Скачать или смотреть 1963: Bumpy Johnson Took Control of Harlem in Just 6 Days After His Release From Jail

On Saturday evening, November 16, 1963, at exactly 6:47 PM, Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson stepped out of his Edgecombe Avenue apartment as a free man for the first time in more than a decade. He had just completed ten years and five months at Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary—the infamous maximum-security prison in San Francisco Bay where escape was nearly impossible, and where Johnson had been sent in June 1953 to serve a fifteen-year sentence for federal narcotics conspiracy.

Johnson was 58 years old, his hair now gray, his frame nearly twenty pounds lighter than when he entered Alcatraz in 1953. He wore a suit his wife, Mayme Johnson, had purchased specifically for his return home. To anyone watching from the street, he appeared to be an aging man shaped—and possibly broken—by ten years inside one of America’s harshest prisons.

But appearances were deceiving.

After serving a ten-year sentence, Bumpy Johnson was free—and within just six days, he would reassert control over all of Harlem.