large supply of liquid assets, namely heroin.

9. Griselda Blanco

Griselda Blanco, also known as the Black Widow or The Cocaine Queen Of Miami, was a drug lord for the Colombian Medellin cartel. She controlled the cocaine trade through violence and intimidation making $80 million a month during the ’70s and ’80s. Reports claim that at her peak Griselda Blanco had more than a half a billion dollars. After serving 10 years in jail on drug charges, Blanco would return to her native Colombia.

8. Al Capone

Al Capone is perhaps the most notorious gangster of all time, and also one of the richest. During prohibition, Capone controlled the illegal alcohol, prostitution and gambling rackets in Chicago which brought in $100 million a year at its prime. Capone’s money allowed him to bribe police officials, judges and even the Mayor of Chicago. Unfortunately, he could not bribe the IRS who convicted him of tax evasion in 1932 and sentenced him to 11 years in prison.

7. Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman Loera

“El Chapo” is one of Mexico’s most infamous drug lords. He is the head of the Sinaloa cartel which smuggles in billion of dollars from Colombia through Mexico and into the United States. Guzman became rich enough to make Forbes list of 1000 wealthiest people in the world as well as their top 60 most powerful people in the world, with a net worth of over 5 billion dollars. Guzman was jailed in 1993 but escaped from prison in 2001 and is currently number one of the FBI’s most wanted list with $5 million award for his capture.

6. Anthony “Fat Tony” Salermo

Italian Mobster “Fat Tony” Salermo made his millions running the numbers and drugs racket in East Harlem after most other Italian mobsters left the area as it became more Black and Latino in the 1960s making tens of millions of dollars. As the front man for the Genovese crime family, Salermo was named the America’s Top Gangster by Fortune Magazine in 1986 due to his wealth of more than one billion dollars and influence. In 1988 Salermo was convicted of racketeering charges and was sentenced to 70 years in prison.

5. Carlos Lehder

Lehder was one of the founders of the Colombian Medillin Cartel. While in prison Lehder met Boston-born drug trafficker, George Jung, who helped him import and distribute cocaine from his native Colombia into the United States accumulating $2.7 Billion. Cocaine made Lehder so rich that he owned his own island in the Bahamas and offered to pay of Colombia’s debt. Lehder would eventually be extradited to the United States and sentenced to life in prison which was reduced after he agreed to testify against former Panamanian President, Manuel Noriega in 1992.

4. Meyer Lansky

Lansky was a Jewish immigrant from Poland who would make a fortune of gambling, both legal and illegal. Lansky would join notorious gangsters, Charles “Lucky” Luciano and Ben “Bugsy” Siegel to run a gang that would be known as Murder Inc. Lansky would later turn to focus on gambling setting up operations in Florida, Las Vegas and Cuba before the Cuban revolution.In 1982, Forbes would name him as one of the 400 richest people in America.  Lansky would be indicted for tax evasion and fled to Israel. He would later return to the U.S. to face charges and was acquitted in 1974. Lanksy would die a free man in Miami at age 83.

3. Joseph Kennedy

Joseph Kennedy is the patriarch of one of America’s most powerful and prestigious families. One of his sons became President, another District Attorney and presidential candidate and another a Senator. At his peak Kennedy was one of the richest men in America but as the saying goes behind every great fortune, there is a great crime. Kennedy was already in the liquor business before prohibition but according to several books and gangsters, became a bootlegger with ties to the New York and Chicago underworlds after liquor was made illegal. After prohibition was ended Kennedy made a fortune off selling legitimate liquor as well as through Hollywood and the stock market. Kennedy was named one of the 20 richest people in America in 1954 by Fortune Magazine and had a net worth of more than $300 Million, which would be in the high billions today . It has been reported that Kennedy contacted mobster Frank Costello, who was known to brag that he was a bootlegger with Kennedy, to use another mobster, Chicago’s Sam Giancana to help his son John get elected through his ties to Chicago and the unions.

2. Pablo Escobar

Escobar is perhaps the most notorious drug lord of the modern era. He ran the Medellin Cartel which imported billions of dollars of cocaine into the United States. Pablo’s money brought him great power as we was able to bribe officials or have them killed if they wouldn’t take his bribes. Forbes Magazine named Escobar the 7th richest man in the world with a net worth of $25 Billion. In 1993, Escobar was killed by Colombian forces with US assistance, after he escaped from a Colombian prison.

1. Amado Carrillo Fuentes

Amado Carrillo Fuentes was the head of the Mexican Juarez Cartel. He was known as “Lord Of The Skies” due to his private fleet of planes, including 22 private 727 jet airliners which were used to import cocaine from Colombia to Mexico where it was later smuggled into the United States. Fuentes had an estimated net value of $25 billion almost twice as much as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and the DEA called him the most powerful drug trafficker of his era. He would die while undergoing plastic surgery to alter his appearance in 1997.

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The analysis shows the racial and ethnic impact of the economic meltdown, which ravaged housing values and sent unemployment soaring. It offers the most direct government evidence yet of the disparity between predominantly younger minorities whose main asset is their home and older whites who are more likely to have 401(k) retirement accounts or other stock holdings.

“What’s pushing the wealth of whites is the rebound in the stock market and corporate savings, while younger Hispanics and African-Americans who bought homes in the last decade – because that was the American dream – are seeing big declines,” said Timothy Smeeding, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor who specializes in income inequality.

The median wealth of white U.S. households in 2009 was $113,149, compared with $6,325 for Hispanics and $5,677 for blacks, according to the analysis released Tuesday by the Pew Research Center. Those ratios, roughly 20 to 1 for blacks and 18 to 1 for Hispanics, far exceed the low mark of 7 to 1 for both groups reached in 1995, when the nation’s economic expansion lifted many low-income groups to the middle class.

The white-black wealth gap is also the widest since the census began tracking such data in 1984, when the ratio was roughly 12 to 1.

“I am afraid that this pushes us back to what the Kerner Commission characterized as `two societies, separate and unequal,’” said Roderick Harrison, a former chief of racial statistics at the Census Bureau, referring to the 1960s presidential commission that examined U.S. race relations. “The great difference is that the second society has now become both black and Hispanic.”

Stock holdings play an important role in the economic well-being of white households. Stock funds, IRA and Keogh accounts as well as 401(k) and savings accounts were responsible for 28 percent of whites’ net worth, compared with 19 percent for blacks and 15 percent for Hispanics.

According to the Pew study, the housing boom of the early to mid-2000s boosted the wealth of Hispanics in particular, who were disproportionately employed in the thriving construction industry. Hispanics also were more likely to live and buy homes in states such as California, Florida, Nevada and Arizona, which were in the forefront of the real estate bubble, enjoying early gains in home values.

But those gains quickly shriveled in the housing bust. After reaching a median wealth of $18,359 in 2005, the wealth of Hispanics – who derived nearly two-thirds of their net worth from home equity – declined by 66 percent by 2009. Among blacks, who now have the highest unemployment rate at 16.2 percent, their household wealth fell 53 percent from $12,124 to $5,677.

In contrast, the median household wealth of whites dipped a modest 16 percent from $134,992 to $113,149, cushioned in part by a stock market recovery that began in mid-2009.

“The findings are a reminder – if one was needed – of what a large share of blacks and Hispanics live on the economic margins,” said Paul Taylor, director of Pew Social & Demographic Trends. “When the economy tanked, they’re the groups that took the heaviest blows.”

The latest data come as President Barack Obama and congressional leaders try to reach a deal to avoid a U.S. default on its financial obligations after Aug. 2. Democrats and Republicans have been wrangling over proposals that could cut trillions of dollars from programs such as Medicare and Social Security; they are divided over whether to bring in new tax revenue, such as by closing corporate tax loopholes or increasing taxes for the wealthy.

The NAACP and other black groups urged Obama to resist deep cuts to housing assistance or safety net programs, saying it would disproportionately hurt urban areas with high poverty and unemployment. The U.S. poverty rate currently stands at 14.3 percent, with the ranks of the working-age poor at the highest level since the 1960s. Some analysts believe the poverty rate will climb higher when new figures are released in September.

“Typically in recessions, minorities suffer from being last hired and first fired. They are likely to lose jobs more rapidly at the beginning of the recession, and are far slower to gain jobs as the economy recovers,” said Harrison, who is now a sociologist at Howard University. “One suspects that blacks who lost jobs in the recession, or who have tried to help family members or relatives who did, have now spent whatever savings or other cashable assets they had.”

Other findings:

-About 35 percent of black households and 31 percent of Hispanic households had zero or negative net worth in 2009, compared with 15 percent of white households. In 2005, the comparable shares were 29 percent for blacks, 23 percent for Hispanics and 11 percent for whites.

-Asians lost their top ranking to whites in median household wealth, dropping from $168,103 in 2005 to $78,066 in 2009. Like Hispanics, many Asians were concentrated in states like California hit hard by the housing downturn. More recent arrivals of new Asian immigrants, who tend to be poor, also pushed down their median wealth.

-Across all race and ethnic groups, the wealth gap between rich and poor widened. The share of wealth held by the top 10 percent of U.S. households increased from 49 percent in 2005 to 56 percent in 2009. The threshold for entry into the wealthiest top 10 percent, however, dipped lower: from $646,327 in 2005 to $598,435.

The numbers are based on the Census Bureau’s Survey of Income and Program Participation, which sampled more than 36,000 households on wealth from September-December 2009. Census first began publishing wealth data from this survey, broken down by race and ethnicity, in 1984.

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From BlackVoices.com:

The New York Times recently wrote about the economic challenges of black residents of Memphis, Tenn. In the piece, the author describes how the recent recession, creating a double whammy of high unemployment and foreclosure, has created an unprecedented amount of financial hardship for African-American residents in the city. The median income of black Memphis residents rose steadily until about five years ago. Since that time, it has dropped to levels not seen since 1990 and remains at half the median income of white Memphis residents.
Black unemployment in Memphis, which is at 16.9 percent, is more than three times greater than white unemployment, which is at 5.3 percent. The problems being faced by Memphis residents are part of a larger national trend, in which the wealth gap between blacks and whites has increased over the past several decades. The Institute on Assets and Social Policy at Brandeis University recently released a study stating that the wealth gap between blacks and whites has grown fivefold since 1984. Additionally, a Federal Reserve study states that for every dollar of wealth possessed by white families, a black or Latino family has only 16 cents.

There is more evidence of African American suffering during the recession. The Economic Policy Institute recently found that during the 2009 recession, black family wealth dropped by more than twice as much as white family wealth. The median white family has $94,600 in wealth, while the median black family has just $2,100.

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MEXICO CITY – Mexican telecom tycoon Carlos Slim is the first man from a developing nation to become the world’s richest person — a shift that underlines the loosening of America and Europe’s stranglehold on the top spots in the billionaires’ club.

Slim’s arrival at the top aroused both pride and anger in Mexico, where many see his fantastic wealth in a poverty-afflicted nation as a sign of what ails it.

With a recovery in the value of his cell phone holdings pushing his estimated fortune to $53.5 billion, Slim jumped past Microsoft founder Bill Gates and investor Warren Buffett when Forbes magazine released its 2010 list of the world’s wealthiest Wednesday.

The rise of Slim, the 70-year-old son of an immigrant shopkeeper, is just a part of the emergence of billionaires in developing countries, Forbes reporter Keren Blankfeld said. She noted this year’s top 10 richest also include two billionaires from India and one from Brazil.

“They’re kind of spread. It’s a nice spread,” Blankfeld said of the list, which had long been dominated by Americans and Europeans.

The full list showed Taiwan tripling its number of billionaires to 18, Turkey more than doubling to 28, and Brazil increasing by 50 percent to 18. Russia also rebounded, almost doubling its number of billionaires to 62 after stock markets there recovered from severe setbacks.

Still, it is hardly time to mark the passing of U.S. dominance: The number American billionaires rose by more than 40 to 403. That is more than six times second-place China with 64 billionaires.

That the single richest man on the list should come from Mexico has drawn frequent criticism given the country’s ongoing battles against poverty.

“This is shameful,” said Ernesto Villanueva, 45, of Mexico City. “This is part of what is wrong with the Mexican political system and the corruption in the circles of power, that allow there to be a few rich people and millions of poor.”

While Mexico belongs to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, whose 30 members constitute the world’s most important market economies, it is also a developing nation. More than 50 million of Mexico’s 107 million people live in poverty, defined as not having enough money to meet housing, transport, education and other normal expenses. Extreme poverty — defined as not having money to buy enough food — afflicted 19.5 million of them.

But some Mexicans give Slim credit for knowing how to take advantage of the situation and make money.

“He was intelligent enough to get to where he is, while we, as a people, have never known how to unite ourselves,” said 17-year-old student Manuel Santibanez.

Whatever their attitude toward Slim, Mexicans have learned to live under the tycoon’s long shadow.

Slim’s conglomerate of retail, telecom, manufacturing and construction companies so dominate the Mexican commercial landscape it is often easy for Mexicans to find themselves talking over a Slim-operated cell phone at a Slim-owned shopping center waiting to pay a bill to a Slim-owned company at a Slim-owned bank. If the line is too long, they can catch a quick coffee at a Slim-owned restaurant.

His Telmex telephone company controls 83 percent of land lines in Mexico and is the leading Internet service provider. Another of his firms is the top cell phone operator, and he wants to get into convergence services to offer television and interactive media.

Slim also owns the Sears and Saks retail stores operating in Mexico. Last year, he announced a $250 million investment in The New York Times.

Arturo Elias Ayub, the billionaire’s son-in-law who is an executive at Telmex, welcomed Slim’s arrival at the top.

“The reaction is one of satisfaction, that this confidence in Mexico exists, and this confidence in our group’s companies,” said Elias Ayub, who frequently acts as Slim’s spokesman.

But he said Slim was not breaking out the champagne.

“This is a number brought out by a magazine that doesn’t concern us, or worry us,” Elias Ayub said, echoing Slim’s 2007 comment about the top spot that had eluded him for years: a Spanish phrase — “me es impermeable” — that roughly translates as “I’m impervious to that.”

Slim is known for wearing inexpensive suits and rarely using the computers his companies sell, preferring old-style paper notebooks. A baseball fan, his indulgences are largely limited to cigars and diet soft drinks.

While he owns — either personally or through his foundations and museums — an impressive collection of art, including works by French sculptor Auguste Rodin, he works out of a set of somewhat dowdy, 1970s-style offices.

A civil engineer by training, he has bought up troubled or government-owned companies of all types, fixed them up and resold them for huge profits. That kind of thrifty eye for undervalued businesses has served him well, especially after the market downturns in recent years.

“In periods of crisis, he has always invested, and now we are beginning to see the fruits of that,” Elias Ayub said.

One factor in Slim’s move to the top spot is that Gates and Buffett have given away chunks of their fortunes in charitable donations.

Slim has donated to several causes, but not on nearly the same level. In January, he announced a $65 million donation for genetic research on cancer, type 2 diabetes and kidney disease in Mexican and Latin American populations.

Speaking to reporters in 2005, Slim described his philosophy: “Wealth must be seen as a responsibility, not as a privilege. The responsibility is to create more wealth. It’s like having an orchard; you have to give away the fruit, but not the trees.”

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Women of all races bring home less income and own fewer assets, on average, than men of the same race, but for single black women the disparities are so overwhelmingly great that even in their prime working years their median wealth amounts to only $5.

In a groundbreaking report released Monday by a leading economic research group, social scientists turned a spotlight on the grave financial challenges facing an often overlooked group of women, many of whom could not take an unpaid sick day or repair a major appliance without going into debt.

“It’s rather shocking,” said Meizhu Lui, director of the Closing the Gap Initiative based in Oakland, Calif., who contributed to the report “Lifting as We Climb: Women of Color, Wealth and America’s Future.”
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Racial disparities in net worth

Among the most startling revelations in the wealth data is that while single white women in the prime of their working years (ages 36 to 49) have a median wealth of $42,600 (still only 61 percent of their single white male counterparts), the median wealth for single black women is only $5.

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Many prominent black scholars were absolutely stunned by the racially misinformed remarks made by President Obama’s Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke. During a visit to Morehouse College, Bernanke stated that the reason for the massive wealth gap between blacks and whites in America is due to “financial illiteracy” and a lack of “financial education” on the part of African Americans.

According to the 2007 Survey of Consumer Finances, white family households possess 10 times more wealth than the median black family. Yes, the statistic is true, but it’s not because black people spend all their money on gold chains and rims. Much of the wealth in America is obtained through inheritance: imagine having parents who can give you a down payment to your first home on your wedding day, or a grandmother who dies and leaves you a house that is fully paid off. There are other forms of critical inheritance, like having relatives with good jobs instead of being the only person in your family to have an income above $50,000 or having parents with Masters Degrees and grandparents who are MIT alumni. Whites are more likely to have these benefits than blacks, in large part because much American power is passed from parent to child (think about how many universities didn’t even start admitting black people until the 1970s and 1980s?). To say that the wealth gap is simply due to black people mismanaging their money is like bombing someone’s house for three months and then criticizing them for not dusting the coffee table. Having 400 years of targeted policy in favor of whites is what led to the wealth imbalance which exists in America. Since targeted policies are what created the problem, targeted policy is what should be used to fix it.

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I am surprised that President Obama would express confidence in a chairman who would make such a misguided statement about the source of America’s wealth imbalance. This helps me to understand why the Obama Administration has been reluctant to consider meaningful economic policy which supports the African American community (notice that the president avoids such questions and only spoke on race during the admittedly sloppy defense of his Harvard homeboy Henry Louis Gates). It’s simple: Obama’s advisors don’t seem to remember that slavery took place. They at least don’t think that the economic marginalization of slavery and Jim Crow could possibly impact the present, and they don’t seem to want to understand how to use economic policy to fix the imbalance.

Bernanke is not the only financial leader in the Obama Administration who seems to be a victim of white supremacist thinking. Lawrence Summers, head of the National Economic Council, showed tremendous disrespect toward Dr. Cornel West during his time at Harvard. Not only was Summers attempting to undermine the value of Dr. West’s research, he engaged in the ironically typical act of arguing that the work of Dr. West does not qualify as meaningful scholarship. Given that Dr. Summers is a member of the same academic discipline that I am (Financial Economics), I know his elitism well; finance is a field where black folks need not apply when it comes to obtaining positions of influence and power. When I got my PhD in Finance in 2002, I was the only African American on the planet to get that degree in that year. Most of my colleagues hate what I do for black people.

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Summers, like many other white scholars across America, seems to have a nasty and elitist habit of believing that anything that is different must be inherently inferior. When you are part of the arrogant academic nobility (as Summers is – his uncle won a Nobel Prize in Economics – another form of inheritance that has benefited him tremendously), you are also tempted to believe that if you don’t understand something, it must be without value. Summers has also shown a tendency toward sexism, as he stated in 2005 that there may be biological reasons that women are less likely to pursue careers in math and science. Perhaps he thinks that their breasts get in the way while solving math problems.

One would hope that Obama would appoint economic policy makers in Washington with a broader ability to understand the impact that history has on the present. With the long list of academic credentials possessed by Obama’s economic team, many of his teammates are unimpressive when it comes to displaying the diversity in their backgrounds necessary to find creative solutions to critical problems. Based on Fed Chair Bernanke’s very limited understanding of the wealth gap in America, it is hard to imagine that he might actually be able to solve a problem that he doesn’t even understand. President Obama should go talk to Bernanke about slavery to make sure he is aware that it happened. It might help him make better decisions.

Dr. Boyce Watkins is a Professor at Syracuse University and founder of the Your Black World Coalition. He is also the author of the forthcoming book, “Black American Money.” For more information, please visit www.BoyceWatkins.com.