Detroit Street Icon ‘Big Frank Nitti’ In Big Trouble Once Again

According to a federal indictment filed this week, Francis (Big Frank Nitti) Usher, the most notorious Detroit drug kingpin from the disco era of the late 1970s, is still moving and shaking in the Motor City underworld.

Usher, 71, was taken into custody without incident at his Southfield residence Thursday, charged with selling heroin out of a Detroit home on St. Aubin. Undercover federal agents made multiple buys from Usher’s alleged drug den in recent weeks, per the indictment, and witnessed him directing narcotics activity from his luxury Ford truck outside the St. Aubin property.

From 1975 until his conviction for a notorious triple beheading in 1980, Usher and his “Murder Row” gang ruled the city’s streets. Authorities tab him a suspect in at least 15 slayings.

His 1980 murder convictions and life sentences were thrown out on appeal and Usher was acquitted at a new trial, when elite defense attorney Steve Fishman was able to convince jurors that he was the target of the 1979 bloodletting at the Federated Democratic Social Club, not the coordinator of the attack. Once he was done serving a “CCE” (continuing criminal enterprise) conviction, he was freed in the mid-1990s.

The infamous triple homicide over 35 years ago was the result of infighting amongst the Murder Row hierarchy, specifically Usher and his main enforcer Adolph (Doc Holiday) Parker.

A U.S. Magistrate ordered Usher held without bail Thursday in a hearing where he told the court that he’s been retired since 2002, when he was a greeter at a restaurant.

Reports following his release from prison in 1994, placed Usher in Indiana, running a health food store. He resurfaced locally a little over a year ago as a pallbearer at the funeral of legendary Jewish Detroit mafia associate, Allen (the General) Hilf.

Usher was groomed in the underworld by Michigan mob leaders, Anthony (Tony Jack) Giacalone and Vito (Billy Jack) Giacalone at the peak of their power in the 1960s. His roots with the Giacalones ran deep, getting his start with the pair of feared Mafiosi as an errand boy as a teenager. A newspaper photo from the early 1960s showed a young Usher following Tony and Billy Jack into a court appearance, carrying their briefcases.

The Giacalone brothers, both deceased, are the prime suspects in the Jimmy Hoffa murder, as well as literally dozens of others and gave Usher his nickname, “Frank Nitti,” after former Chicago mafia don Frank (The Enforcer) Nitti, Al Capone’s cousin and successor.

Hilf, the Giacalone crew’s top earner and one of the country’s largest bookmakers and most accomplished handicappers, acted as a liaison between the Italian mafia and the black drug dealers and racketeers in Detroit during Usher’s prior heyday. At the time of his death by natural causes in January 2014, Hilf was considered the closest advisor to current Detroit mafia don, Jack (Jackie the Kid) Giacalone -Billy Jack’s son, Tony Jack’s nephew.

“We’d follow Allen into the city to Usher’s house and see them talk shop,” recalled Mike Carone, an FBI agent in Detroit for 30 years. “Originally, we were surprised, but then we realized that the two groups, the blacks and the Italian’s, were working together. The Giacalones set Usher up in his business. He did their bidding in the drug world in Detroit proper.”

Testimony in front of a U.S. Congressional committee in 1988, claimed Usher’s Murder Row organization in the 1970s was the last urban drug conglomerate to rely solely on the Italian mafia in Michigan for their product supply.

Fox2 News and reporter Ron Savage broke the most recent Usher arrest story Thursday night, with television cameras on the scene as he was led away in handcuffs by DEA and ATF agents, flanked by Wayne County Sheriff’s Department personnel. http://gangsterreport.com/detroit-street-icon-big-frank-nitti-in-big-trouble-again/

VIDEO
http://www.myfoxdetroit.com/story/291307...-selling-heroin

i guess he ain't have shit to doing

fuck is he 71 and personally orchestrating a heroin operation

seems like he was doing pretty well too. probably got bored.

Still going at it in his seventies. Only we get old never the money.

sounds like a dumbass to me

there are so many white collar crimes today for people to still sell drugs is dumb

Very true but the drug dealing is so easy and lucrative. Most of the blacks criminals only know of dealing. Some can but most from the inner cities and the ghettos don't no the first thing about the white collar crimes.

A black guy is groomed in his criminal ways and nature by two of the biggest Italian mobsters Detroit has seen, they place him in the game and give him his start, he's indicted on a triple murder and convicted but gets out on an appeal. And from what the article and news video mentioned, it seems their implying that he may have had this drug operation going ever since he's been out of prison, but they aren't sure. 71 years old with a nice big house in a pretty nice community. Seems far from a dumbass to me.

Also nowhere does it mention that he was personally making these drug deals himself, what they do say is he was witnessed "directing drug activity out of his luxury Ford truck." That sounds like he was dropping in from time to time and making sure things were running smoothly.

^^^^^

at his age he should know the difference in the drug game from then and now

now you're either gonna get killed, told on, arrested or turned into a snitch

He probably has other drug houses in operation.

Notorious hit man Chester wheeler campbell was murder rows top enforcer during the 1970s. This guy is smart though, talked himself out of getting murdered and beheaded that night along with the rest of his friends.

follow up by gangster report


Frank Usher & His Role In Infamous Detroit Triple-Beheading Murders


Recently-apprehended Detroit drug czar Francis (Big Frank Nitti) Usher was at the center of maybe the most heinous mass murder in Motor City history almost 40 years ago – The Michigan Federated Democratic Social Club Massacre.

Usher, 71 and currently facing federal heroin-dealing charges stemming from an arrest this week, was originally convicted, then acquitted at a second trial of the 1979 triple-beheading executions of Joanna Clark, William (Dirty Dirt) McJoy and William (Straw Hat Perry) Jackson. All three were found in a van on the east side of Detroit on July 18, 1979, their heads and hands chopped off. McJoy and Jackson were two of Usher’s top lieutenants in his Murder Row gang, the biggest and most feared narcotics organization in Michigan in the mid-to-late 1970s and a crime syndicate believed to be responsible for at least 15 gangland killings between 1977 and 1979.



Convicted initially in a 1980 trial, Usher had the conviction overturned on appeal and then earned an acquittal at a 1989 retrial after his attorney (ace defense counsel Steve Fishman) successfully argued to the jury that Usher was supposed to be a victim of the massacre and didn’t order it.

“He talked his way out of being killed,” said one exclusive Gangster Report source familiar with Usher and Murder Row in its heyday. “Nitti’s guys were slaughtered, he sidestepped the whole blood bath by thinking quick on his feet and convincing the hit squad that they’d be writing their own ticket to hell if they did him in. Usher was one of the most juiced-in players around back then. He had a lot of different dangerous cats watching his back.”

FBI and DEA records tie the cause of the Michigan Federated Democratic Social Club slayings to a power struggle atop the Murder Row gang, pitting Usher against Adolph (Doc Holiday) Powell, the gang’s main enforcer. The Bayou-born Powell came to Detroit from New Orleans in the late 1960s and was charged and acquitted of the triple murder at trial.

Powell and Usher, per these federal files related to organized drug activity in the Motor City in the 1970s, are alleged to have fallen out in the wake of Murder Row co-founder Harold Morton being jailed in 1977, spurring two years-worth of violent flare-ups as Usher and Powell tangled over syndicate territory and supply sources.

In the days before Usher, Powell and three others – social club bartender, Benjamin (Shorty B) Fountain and out-of-state hit men Robert (Baby T) Partee and James (Jimmy Red) Freeman and – were indicted for the triple homicide and dismemberments in October 1979, a Murder Row member named Clarence (C-Was) Welton popped up dead, apparently because the gang thought he was snitching and relaying his knowledge of the social club slayings to authorities..

Located on Detroit’s near east side, near Garfield, just a couple miles off Woodward, the Michigan Federated Democratic Social Club was opened in 1932 as a congregating spot for African-American politicians in the area, but by the 1970s had transformed into a hangout for black gangster types like the Murder Row boys.

Usher had heavyweight gangland sponsorship in the local Italian mafia, specifically the highly-feared Giacalone brothers (“Tony Jack” & “Billy Jack”), the Detroit mob’s street bosses for the second half of the 20th Century and responsible for countless clippings, bump-offs and rubouts in their more-than-50-year reign. As a teenager, Usher was an errand boy for the Giacalone crew on the rough-and-tumble eastside, getting a Grade-A schooling in the rackets by the Rembrandt and Da Vinci of the Detroit mafia and then eventual financial-backing for an mob empire of his own in the city’s black community.

Another early mentor to Usher in the Motor City underworld was Chester Campbell, a legendary freelance hit man and enforcer who worked closely with the Italians and might have killed upwards of 100 people with his own hands. According to DEA documents, Campbell buffered relations between Usher and Powell and his imprisonment in 1975 for being caught with a notorious “hit list,” dotted with the names and addresses of dozens of politicians, attorneys, judges, media members and mobsters, set the two off on a collision course that concluded that sticky, summer evening 36 years ago.

First-hand witness testimony placed Usher arriving at the Michigan Federated Democratic Social Club at around 11:00 am on the morning of July 18, 1979, followed in succession by the three victims and Powell, Partee and Freeman. Partee and Freeman had been recruited to Detroit for the hit from San Diego, a longtime west coast outpost for Detroit’s Italian mafia family. Freeman, a native of St. Louis, is a suspect in numerous gangland slayings that occurred on Michigan soil in the 1970s and 80s.

Further eye witness accounts at trial, said that Powell left before the job was done, Partee and Freeman shot McJoy, Jackson and Clark execution-style in the back of the head and that Usher aided club personnel chopping up the bodies in the kitchen and then sat beside Partee and Freeman counting money and left with them in his car. Around 8:45 pm that night, a passerby noticed blood leaking from an abandoned van a few miles away from the social club and alerted the police.

The only person beside Usher convicted at the first trial was Partee, currently 75 years old and serving a life prison sentence. Freeman died in prison as a result of a non-related murder. Doc Holiday Powell was assassinated while having a drink at the bar at La Player’s Lounge, a known hoodlum hotspot on the eastside, in January 1983.

Usher was released from behind bars in 1994 and had reportedly relocated to Indianapolis. His indictment and arrest earlier this week found him living back in the area in a well-manicured residence on 12 Mile and Southfield Road in Southfield, Michigan, less than five miles outside the Detroit city limits, where according to this week’s indictment, he oversees heroin sales.

An interesting tangential connection to the Michigan Federated Democratic Social Club case was the Detroit Tigers pro baseball club’s trade of fan-favorite and hometown boy Ron LeFlore to the Montreal Expos two months following the murders. DEA filings reference Leflore as a social companion of Usher and his Murder Row crime syndicate in his days as a MLB All-Star centerfielder and base-stealing specialist and speculate the Tigers trade of him in December 1979 was due to the organization being skittish regarding his alleged ties (although not of the criminal nature) to Usher and Usher’s thug pals.

LeFlore was serving time in state prison in the early 1970s when he was discovered by the Tigers and signed directly off the jail yard diamond via a tip to then-manager Billy Martin from incarcerated Giacalone crew goon Jimmy (Cokie) Karalla, linked to mob-run sports gambling out of the Lindell AC, a popular tavern down the street from Tigers Stadium and a bar and night spot frequented by Martin and his players in that era.

Detroit Lions all-pro football player Alex Karras was suspended for the entire 1963 season by the NFL related to his ownership piece of the Lindell AC bar, it’s organized crime element and his personal wagering habits on events he was participating in with the Lions. Karras achieved fame in Hollywood after his NFL career on the pro gridiron was completed, starring in a number of movies (Blazing Saddles, Against All Odds) and television shows (Webster). The original Lindell AC closed in 2006.

Usher was seen in the presence of Jack (Jackie the Kid) Giacalone, Billy Giacalone’s son and alleged to be the new mafia boss of Detroit, in January 2014 at the funeral of Allen (the General) Hilf, a respected Jewish mob associate and street advisor to multiple generations of Giacalone gangster royalty.

Hilf was the Giacalones’ primary liaison to the black underworld at the time Usher ruled the city’s drug game. Both Big Frank Nitti – nicknamed by Billy and Tony Jack in honor of the Italian Chicago mobster who was the brains to Al Capone’s brawn during Prohibition – and Jackie Giacalone served as pallbearers at Hilf’s funeral (died of kidney failure).

he should've gotten pinched in an insurance scam or, fraud or something

drug pinches are an old story and an easy way to go to jail

Ushers partner harold morton was importing heroin from europe and was caught along with two female couriers one of whom was killed in LA after she began cooperating with authorities.

thanks to scott burnstein for writing these stories.Im pretty sure he's been on here before and wanted i to ask if theres any more details on ushers latest arrests?

The Partnership That Lost Its’ Head: Detroit’s Frank Usher & Johnny Coach


Maybe instead of “Big Frank Nitti, historic Detroit drug boss Frank Usher’s nickname should have been “the Hatchet Man.” Arrested last week by the feds for dealing heroin, authorities think he might have had four people’s heads chopped off in a storied career on the Motor City streets dating back a half-century. The beheadings all took place in less than a year time frame between 1979 and 1980.

There’s the three most local Detroiters know about: the notoriously-gory Michigan Federated Democratic Social Club Massacre where William (Dirty Dirt) McJoy, William (Straw Hat P) Jackson and Joanne Clark were all killed execution style and decapitated as strife inside the Murder Row narcotics organization reached a fevered pitch in the summer of 1979, a triple homicide Usher (71 years old today) was first convicted of and then acquitted of after being granted a second trial.



But there’s also the January 22, 1980 gangland slaying and decapitation of Midwest underworld figure John (Johnny Coach) Cociu, a business partner of Usher’s and a known associate of Detroit’s traditional Italian mafia. The Cociu murder is one of at least two killings the DEA and FBI link to the aftermath of the Michigan Federated Democratic Social Club Massacre. The other being the October 1, 1979 rubout of Murder Row lieutenant Clarence (C-Was) Welton. The 42-year old Welton was found in his eastside Detroit home, face down on his living room floor, shot twice in the back of the head.

Usher and four others were indicted for the July 18, 1979 Michigan Federated Democratic Social Club slayings less than a week later on October 5. Welton, per court records, is alleged to have helped with the disposal of the bodies in the social club slaughter. Held without bail in the case, Usher is suspected of possibly ordering the Cociu hit from behind bars, calling in favors to his ties in the mafia to carry it out, according to FBI informants, due to his worry that Johnny Coach was too knowledgeable regarding Murder Row financial dealings.

“Johnny Coach knew how Usher washed all his cash, that was probably too much,” said one Gangster Report source.

Cociu was a co-owner of BeBe’s, a bar, nightclub and Murder Row gathering spot on Livernois, with Usher and connected to both the Detroit mob’s Giacalone and Corrado crews, per FBI documents related to his death. His headless corpse was discovered in the trunk of his Cadillac in a westside parking lot. Cociu’s head has never popped up.

“I think there still searching for Johnny Coach’s noggin as we speak,” said half-joking retired FBI agent Mike Carone. “That was a scary time. We had four beheadings in six months. People were spooked and in a lot of ways it represented a shift in the way business was done on the streets, laying the groundwork for all the craziness in the 1980s and the crack era.”

Cociu was Syrian, part of the various Middle-Easterners involved in the Detroit underworld, in addition to the Lebanese and Chaldeans (non-Muslim Iraqis).

Per FBI documents, Usher and Cociu met through the Giacalones brothers, Tony and Billy – the mafia’s day-to-day caretakers in Michigan from the middle of the 20th Century into the New Millennium and Usher’s mentors in the Motor City rackets from the time he was their gopher as a teenager. Cociu partnered with the Giacalones on large-scale drug transactions and worked in the area’s illegal numbers business with the gargantuan Corrado brothers, Dominic (Fats) Corrado and Anthony (Tony the Bull) Corrado, according to Detroit Police records.

The Corrado family oversaw the Detroit policy lottery racket. Starting in the late-1940s, Dominic’s and Anthony’s father, Pietro (Machine Gun Pete) Corrado, spearheaded a seizing of control in the city’s numbers territory from a contingent of local black policy chiefs led by Frank (St. Louis Geech) Loftis. Machine Gun Pete Corrado died of a heart attack in 1958, passing leadership of his crew to his oldest son “Fats” and his duties as the syndicate’s unofficial “Sergeant-at-Arms” to his youngest, more ferocious son “Tony the Bull.”

Billy Giacalone and Dominic and Tony Corrado were considered suspects in the Cociu hit, per an internal FBI memo dated September 1980. At the time of the Cociu and Michigan Democratic Party Social Club slayings, Tony Giacalone was tucked away in the confines of a federal prison in Atlanta serving seven years for tax evasion and extortion.

FBI surveillance logs from the 1970s note Johnny Coach and Usher taking trips together into Greektown, longtime mob stomping grounds belonging to the Corrado family and Vitale crew, and visiting with Fats and Tony the Bull Corrado, as well as Tony and Billy Giacalone and others of similar local mafia dignitary ilk.

Co-captains and gangland “sibs”, Peter (Bozzi) Vitale and Paul (the Pope) Vitale headquartered their operations in the center of Detroit’s Greektown entertainment district at the Grecians Gardens restaurant on Monroe Street, an Italian eatery opened by Machine Gun Pete Corrado after WWII. During their reign atop their dad’s former crew, Fats and Tony the Bull managed most of their illegal activities out of the St. Antoinette Coffee Shop several blocks north of Greektown.

Frank Usher c. 1979
Frank Usher c. 1979
“We’d see Usher arrive at the Grecian Gardens, sometimes with Johnny Coach and they’d be in the backroom wheeling and dealing with all the Outfit (Detroit mafia) guys,” Carone recalled. “He was one of the only black racketeers that the Sicilian boys allowed to be in their orbit socially, more than a ‘hey, how ya doing’ in passing. Usher was able to float among different criminal groups and get multiple ethnic factions to trust him. Johnny Coach was pretty good at it, too.”

In the 1960s, Cociu was partners with Jewish racketeer Max (Big Maxie) Stern on a series of gambling businesses – Stern was a confidant and ace subordinate of Detroit mob underboss Peter (Horseface Pete) Licavoli.

Another individual seen by FBI agents at powwows in Greektown was Harold Morton, who alongside Usher founded the Murder Row gang and was one of the city’s largest purveyors of wholesale heroin and black gangster royalty. Morton’s arrest in 1977 and jailing in early 1978, according to federal court filings, created unrest in Murder Row, pitting Usher and gang enforcer Adolph (Doc Holiday) Powell against each other in a shooting war. With Morton behind bars, the streets ran red with blood for the next two years, more than a dozen bodies dropping and the conflict cresting with the Michigan Federated Democratic Social Club Massacre.

The victims of the triple decapitation were a pair of Usher’s primary Murder Row lieutenants, “Dirt” McJoy, 33, and “Straw Hat P” Jackson, 41, and a girlfriend of McJoy’s (Joanne Clark, 33). While gaining his freedom in the retrial, Usher’s attorney argued Big Frank Nitti – nicknamed after the former Chicago mafia don – and his crew led by McJoy and Jackson were marked for death in the attack by Powell (charged, but acquitted in the case – shot dead in 1983). Other possible motives for Cociu’s follow-up murder, besides Usher’s worrying about how much Johnny Coach knew about his money, were Powell’s desire to rid the area of those loyal to Usher in the wake of Usher’s incarceration and rivals of Cociu pouncing with his protection locked in a cage.

Beheadings became the subject in the Detroit drug world a decade later when a war erupted in the “Arab mafia” and the city’s tightknit Iraqi community located in “Little Baghdad” on the northwest side, in the summer of 1988.

A number of beheadings were ordered, however, never carried out by young Chaldean mob prince Khairi (Harry the Blonde) Kalasho, according to DEA records. Kalasho was a nephew and surrogate son to Arab mafia founder and Godfather Louis (Lou the Hammerhead) Akrawi and slain gangland style himself in the winter of 1989. Akrawi is currently imprisoned on second-degree murder charges stemming from a shooting in a grocery store at the latter-stages of the conflict in the fall of 1993.

Besides running bread-and-butter shakedown and gambling rackets, the Arab mafia flooded the state with cocaine in the late-1980s and early 1990s, bringing in hundreds of kilos a month sourced from Colombia’s Medellin cartel and legendary world narco czar Pablo Escobar. An offshoot of Akrawi’s and Kalasho’s organization got backing from the Giacalone crew and challenged them for power, a bloody dispute that lasted five years and boasted double-digits in related murders.

The dashingly handsome, magnetic and fiercely ambitious Kalasho, 25 at the time of his own killing, offered his assassin teams $10,000 cash bonuses if heads of his enemies were cut off and thrown onto the street on 7 Mile Road, the heart of the city’s Little Baghdad section. One of Kalasho’s hit men, Kevin (Midnight Mike) Minley told police he wanted to chop off his two victims’ heads and collect on the bonus, but was convinced not too for time purposes by his two accomplices.

Arrest In NYC Led To Downfall of Detroit’s Murder Row Gang


The November 1977 heroin-smuggling bust and subsequent incarceration of former Detroit drug baron Harold Morton for having a potential witness against him killed sent his Murder Row crime syndicate careening onto the rails, eventually crashing into pieces on the ground with the July 1979 Michigan Federated Democratic Social Club beheading slayings.

Murder Row was founded around 1974 by Morton and fellow aspiring kingpin Francis (Big Frank Nitti) Usher and within a few years had become the No. 1 drug-dealing organization in the city of Detroit and the heads of state of the area’s defacto black mob. The two made a perfect pair – Morton spawning from the city’s westside and holding bicoastal narcotics connections in New York and Los Angeles and Usher, an eastsider with deep ties inside Michigan’s Italian mafia, personally groomed in the ways of the underworld by the notorious Giacalone brothers, “Tony Jack” and “Billy Jack,” Detroit mob street bosses for over 50 years.



And they needed each other. Usher wanted to use Morton’s east and west coast contacts to expand his distribution routes and Morton was in need of new lines of supply – such as Usher’s mob-based source – since his main L.A. wholesaler, transplanted Detroiter, Vernard (Butch) Harris, was killed in the summer of 1974 in a DEA raid of his Beverly Hills mansion. Harris had relocated to L.A. years prior and owned Sound Track Records, a fledgling soul, funk and R&B music label.

Just last week, Usher, 71, found his way back into the headlines, not to mention handcuffs, being federally indicted for running a “heroin house” on St. Aubin and East McNichols Boulevard. He was arraigned Friday in U.S. District Court in downtown Detroit and pled not guilty.

While living relatively quietly for the past two decades, safely out of the limelight, forty years ago, was a whole different ball game. In other words, Big Frank Nitti (given his moniker in honor of 1930s Chicago Italian mob Godfather Frank “The Enforcer” Nitti) used to be a really big deal. His joining forces with Morton had people on the street talking, taking notice and shaking in their boots. That boot-shaking came as a result of Murder Row’s hair-triggered roster of fearless hit men, most notably Chester Campbell, a career criminal described by those who knew him as the human embodiment of the Grim Reaper.

“They called those cats Murder Row because in addition to being hustlers and dope slingers, they were all straight killers, from top to bottom, if you weren’t willing to get down (kill somebody), they wouldn’t fuck with you,” said one Gangster Report source. “It was like a baseball team that they say has a murderer’s row of batters, but in this case they were all coldblooded killers. That’s where the name came from.”

Campbell was a professional freelance assassin with a genius IQ and close to 100 executions under his belt, if you believe street lore and FBI informant tales. Meeting Campbell through his pals in the Italian mafia, Usher recruited him for his new super gang.

However, Campbell, known ominously as “Dr. Death,” “the Angel of Death” and “the Undertaker” and headquartering his activities out of a funeral home, was imprisoned early on in Murder Row’s reign and his job as the gang’s top enforcement tool was assumed by Adolph (Doc Holiday), a Morton friend and associate who had landed in the Michigan years before from New Orleans. Powell was a wildcard, flamboyant, loud and difficult to keep a lid on. He and Usher didn’t get along from the start. Morton knew how to talk to him though and could contain his ticking time-bomb nature.

With Morton there to act as a buffer, Doc Holiday and Big Frank Nitti played nice. Then, all of a sudden, he wasn’t there anymore and the whole operation collapsed into chaos. The long-gestating flames of discontent were stoked by Morton’s legal troubles, catapulting Usher and Morton into full-scale war.

And it all traced back to New York City and Morton’s collar at the airport on a return trip from Holland, where he had purchased a large amount of “China White” and was trying to bring it back into the country.

Morton and two of his female drug mules were apprehended by U.S. Customs on November 18, 1977 at New York’s JFK International Airport coming back from Amsterdam with close to a pound of heroin stuffed in the women’s undergarments. Being interrogated by the DEA, both female couriers, Gloria Roe and Sandra Jones, admitted carrying the narcotics for Morton and Morton’s Murder Row organization and Jones agreed to cooperate with authorities and testify against Morton in court.

Released on a $100,000 cash bond, Morton returned to Detroit by Thanksgiving, arranging for a Manhattan-based attorney to represent the pair of ladies – roommates in a apartment on the Motor City’s eastside, unaware that Jones had already flipped. Roe and Jones were back in Michigan by the first week of December and immediately summoned to a meeting at the office of Morton’s attorney Allan Early. Two years prior, Early had represented Tony Giacalone, when he was called in front of a federal grand jury investigating the July 1975 disappearance of Teamsters union boss Jimmy Hoffa of which Giacalone and his brother were prime suspects.

At a private meeting held in a conference room at Early’s office between the two women and Morton, Roe promised Morton she would do prison time for him, but Jones told him bluntly she wouldn’t. The following day, Morton showed up at the girls’ apartment and was informed by Roe that a frightened Jones had fled to California that morning. An informant told the DEA, that he was told that Morton reached Jones by phone in San Diego, where she had flown to from her hometown of Birmingham, Alabama and Jones requested money from Morton so she could stay away from “the heat” and not be forced to testify against him.

Morton rejected the idea. Instead, he decided to silence her himself, ordering her killed. Hiring a hit man named of James McKnight, Morton paid him $3,500 to fly to California, track down Jones and murder her. Worried that Morton knew she was in San Diego, Jones traveled to Los Angeles and hid out with a childhood friend. Unfortunately for Jones, someone tipped off Morton that a girl Jones had lived on the same street with growing up lived in West Los Angeles and was trying to be an actress. On December 11, exactly a week after being released from a New York jail cell facing drug-smuggling charges, Sandra Jones was found dead in her car parked in a West L.A. alley, shot twice in the back of the head.

McKnight became a witness-for-the-government and Morton was behind bars by the end of the year. He was convicted of conspiracy to commit murder in 1980 and sentenced to life in prison – the drug-smuggling charges were dropped before trial due to lack of evidence. Another associate of Morton’s and Usher’s to meet their demise on the west coast was Maurice Downs, an eastside Detroit heroin wholesaler who had moved out to Hollywood to produce (Project: Kill) and act in movies (the Pam Grier-vehicle Sheba, Baby, Disco 9000) and was killed in a hail of bullets in April 1981 as he departed a L.A. nightclub.

Murder Row crumbled without Morton on the scene to keep Frank Usher and Doc Holiday Powell from tearing each other’s heads off. Almost as soon as Morton was off the streets, Usher and Powell went at it and Murder Row broke off into two factions with members falling into pro-Usher and pro-Powell camps and duking it out for territory. Over the next two years, at least 15 slayings were attributed to the Murder Row gang war, concluding with the July 18, 1979 Michigan Federated Democratic Social Club Massacre, an internal syndicate “purge” of Usher lieutenants William (Dirty Dirt) McJoy and William (Straw Hat P) Jackson and McJoy’s girlfriend Joanne Clark killed execution style, their heads and hands cut off.

Usher, Powell and three others were charged with the triple homicide. Although initially convicted at trial, Usher had the conviction tossed by an appellate court years later and was acquitted at a second trial. Powell was acquitted at the original trial, but only lasted until 1983 when he was slain himself inside a popular Detroit watering hold and gangster hangout called La Player’s Lounge.

After Usher was jailed in October 1979, Murder Row basically disbanded. Morton was finally paroled in 2010, having served over three decades in prison.

In terms of historical significance, Murder Row was the last major urban drug organization in Michigan to use the Detroit Italian mafia as it’s main supply source. From the days following the Prohibition Era into the 1970s, the Motor City was the heroin distribution hub for the entire nation, a sophisticated and heavily- insulated network of dealers and Eurpoean supply lines headed by internationally-powerful Detroit Mafiosi Giovanni (Papa John) Priziola, Peter (Bozzi) Vitale and Raffeale (Jimmy Q) Quasarano. Priziola, the Detroit mob’s consigliere for over 40 years, died of natural causes in April 1979, three months prior to the social club slayings and Murder Row’s self-ignited implosion.

Ex-Detroit Crime Lord 'Frank Nitti' Usher Dies At 78

https://www.deadlinedetroit.com/articles/25889/ex-detroit_crime_lord_frank_nitti_usher_dies_at_78