National Crime Syndicate
starbets.io

A little note about the stories in the Crescent Corner

Doing these stories is fun for me. Sometimes it can be a bit of a chore researching subjects and finding sources to bump facts against. Sometimes information shows up later on that changes the facts that I had at the time of writing a piece that goes into the CC. But the main thing is, it’s fun and I enjoy sharing what I find out about New Orleans Mafia history. It’s a topic that is lacking info in the Mafia buff circles.

So, the main point….it’s fun! That being said, I thought it was a given fact that I was not 100 years old, I’m not affiliated with any OC Family and that I didn’t experience these things first hand and, that being the case, I would have to gather information from other sources. I still think that most people will realize this without having to be told but, unfortunately, there are those out there that don’t understand this. I experienced this recently when I was accused of plagiarism this week with a story I did here in the Crescent Corner last year.

I won’t go into all the details but one thing it did make me understand is that though this is done for fun and I don’t make any money off doing this, nor do I wish to, that even so I should list the resources I use to write a story. I’m not going to list every place I get every tidbit of info from nor am I going to list every place I use to bump facts against each other. Sometimes that could make the list longer than the story. I will cite sources that I get a majority of info from or significant bits from. I’m not going to cite page numbers, provide web address’s, specific quotes, names/dates/writers of newspaper articles or what city info from an article came from…..etc etc. If it gets to the point where I need to do that it stops being fun and more like work and then I want to see some money for my efforts.

That being said I’d like to do a general list of sources that I can recall using from past stories in the Crescent Corner. I can’t recall everything but these were used quite a bit.

Books:

Empire of Sin by Gary Krist
Deep Water by Thomas Hunt and Martha Macheca Sheldon
Vendetta by Richard Gambino
Mafia Kingfish by John Davis
The Crescent City Lynchings by Tom Smith
A transcript of the Kefauver Hearings in New Orleans

Websites:

Mary Ferrell Foundation – FBI files
Wikipedia
Mafia Wiki
Americanmafia.com
Forteana.org, CFI Blog – This blog is done by a guy named Mike Dash (author of The First Family). An entry he did in March of 2009 cited work from Richard N. Warner in which I pulled a couple of details from for the Vito Di Giorio story in the CC.

There have been tons of other websites I’ve used but I can’t recall them. When you get to surfing for info you don’t always pay attention to where things bring you.

Newspapers:

I’ve had tons of newspaper clippings sent to me and use Newspapers.com to do research in old papers from around the world.

Images:

And a note on pictures. I think most people with common sense will realize that once a picture goes up on the internet you lose control of it. But again this does not appear to always be the case. A few pictures used in the stories I’ve done were taken by me. Most came from the internet. Again, since I’m not 100 years old it would have been difficult for me to snap a pic in say, 1920 or 1930.

So, all told, I hope this will be sufficient to cover the past and I will be more diligent in the future for those that can’t just have fun with a subject that interests us all.