The Underworld Podcast - Felix Mitchell:The Druglord That Took On The Black Panthers, and Oakland's Kingpin Wars

Episode Date: August 3, 2022

Felix "The Cat" Mitchell was like nothing Oakland had ever seen before. He took over the city's heroin market from, wholesale to retail, driving exotic cars through some of the grittiest streets in America, flanked by his assault rifle carrying lieutenants while keeping massive housing projects locked down like fortresses while dripped out in full length fur jackets and glittering diamonds. He also donated to charities and passed out cash all over east Oakland before it all came crashing down, after his crew attracted a little too much attention from the feds with what came to be known as Oakland’s Bloody August. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. August 29, 1986. The funeral is like nothing the city of Oakland has ever seen before. 8,000 people lined the streets. There's a horse-drawn carriage pulling the coffin, and the convoy also has four Rolls Royces, 10 white limos, Cadillacs and Lincoln's, all dry. with it. It's a two-hour procession over eight miles. And it's not only going to make local news, but also national news. The feds are there, too, parked right alongside a convoy in a red Ferrari

that once belonged to the dead man, that they had seized when he was arrested, and they're taking pictures of anyone they think could still be involved in his operation. The kids the news crew's interview say they love the man, that they want to be like him. Others talk about how he donated the charity, kept the people in the neighborhood with food on their plates. One woman tells them, without jobs, what do they expect the people of the neighborhood to be involved in? Who do they expect the kids to look up to? Others say he was a scourge,

that they're glad he's dead and shocked that he's being celebrated like he is. A councilman tells one journalist that it's, quote, hero-worshipping of a murderous thug. When the service finally finishes at a local church, the loudspeaker plays smooth operator by Chade, a fitting tribute for Felix the Captain

Mitchell, dead at only 32 years old. Founder and leader of the 69th mob, my other brother, said to have been the first drug lord kingpin Oakland has ever known, a man who set the tone for decades to come. He had driven that red Ferrari and other exotic cars through some of the grittiest streets in America, flanked by his assault rifle carrying lieutenants, and kept massive housing projects locked down like fortresses while dripped out in full-length fur jackets and glittering diamonds while donating to charities and passing out cash all over East Oakland before it came crashing down. After his crew attracted a little too much attention from the feds with what came to be known as Oakland's Bloody August. After he was finally locked up a few years later, he had told the

probation officer before he was sentenced, according to the LA Times, I like money, I like jewelry, and I like fine cars, and I went out and got them. Isn't that the American way? For such a high-profile criminal too. It's kind of crazy. He was killed a year into his prison sentence, reportedly over a debt of only $10. This is The Underworld Podcast. Welcome back to another episode of the Underworld podcast. I'm one of your host, Danny Gold. I'm usually here with my co-shawn Williams, and we are two reporters who have covered stories all over the globe. And every week, we bring you stories of organized crime and everything related to it from around the world, historical, present day, future, and all of that. It is Cautionary Tales from Cautionary Tales. And actually, Sean is not here today.

He went a little too hard on a Tuesday. I can't really blame him because the reason we didn't record yesterday is because I went too hard on a Sunday night. But we are joined by our audio producer, Yeah, Lisinger who is stepping in to play his role. Hey, Danny. Interesting to be here. Yeah, hi to our listeners. I'm the guy who when you complain about the sound or the music, I think, think, oh, that's a thoughtful and carefully worded comment and not at all hurtful. And I thank you for that suggestion, which I'll think about incorporating. So, yeah, great to be here. Yeah, thanks for cleaning up everything, all the mistakes that we make always.

Yeah. As always, too, we have bonus stuff, interviews, many episodes, scripts, notes, sources, all up on the Patreon at patreon.com slash aneworld podcast, where you can choose to support us and also get our episodes ahead of time and commercial free. We've had quite a few people sign up the last month or two, so thank you. for all that. We really appreciate it. So this episodes actually came about because a friend of mine from the Bay Area

had offered to do an episode on Felix the Cat Mitchell and then never did, which is always what happens when people offered to do episodes. And I figured I would jump on it and we've kind of neglected California in the Bay Area that we do have some representation coming up on our episode ideas list that we haven't gotten around to. And it's really a shame because despite

producing some of the worst rap known to mankind, the Bay Area has also produced like a whole lot of notable criminals and mafiosos and gangsters with some incredible stories out there. Shout out the Shrimp Boy who has one of the best gangsters nicknames of all time that we'll get to eventually as well. Listen, I do take issue with

you hating so hard on Bay Area Rap. We have Little B and Mack Dre just to name two. Yeah, I mean, I guess there's something like I you know, too short obviously, but like even if it costs me listeners and Patreon subscribers, I want to be clear

that E40 is like really bad at rapping. He's not good. And a lot of other Bay Area rappers are also very, very bad at rapping. Please direct all angry comments to Sean. He is not here right now, but I'm sure he'll have a lot to say about it. He at the least deserves them. Yeah, definitely.

So Mitchell is often credited as the first major drug dealer Kingpin type in all of Oakland, which has a pretty impressive criminal history in general, but he's supposed to be the guy who really changed the game. And he's got those titles as well as others, like most influential whose power is still held in the street, stuff like that, said to have been the first gang leader to really have set up the whole vertical integration, top up, top down, wholesale, the retail operation in the U.S.

You know, think of Nino Brown and New Jack City and all that. Some sources actually say he was the inspiration for the movie, but most sources I've read kind of point to the Chamber Brothers as the inspiration for New Jack City. I don't really know, you know, I don't keep up with like whatever Don Diva or Fed's saying, but I'm sure someone will correct me in the YouTube comments. One thing though you learn being a reporter, and Leo, even just reading about a lot of this stuff with the first so-and-so, most influential, most dangerous, most powerful, all these sort of superlatives that get attached to gangsters,

a lot of times they're just kind of made up in a way, especially when you look at historical stories. You know, it could be law enforcement that wants to make a guy seem scarier, bigger than he is for obvious reasons, or the gangster in question, maybe sometimes even his neighborhood or his city that want to hype him up as the biggest and baddest, or could just be like a journalist or editor who wants to make the story bigger itself and more sensational. Yeah, I would wager as this last option. Some poor Rube way down in the publishing industry, doing their best to make a name for

themselves by just engineering this superlative out of words. I'm definitely not speaking from experience. Yeah, I mean, I got to say, Dale actually has worked the streets in New York doing the stuff that I used to do, covering crime and breaking news, all that. So you definitely, you know, you've definitely been there as well, bringing some level of expertise to all this. Yeah, I mean, Laura knows I'm guilty sometimes of that same thing. Even when I'm writing headlines for YouTube or for this podcast, And a lot of that stuff, it's not really quantifiable.

You can't really measure most dangerous or most influential, you know, or money coming in is often just a guess as we've talked about. Though obviously, you know, in some cases like Alchapo or a hitman who gets charged with a certain number of bodies or confesses, you can actually quantify some of it. But yeah, I'm definitely not just patting out this episode because there's not that much source material. Moving on, Felix Mitchell, he's born in 1954 in Oakland, California. and he's a third of six kids to a single mother. His father had died of cancer,

and he lives at first near a neighborhood called the Acorn Projects before his mother moves the family to the east side of Oakland, which is the 69th Village, the San Antonio Village Housing Projects, which is kind of a notorious area. Now, I'm not sure if it's a notorious area before he gets there or if it becomes a notorious area with him being there and taking over. But I'm sure again, we'll figure that out. It's kind of a chicken and egg situation when it comes

the situations like this. I don't know either, Danny. That's why I'm here. At first, he's a quiet, like studious kid, good kids, smart. I mean, aren't we all at first, you know? Yeah. But he's growing up poor in the projects in Oakland in the 60s.

Obviously, he soon decides he needs some cash. You know, his family's not eating too great. And he starts stealing, hustling, selling weed. And in a relatively short amount of time, he drops out of school and starts selling heroin in his neighborhood. And 69th, the village, his neighborhood, those projects, it's right next to the Oakland Coliseum. So it's sort of like how Broadway was or has

been in New York City, right? It's a spot for hustlers, dealers, pimps, prostitutes, everything you could think of, and there's going to be a ton of foot traffic. Honestly, it sounds like a place I would have loved when I was like 23 to 27 maybe, just like not knowing any better, just hanging out. Yeah, definitely would have gotten robbed there, both of us. Oh, okay. Mitchell, he's soft-spoken, he's smooth, he's tall, he's thin, he's good-looking. It's kind of how he got the name of the cat. He was just this laid-back dude that knew what to say and knew what to do. He even does a little bit of pimping during this time and picks up his flashy style from

Oakland's pimps. I mean, this is like the real heyday of that stuff. Think of like 70s black exploitation films, outlandish ghost designer threads, mint coats to the floor, all that sort of stuff, just the image you have of the 70s pimp, this is it right there. It's when movies like the Mac were coming out. And this is really when Mitchell kind of develops his persona a bit, his designer style,

his pimp-like qualities, and his smoothness. So, yeah, this is the 70s. Crack isn't even a thing yet, and cocaine is mostly for rich, wealthier people with money. You know, it's a society drug. So the thing on the streets right now is heroin, and it's getting huge.

Remember, we had all those Vietnam vets coming back that had gotten addicted over there, the French connection. had gotten blown up, I think, a little bit later, but that had been a thing before. I think there was the pizza connection too was around that time. But the Golden Triangle was pumping out heroin

that's coming into the U.S. and just flooding the streets. And Oakland, too, we should talk about the environment that was in Oakland. The city was at one point the second biggest port operating in the world. It's always been a major transport hub, a major maritime port city. And during World War II, production and industry around there really ramped up.

It plays a very important role, too, Black History in America, and we'll get to the Black Panthers in a bit too. But Oakland, with its longshoremen jobs and booming industry, attracted a lot of black migrants who are kind of fleeing the terrible conditions they were forced to endure in the South during the first half of the 20th century. If you haven't read Warmth of Other Suns, which is about America's great migration of Southern blacks to northern cities, it's a really remarkable book, and I certainly won't be doing the situation in their justice, but definitely read that if it's something that interest you. So this period from like the 1910s to the 1960s, maybe early 70s a little bit too,

it saw millions of black Americans leave the South for better opportunities. And there were plenty of opportunities. You know, there were these manufacturing jobs, labor jobs, construction. All of that was in Oakland. Here's how the website, Oakland here and now puts it. In the paper of record. Yeah, yeah, of course. Quote, tens of thousands of these migrants came to Oakland, drawn by the promise of plentiful jobs in a city at the center of the region's rapidly expanding wartime economy, authored by an infusion of federal defense sector spending for shipbuilding and the construction of the Oakland Army Base and Naval Supply Center. A wartime labor shortage, coupled with a directive by Franklin Roosevelt ordering federal contractors to integrate their workforces, prompted blacks to flood into the city to take jobs on the railroads, shipyards, ports, docks, and military supply centers that were an integral part of the war effort.

The availability of plentiful and relatively lucrative jobs engendered a new Bay Area black middle class, many of whom settled in West Oakland, where most of the maritime jobs were centered and where several housing projects had been constructed. So correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds a little bit like the growth in Oakland came out of a part of the New Deal we don't seem to talk a lot about, which is the concept of government contracting and graft. I don't know if contracting was a specifically new thing in that regard. And when they're saying contractors, I think they're just people that were hired out to build the military stuff during the war. And I don't know about graft either, though. I'm sure there was graft.

I'm not sure how prevalent it was on those ports and whatnot. But it's definitely, yeah, I mean, these jobs that were created, it wasn't just, I think, from the wartime effort in northern cities, there was also manufacturing before that. Of course, that goes away, which we'll talk about in a minute. But apparently in Oakland, a huge part of it was the defense industry getting this money to start building stuff during the war. And obviously there was a dearth of male labor because people have been drafted and sent as well. Wild. Now, of course, it wasn't like the North was like utopia for black Americans, right?

They were often segregated into crumbier neighborhoods and given less resources and things like that. Yeah, we call that redlining. Right, that was the documentary title of the doc. The first doc I did in St. Louis, the red line. It's a similar thing. If you guys heard the St. Louis episode, I talk about what happened there as well.

And the thing is, though, there were jobs, right? People could eat. But of course, in the 60s and 70s, a lot of those manufacturing jobs, those working class jobs, they start disappearing. Apparently in Oakland, this actually started in the late 40s and 50s and such, this downturn. It was closer to the end of World War II when some of that defense industry stuff was no longer necessary to dry it up. So it had a kind of post-war slump and whatnot. And of course, when you have poverty and lack of opportunity, it's a big part of the recipe for drugs and violence. And that's what we're going to see happen right here.

So Felix, he's doing his thing, right? he's selling heroin and he starts consolidating. He gets some of his friends and his relatives together, people who grew up with, and they formed the 69th mob, otherwise known as MOB, which stands for my other brother. He takes over the entirety of the 69th Street Projects and the nearby 65th Street projects and basically sets up an open-air heroin market. He marries his first wife, I think, Sheila, whose family had connections with the biggest heroin dealers in Los Angeles, and he just takes off.

Felix has these incredible organization skills, and another source claims. he learned it from Thomas C. Tudy Reese, who was a south central L.A. Kingpin, who had been doing so really operating at a big level since 1965, moving cocaine, eventually heroin supplied from Iran. So he was like international level. Reese taught Felix about supplies, distributors, all that sort of stuff. And I'm assuming Reese was the relative his wife was connected with,

but I couldn't find concrete evidence that connected, you know, that part of the story and this part of the story. So Felix sets up 65th and 69 as a fortress. He's got the whole thing running like a machine. He's paying the 10 and 12 year old kids as lookouts, $100 a date for some. It's said to be one of the first guys to really run things like this, even though it seems so common now. He really is seen as the originator of some of this stuff, at least according to these write-ups. And he's also getting into wholesale at that point, huge amounts, and breaking it down all the way to retail, you know, those $10 buys, which means his profit margins are going to be insane.

He has that set up with like, you know, the money going in through a hole in the wall, the drugs come down the drain pipe in another area, customers talk to one guy, he sends them to another guy, money and dope kept separate. This stuff that like sounds standard now, but back then it was kind of revolutionary. He was one of the first guys to really set something up like this. Honest to God, in the history of political economy, there will be a straight line drawn from Frederick Taylor to Henry Ford to Felix Mitchell as these innovators. of efficiency.

Right, the assembly line, right? Wasn't that Ford's thing? Exactly. His location, it was actually perfect too. There was a BART station, which is like San Francisco and Oakland, subways, metros, whatever, that was right there,

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Like where his dealers were. And that means, you know, one way street, only one way in and one way out. And even now, like one way is when you talk to guys that are, like St. Louis, right, they love the one ways.

They're huge on the one ways because, you know, it really protects you from anything coming and going. And he just had these whole neighborhood set up like an armored fortress. And even the police were too scared to come in at that point. Here's how the blog Oakland Hot Spot put it. Paper record.

Quote, both the FBI and the DEA credit Mitchell with establishing America's first street gang operated drug network. In the process, he took over an entire city block in East Oakland and transformed it into a virtual nonstop clearinghouse for the importation, sale and distribution of huge amounts of heroin, bringing it upwards of $5 million a month at the height of his reign in the late 1970s and early 1980s. When Mario Van Peebles started making the movie New Jack City, he modeled the slick money-hungry hero of the story Nino Brown on Felix Mitchell. So again, this kind of reads a little bit like a local site building up local lore and all that to me. Just a bit. Most reports I read had him bringing in maybe half of $5 million a month max, usually $2.4 million.

I didn't find any feds or DEA saying it was the first streaking operated drug network. And it kind of feels like nonsense, right? You have those Harlem Kingpins going back decades, Bumpy Johnson, all that sort of stuff. I guess it kind of depends on your definition of a streaking. I don't know. And Nino Brown, like I said, actually based on the Chamber Brothers of the United States of Detroit. But, I mean, you guys get it, right? The site goes on, quote, he coerced most of the several hundred residents in the 178 unit housing complex, known as the San Antonio Housing Village

project into either silence or complicity to grow his business. It was during Mitchell's era in Oakland at the drive-by shooting, first used by mafia hit men in Chicago during the 1930s, came back in vogue with a terrible vengeance. And again, I always thought drive-bys really came back in LA, not Oakland, but I can't really, I couldn't find anything to verify any of this. Honestly, I didn't know drive-by's ever really went out of vogue. Well, I think in the 80s, too, it was big. Like Griselda in Miami got big on the guy in the back of the motorcycle, you know? The motorcycle drive-by, she really pioneered that.

So maybe, I don't know, that seems like a more advanced step in the 80s. One group, though, that isn't too scared to come into the neighborhood is the Black Panthers. The Black Panthers are founded in the mid-60s in Oakland by Bobby Seal and UEP Newton. as a militant black power organization. I'm not going to dive too far into it. I mean, I think most of you know the general idea of the Black Panthers, hoping carrying guns through citizen patrols to protect black residents from the police. They did the big free breakfast for the kids and all that.

The FBI goes to town on them, kills one of their leaders, Fred Hampton. There's internal division. You know, all that stuff happens. And in the mid-70s, the group's power in Oakland has kind of waned a bit. Ewey Newton by this point is into drugs and just sort of being a criminal. He's really fallen on hard times. he had fled to Cuba for a few years, but he came back from exile in 1977,

just as Felix is really hitting his stride and being a powerful drug lord. By this point, Newton is basically running a racket a bit with some of the Oakland Panthers that he's with. In the heyday, the Panthers are strongly anti-drug and I cleaned up the streets,

but it's not really the case anymore. Newton and his crew, they're extorting pimps and drug dealers and all that, they're taxing them. And when he hears about this guy Felix Mitchell running things, controlling the drug trade

and making big money, he's just like, I'm going to go extort this guy too. He assigned some of his men, including a Vietnam vet recon guy, to go look into him. This is from Elaine Brown's book, Brown was a leader in the Panthers. Young cats, 16, 17 years old, were perched on the rooftops of automatic rifles with scopes yet. Guarding the two entrances to that six square block of a shithole, they had the nerve to ask Simba and his squad what their business was. Ewe Newton says, quote, oh no motherfuckers, they don't ask us. We ask the questions.

We make the rules in Oakland. Francisco Flores, who was another Panther, who was, I think, relatively high up. He wrote a book as well. He also mentions Ewee getting pissed about the 69th mob running things and not cowtowling to anyone. Keep in mind, Felix is only in his early 20s at this point. He controls the entire neighborhood, though, and effectively much of Oakland, which is a city of 350,000 people, which I guess kind of the Bay Area is actually really

small, right? I think Oakland, San Francisco, and surrounding areas is still barely over a million people, which is smaller than just Brooklyn, not forget New York City. Listen, man, I'm from Idaho and Brooklyn has more people in it than the whole state. Yeah, there you go. Brown also talks about how the 69th mob controlled the entire projects. No one went in or out that didn't live there without express permission from the gang. Some woman's brother once visited without getting it and they beat the hell out of her afterwards, breaking her pelvic bone.

So the Panthers, they make a move against Mitchell, right? They press him and they press his crew. And Mitchell says, like, no way, I'm getting fucking taxed. I'm the king of Oakland. So there are some incidents, some back and forth, some shootings, drybys. I found a summary of an incident in charging documents against Mitchell and his crew from years later. So Mitchell, like any smart drug dealer, right, has a lot of businesses he propped up to use his fronts and all that. And he uses his limousine service office as a headquarters.

He's there with his people one night in 1977, and the Panthers had come by looking to extort them earlier in the day. Ui Newton's people, they'd been driving a white van around, and Mitchell and his crew, they get word that they've come back and have already circled a block a few times. So Mitchell's with a few of his guys And he tells them, Let's go out, let's check out this van and see what's up. So again, they're cars, and they go looking for it. Mitchell spots it, yells to the guys to do something, there it is. They're all armed, and one of his guys fires a shot into the van.

Turns out this van was just like not the Black Panthers and just a random group of Mexican guys. God. They end up killing one of them that night and were later charged for the murder, which is why I was able to read this in this charging document I found online, which is, you know, just amazing what you can do with a simple Google search, I tell you.

Yeah. journalism. Eventually, Felix in the 69th mob reached a truce with the Panthers after he had sit down with Ui. And they even end up at Felix's funeral, which I talked about in the beginning. Ewe unfortunately, you know, years later, he goes way too deep into cocaine, ends up really getting into the streets. He's killed in 1989 by a drug dealer, apparently, to impress gang members in the Black Gorilla family and to take over a crack ring. Now, the Black Gorilla family, I haven't heard of that in a while. The last I heard of them, this incident where this guy, Ishmael Brinsley,

came to New York City from Baltimore and just shot two random cops in a car and he said it was in retribution for the killing of Eric Garner. He claimed it be a member of the Black Dorilla family, if I recall correctly. Yeah, I mean, I think they're still around. I'm not sure how active they were, but they were involved in sort of like the Black Power movement

in the 60s and stuff like that. I don't know much about them and how active they are right now. It's something I would have to look into. I think from what I understand, they're active in the prison system, but I really, you know, it's not something that I'm well-versed on at the moment.

Back then, though, Felix really admires how the Panthers are run, right? They've got this tight corporate structure, there's discipline, there's a hierarchy, and it influences him and affects the way he runs his organization. To be clear, too, like, Felix was sharp as hell. It was real good with numbers, good with finances, good with organization. An FBI agent tells a journalist for the LA Times, quote,

get a knack for business. Unfortunately, the business was heroin. That's also like a, that's like a very law and order, you know, like iced tea line. He's a brilliant businessman, except that business is heroin. It's very 90s writing. Yeah, it's definitely like a, like a Borge Bell cop joke. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I'm with it.

Or a DA at like a press conference. Yeah. Felix was also influenced by the mafia movies that were coming out around then. He used to make all his people watch movies about Al Capone, you know, movies like The Untouchables and. He kind of built his persona too and then of his crew around them, all the way to jumping out of cars

with machine guns and things like that. And he also made them watch the godfather because he wanted them to know about codes of honor and shit like that, which I don't know. I kind of feel like most mafia movies and stories in general feature like a heavy dose of betrayal as opposed to really the honor code situation.

Like I'm reading the book Goodfellows is based on right now. And without the charm of like Ray Leodian, De Niro, let me tell you, it's like way darker than you can ever imagine. And it's just one, like one betrayal after another of best friends and family member is just like, you know, literally killing each other. It's nothing but betrayal. It's also not all Felix did that echoed the way the Panthers were, right?

He became famous for supporting community youth programs, donating sports teams, you know, charities all over the hood, putting money in food in people's hands. I mean, you know the deal. Turkeys at Thanksgiving and whatnot, hearts and minds, Robin Hood. The kind of thing that you see a lot happen, he got increasingly popular because of it. He's basically at this point becoming this urban legend,

like a street folk hero. The comic Mark Curry, who was Mr. Cooper and hanging with Mr. Cooper, I love that. He came up in Oakland. Yeah, great show. He told DJ Vlad in an interview the first time he ever wrote in a limousine when he was an up-and-coming comedian was with Felix Mitchell. Quote, it was something we had never seen.

It was an amazing situation. Yeah. So Felix is, yeah, he's out there, man. He's driving red Ferraris through the streets, exata cars, limos, dripped out with the jewelry, the women. He's throwing these big, you know, players ball, giant parties, going out with athletes and entertainers. he had a necklace that was an hourglass

that was just filled with small diamonds, which is kind of a dope necklace. Yeah, that sounds awesome. In those days, guys like this, they'd be on the cover of the newspaper. Magazines would mention them, all that sort of stuff, like before they got busted, right?

Dude was just like a legend in the streets. And this guy, Little D, who became a kingpin after Felix, he was also interviewed by Vlad, and he said, quote, the way he dressed up, I never seen nobody as fly as this guy. Damn.

Here's Oakland hotspot again. The paper of record. Yeah. In the process, Mitchell became something of a folk hero to thousands and thousands of black Americans, living in what was then one of the grittiest cities in America. To ensure loyalty and support, Mitchell regularly dispensed candy and toys to neighborhood youngsters from the window of whatever fancy car he happened to be driving at the moment. He contributed to charities, spent tens of thousands of dollars to buy the loyalty of neighbors, went to church, and played a central role in the casual life of the streets that defined African American culture in those days. Felix Mitchell was the archetype of the OG, the original gangster, and his famous celebrating rap music movies and in the life of the streets in Oakland,

and places just like Oakland all across America. So he's the archetype, is this a good thing, a bad thing? And he sounds kind of nice, but you must wonder, is he doing those things just to have this public persona? You're saying they're always in the newspapers and stuff? Yeah, I mean, obviously, you know, I don't think it's good to revere a drug lord, but there's reasons for it. And he was doing these nice things for people,

but he also was getting those people's parents and grandparents hooked on fucking heroin. And he was said to me, he was ruthless. You know, bodies were dropped. He was said to like, I think this wasn't an exaggeration, but they said if you messed up the business, he would take your hand. Oh, Jesus.

That kind of sounds like a bit much to me, but he was a smooth guy, but like don't forget, these guys are brutal, you know, and they, so yeah, I mean, it's a mixture of both, you know. So he has the community locked down. He has much of Oakland lockdown. He's fly as hell. He's having the time of his life.

He reportedly has 25 lieutenants under him. And he's expanding, not just in Oakland, right? Sacramento, Alejo, even out of state to Michigan. That doesn't mean other people aren't going to try him. And there's two other gangs with charismatic kingpins that are on the rise. The first is Fonctown USA, which is led by Funktown Harve, government name Harvey Wisington. Okay, but Funktown USA, this honestly might be the best gang name so far on the podcast. since the beginning.

Yeah, it's pretty good. I think it's what the neighborhood was called as well. Yeah. That's where the name came from. But it's still rules. It's even Falk Town Hard, which sounds like a, like a, you know,

disco DJ is still pretty cool. So he's a former high school football star only in his early 20s when him and his crew started to take it to Felix in the 69th mob. Harve had previously been a lieutenant in the other gang on the rise, the family,

but he got into a fight with another lieutenant over a woman and he split from the family after that lieutenant shot him in the back. and the family is an all-time low, cool name for a gang. It's too obvious. Pretty standard. But getting shot in the back like that, it's just a poor workplace environment,

you know, that's what they call a macroaggression, not a microaggression. But like, you're going to leave the company after that, right? You're going to have something to say. Yeah, that's the kind of stuff you get sub-tweeted for. Oh, yeah, maybe even outright. Maybe tweet that out loud. Yeah.

The family is led by Milton Mickey Moe Moore. And they really came hard after Felix. leading to what's known as Bloody August. Moore was also a pimp and an R&B singer before with a band called The Nnemonics that had songs like Time Brings About Change and Forever in a Day. So Mickey Moe was like kind of the upstart then

and he had read an article that said Felix was bringing in $10,000 a day and decided he wanted a piece. He actually got arrested in 1979 with three pounds of heroin at San Francisco Airport but he got off on a technicality. Which is the best way to get off? It's a great way to get off for sure.

Moore is actually a pastor now after serving a pretty lit lengthy prison sentence because, you know, of course. And he has an amazingly bad Geo City's website. Here's how he describes his start on it. In the summer of 1977, I was selling Heron out of my apartment when the Oakland vice officers kicked in my door with their guns drawn. Screaming they had a search warrant, demanding my lady to lay down on the floor. They searched the apartment, but they didn't find anything. So this prompted my brother and I to put together a plan that would upset Oakland and put me behind the scene. That was the beginning of the family.

At first, Moore and Felix are cool. They get along, they give each other space, but that doesn't last long. What happens is, and this is from a gangster documentary series, I think that was airing on, maybe it was on BET. I think it's called America's Most Evil Gangsters, but they did an episode on Felix where there was actually a good source. Usually I don't get a lot from documentaries, but I used quite a bit of it to build out this episode.

In the summer of 1980, some guy, some dealer sets up shops selling where Felix has territory. And he says he's selling for Moore. Felix's people respond by shooting that shit up. Moors people kidnap Felix's son and things just go haywire. Six people are killed in a matter of days, one of Felix's crew, and five of Moors. That includes the grisly triple murder of three family members, two brothers and a sister-in-law. And their bodies are found strangled and shot execution style with plastic bags over their heads by a job. Some of Mitchell's crew actually brag about it, and it's dubbed Bloody August, and it brings down a hell of a lot of law enforcement attention, including federal, which is, you know, not good.

Anything named Bloody is probably not going to be great. We had Bloody Williamson a couple of episodes, too, with all the murders in Southern Illinois. Yeah, I don't listen to the pod. Mitchell continues his rule for a while. He's taken private jets to Paris. He's buying properties all over. He's setting out more businesses. He's getting everything in his house gold-plated,

just the regular life of luxury. That heavy carbon footprint lifestyle. Yeah, that's exactly what it is. But the feds are on him. They're pressuring his people. They're monitoring, all that. He moves down to the San Fernando Valley to get away from it because it was just too hot.

But the feds are eventually able to turn a couple of members who dime him out, and they've got enough for the RICO charge, which, as we all know, is generally lights out. They arrest him when he's in Los Angeles visiting one of his kids in the hospital who had been injured, and that's in 1983.

They went after a bunch of his people too. And in February of 1985, he's brought to trial and convicted, and he gets life without the possibility of parole, and he's sent to Leavenworth in Kansas. Listen, man, getting sent to Leavenworth, that's punishment enough, but a prison in Leavenworth,

that's hell on earth, okay? I'm going to have to trust you in all, like, Middle America locations like that because I'm not that knowledgeable. And actually, Sean's got that Oklahoma knowledge, and he's not the biggest fan either that part of the world. Why has he lived in Oklahoma?

I don't, anyway. We've never gotten the full story. I think it was an ex-girlfriend, but one of these days, we'll get it out of him. Meanwhile, the streets of Oakland with Felix out of the way, they're just going nuts, right?

He had run things, he kept the tight grip, he kept the prices at a certain level because he had a monopoly on heroin in the city, but now it's the little crew is just going after each other. The price of heroin goes down.

And this is even really before crack hits, the level of violence just goes through the roof. And of course, leading the wars is Funktown USA and Funktown Harve versus Mickey Moe and the family. An article from the night news service in May of 1984 says Oakland has a population of 350,000

and 10 to 15,000 heroin addicts that all these gangs are fighting over. Quote, the battles are being fought openly in the streets in a style reminiscent of Chicago in the 20s for San Salvador in the 80s. Combatants in their late teens or early 20s cruise East Oakland streets

armed with AR-15s and oozy machine guns, while kids as young as 12 or 13 serve as lookouts on the home turf. That's really not good. No, no, not at all. But I kind of feel when you see this kind of stuff that it's, again, it gets exaggerated a bit. You know, it's a bit hyperbolic.

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It's just, you know, you got to take this stuff sometimes with a little bit of a grain of assault. Yeah. The article goes on to actually name Harve and Mickey as the two main kingpins going after each other. And Moore is brought down in December of 1984

and Harve in October of 1985. Here's the AP on Funktown being shut down. Quote, their reputed mastermind of Fungtown USA, believed by law enforcement officials to be the biggest and most violent drug in Oakland history, has been arrested on charges that could bring him a 135-year prison term

and a $2.2 million fine. Federal agents in Oakland police announced the arrest of reputed Fungtown boss Harvey Wissington, 26, and East Oakland Auto Body Shop, that allegedly was a front for heroin sales estimated to gross thousands of dollars a week. So, you know, there we go right away with the superlatives, you know, most violent Oakland history,

but we also have Mitchell in the 6-9 mob, 69th mob said to be the first, the most influential, all that. I mean, it's also kind of crazy to you that Harvard is only 26 when he got knocked. I think I'd rather be the first than the most violent. I mean, yeah, I mean, his name is still the one that people talk about. He had the documentary made about him and all that. So probably, probably you're spot on with that. But yeah, basically Oakland goes nuts and sees this huge boom in violent crimes.

The homicide rates crime higher and higher. It does happen to coincide, like I said with the crack era. But a sociologist coins the Felix Mitchell paradox, which we've seen a million times throughout the drug war in the U.S. and overseas in places like Mexico and Colombia, basically the counter-narrative, counter-argument to the kingpin theory, which you know, you take the boss mine out thinking it'll slow up. But in actuality, all you do is unleash chaos as all the smaller crews and other people in his organization.

They fight for control and for power. It's like balkanizing drug clans. Right, exactly. And in 1986, after serving like a year in his life sentence, Felix the Kat Mitchell, drug campaign of Oakland is killed in prison, stabbed to death allegedly over a $10 debt. There's a couple of theories over why this happened. It's never been solved.

The first is that Felix had paid a prisoner $10 to bring in some fruit. The guy doesn't do it. Felix's men just start beating on the guy, but Felix stops it. Somehow the next day, though, he's walking on a corner of the jail after telling his guy he's going to take a nap, and someone stabs him 14 times just like that. Fruit is serious business, man. Yeah, it's, you don't mess with the man's fruit in prison.

Everyone knows that. You don't mess with the man's fruit anywhere. According to Little D, who was that Oakland Kingpin that came later, that was actually mentored by Felix. Her story goes, a guy Felix hung out with actually had the $10 debt. Felix didn't really know prison politics at the time. The guy who was owed the debt, they saw Felix as being responsible for the guy or something, so they're the one who stabbed him. Dee kind of called it a fluke and said that it was a mistake. That's really sad if it's true.

I mean, either one is kind of sad, you know, just getting stabbed to death over that. But who knows if that's the real story or not? No one does. And nobody was found to be responsible. And also, this is actually interesting, in 1987, Felix's conviction gets overturned. Because his lawyers argue that it shouldn't continue, it shouldn't exist since his appeal was never hurt. And that means that all of Felix's assets that were confiscated get returned to his family, which is like, I mean, I don't really understand how that works. It's the law, Danny.

It is. Here's the AP in 1987. Quote, the conviction of Felix Mitchell of Oakland was overturned Wednesday by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. which relied on its ruling in a 1980 case that conviction cannot stand unless the defendant has been allowed in appeal hearing. And, quote, Churny said Mitchell's appeal had raised the issue of whether he could be convicted of both conspiracy and operation of a continuing criminal enterprise without violating the constitutional ban on double jeopardy. So, yeah, I still don't really get it. It doesn't explain why all the illegal assets go back to his family. I mean, I'm not going to look too far into it. Look, I'm no, I'm no fan of the law.

Okay, I'll admit. Give the family the assets. It's fine with me. They get that red Ferrari bags. Exactly. And then, of course, we have the story of funeral, which we told in the cold open with the crazy procession and national news stories and this kind of divided between the people

who celebrated Felix as an icon, someone who made it big and took care of his people, and those who saw him as a monster who prayed on his own people. I think it was also like one of the first times, you know, where you had like the tutting, you know, middle-aged professional class who was like, how dare these people celebrate a drug dealer not really kind of knowing, you know, what life was like in those areas and maybe why he was celebrated like that,

but also, you know, don't celebrate heroin kingpins. Here is the San Francisco Gate with a quote about the legacy, with a quote about the legacy of Felix Mitchell. Mitchell was the man who started at all, law enforcement officials say, running Oakland's first large-scale gang drug operation in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He sparked the city's drug wars

and spawned an entire generation of killers and dealers and dealers. Young men who tried to follow his nefarious example of how to hit it big if you're young, black, and poor. So yeah, that is the story of Felix the Cap Mitchell. We should have another episode up next week, and then we're probably taking a break for a couple of weeks in August, but the Patreon will keep being updated, so definitely sign up for that. I'm interviewing a guy tomorrow who's done a lot of work in Senaloa with the cartel, so that should be interesting. Patreon.com slash the underworld podcast.

Definitely, thank you, Dale, for filling in and stepping in for Sean and all the editing work that you do. It's good to give you a voice finally so people can pay their respects. They'll probably just yell about you in the YouTube comments, but you got to learn, you know, don't worry

about it. I'm not new to the comments game. Thanks, guys. Security program on spreadsheets, new regulations piling up, and audit dread. It's time for, for Vanta. Vanta automates security and compliance, brings evidence into one place, and cuts audit prep by 82%. Less manual work, clear visibility, bastard deals, zero chaos. Call it compliance, or call it Compliance. Get it? Join the 15,000 companies using Vanta to prove trust. Go to VANTA.com

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