← Back to the front page

Facts About These Notorious Law Breakers and Their Criminal History

Khalid Elhassan May 20, 2020 34 min

Al Capone - Bugsy Siegel — 1930s mobsters. Eugene Cannevari Collection

9. Harlem’s Greatest Crime Boss

Bumpy Johnson in Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary. US Bureau of Prisons

Harlem’s most feared criminal kingpin from 1930 until his death in 1968 was Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson. Born in South Carolina in 1905, he got his nickname from a bump in the back of his head. When he was ten, Bumpy’s older brother killed a white man and fled to the north to escape a lynch mob.

Bumpy’s temper and refusal to abide by the day’s racial codes, particularly the deference to whites part, made his parents fear that he would end up killing somebody or get lynched. So at age fourteen, he was sent to live with a sister in Harlem.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.