by Frank Bergman, Slay News: Newly released emails from the Department of Justice (DOJ) are raising disturbing new questions about convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, revealing that at least two of his properties appeared to contain secret underground tunnel and bunker networks. The documents show Epstein maintained a long-running obsession with a mysterious “tunnel” at […]

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Jim Thornton/The Herald Sun Collections/University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill LibrariesC.P. Ellis, a former Ku Klux Klan leader, with civil rights activist Ann Atwater in 1971. In 1971, the schools in Durham City, North Carolina, were still segregated. But in an effort to desegregate them, the school district put two bitter enemies in charge of running a 10-day community meeting. They were Ann Atwater, a Black leader in the city’s civil rights movement, and local Ku Klux Klan leader C.P. Ellis, who found himself on the end of Atwater’s pocket knife one day when he suggested banning Black people from the sidewalks. C.P. Ellis responded by showing up for the community meetings with a machine gun. But then, something unexpected happened. Ellis not only listened to Atwater, but he began to question his lifetime of racist beliefs. By the end of the meeting, Atwater had convinced Ellis to give up his membership to the KKK — and he became a civil rights advocate. How C.P. Ellis Became An ‘Exalted Cyclops’ Born the son of a millworker on January 8, 1927, Claiborne Paul Ellis left school after eighth grade to find work to support his family. At 17, he married and went on to have three children who he struggled to feed, working two jobs but barely covering his family’s bills. “I worked my butt off and never seemed to break even. They say abide by the law, go to church, do right and live for the Lord and everything will work out. It didn’t work out. It kept gettin’ worse and worse. I began to get bitter,” Ellis said in a 1980 interview with Studs Terkel. That bitterness drove C.P. Ellis to join the Ku Klux Klan, where he believed his frustrations with destitution were heard and understood. But beyond a sense of belonging, the Klan gave Ellis someone to blame for his problems. “I didn’t know who to blame. I tried to find somebody. I began to blame it on Black people. I had to hate somebody.” Ellis said. “Here are white people who are supposed to be superior to them, and we’re shut out.” Ellis became a vocal voice for similarly disenfranchised white people in his segregated neighborhood. He quickly became a leader in the Durham chapter of the Klan with a position known as the Exalted Cyclops. He also became a constant fixture in the civil rights clashes taking place across the country. “I wanted to make them angry,” Ellis recalled of civil rights advocates. “I didn’t like them. I didn’t like integration. I didn’t like the demonstrations downtown.” And one person, in particular, became the target of C.P. Ellis’s anger. Activist Ann Atwater led boycotts and protests. “She was making progress,” Ellis said. “I hated her guts.” But Atwater was struggling with many of the same financial difficulties as Ellis and his neighbors. “Mr. Ellis has the same problems with the schools and his children as I do with mine and we now have a chance to do something for them,” Atwater said. They both considered themselves voices for their communities, and Atwater recognized that if Ellis could see her as someone living with the same struggle, then together they could make a difference. C.P. Ellis And Ann Atwater Clash Even though the upshot of the supreme court case Brown v. Board of Education ruled that schools were to desegregate in 1954, by the 1970s, many major school districts still resisted racial integration. Durham was among them. Nonetheless, in 1971, C.P. Ellis agreed to co-chair a committee on desegregation with Ann Atwater. Wary of his rival, Ellis showed up with a machine gun in his trunk. Ann Atwater also came prepared. “I had my white Bible in my hand,” she said in an interview with NPR. “I always said if they’d said something to me, I was going to knock the hell out of them with my Bible.” But the rivals soon became unlikely friends. The shift started almost immediately. During the first few days, the committee listened to a gospel choir. Atwater noticed that Ellis was clapping along. “And he wasn’t clapping his hands even along with us; he would clap an odd beat.” So Atwater grabbed Ellis’s hand. She “show[ed] him how to clap along with us at the same time till we learned him how to clap.” Later during the meetings, young people from Durham spoke about their experience. “We talked to the youth, and we found out that the children was the ones suffering,” Atwater recalled. Bettmann/Getty ImagesIn the 1970s, several school districts resisted desegregation. White parents overturned busses bringing Black children to schools in Lamar, South Carolina, in 1970. “Me and him was over there mad with each other, but we wasn’t getting anything done that the children wanted.” It was then that Ellis and Atwater bonded over their shared problems. “Me and him cried at that time,” Atwater said, “and we began to melt down towards one another.” C.P. Ellis admitted that the experience changed his perspective. “During those days it became clear to me that she had some of the identical problems that I had and that I’d suffered like she had and what in the hell had I spent all my life fighting people like Ann for?” The Ex Klansmen Becomes A Civil Rights Activist By the end of the 10-day meeting, C.P. Ellis was ready to renounce his position in the Klan. As he explained,”I found out they’re people just like me. They cried, they cussed, they prayed, they had desires. Just like myself. Thank God, I got to the point where I can look past labels.” Ellis left the Klan and went back to school. He earned a high school diploma and became a union organizer. By 1980, Ellis was the manager of the International Union of Operating Engineers in Durham, a predominately Black union. Abandoning the Klan to become an advocate of civil rights saw Ellis ostracized from his friends. He considered suicide, but he stuck to his advocacy. “I tell people there’s a tremendous possibility in this country to stop wars, the battles, the struggles, the fights between people,” Ellis said in 1980. “People say: ‘That’s an impossible dream. You sound like Martin Luther King.’ An ex-Klansman who sounds like Martin Luther King. I don’t think it’s an impossible dream. It’s happened in my life. It’s happened in other people’s lives in America.” C.P. Ellis and Ann Atwater remained friends for decades, and according to Atwater, they “looked after each other.” When Ellis died in 2005 from Alzheimer’s disease, Atwater delivered his eulogy. After this look at the galvanizing friendship of Ann Atwater and C.P. Ellis, learn about nine unsung leaders of the civil rights movement. Then, discover the story of Ella Baker, the “mother” of the civil rights movement. The post The Story Of C.P. Ellis, The KKK Leader Whose 1971 Meeting With A Black Activist Changed His Life appeared first on All That's Interesting.

On February 21, 1910, in an East Harlem tenement, one of the most notorious gangsters of the 20th century was born. Carmine Galante was the son of Sicilian immigrants from the seaside village of Castellammare del Golfo. He was destined to become a Mafia legend. Carmine Galante: ‘A Neuropathic, Psychopathic Personality’ Born Camillo Carmine Galante in New York on February 21, 1910, he exhibited criminal tendencies that at age 10 landed him in reform school. As a teenager, he worked at multiple places including a floral shop, a trucking company, and on the waterfront as a stevedore and fish sorter. Santi Visalli Inc./Getty ImagesCarmine Galante, pictured here in a police mugshot from 1943, rose from obscurity to Mafia boss, driving a massive international narcotics trafficking operation. These were just covers for his true calling as a Mafioso. Among the various charges ascribed to him were bootlegging, assault, robbery, extortion, gambling, and murder. Galante’s first notable alleged murder occurred on March 15, 1930, for slaying a police officer during a payroll robbery. Galante was not prosecuted due to a lack of evidence. Then, that Christmas Eve, he and other gang members attempted to hijack a truck and found themselves in a shootout with police. Galante accidentally wounded a six-year-old girl. Carmine Galante did time at Sing Sing Prison where a psychiatrist evaluated him in 1931. According to his FBI dossier: “He had a mental age of 14 ½ and an IQ of 90. He… had no knowledge of current events, routine holidays, or other items of common knowledge. He was diagnosed as a neuropathic, psychopathic personality, emotionally dull and indifferent with prognosis as being poor.” A rare 1930 mugshot of Carmine Galante. He was arrested more than once that year. The examiner also noted that Galante showed early signs of gonorrhea. A Contract Killer For Mussolini Carmine Galante was released on parole in 1939. Around this time, he started working for the Bonanno crime family whose head, Joseph “Bananas” Bonanno, also hailed from Castellammare del Golfo. Galante remained loyal to Bonanno throughout his career. Wikimedia CommonsThe anti-Mussolini newspaper editor Carlo Tresca, whom Carmine Galante allegedly murdered. In 1943, Galante made the mark that elevated him from ordinary gangster to mafia star. Around this time, crime boss Vito Genovese had fled to Italy to escape murder charges. While there, Genovese tried to ingratiate himself with Italy’s fascist Prime Minister Benito Mussolini by ordering the execution of Carlo Tresca, who published an anarchist newspaper in New York that was critical of the dictator. On January 11, 1943, Galante allegedly carried out the execution — possibly on the orders of the Bonanno underboss, Frank Garofalo, who also had been insulted by Tresca. Galante was never charged due to lack of evidence — all the police could do was link him to an abandoned car found near the murder scene — but the Tresca hit cemented Galante’s reputation for violence. In 1945, Galante married Helen Marulli. They later separated but never divorced. Galante would later state that he never divorced her since he was a “good Catholic.” He lived for 20 years with a mistress, Ann Acquavella, who bore two of his five children. Carmine Galante Becomes The Bonanno Family Underboss By 1953, Carmine Galante rose to become the Bonanno family’s underboss. It was during this time that he was dubbed “the Cigar” or “Lilo,” which is Sicilian slang for cigar. He was rarely seen without one. Wikimedia CommonsCarmine Galante served as Joseph Bonanno’s chauffeur, capo, and finally as his underboss. Galante’s value to the Bonanno operation was in drug trafficking, particularly heroin. Galante spoke various Italian dialects and was fluent in Spanish and French. He oversaw the family’s drug business in Montreal as it smuggled so-called “French Connection” heroin from France into the United States. Galante spent the years 1953 to 1956 in Canada organizing the narcotics operation. He was suspected of being behind several murders, including those of drug carriers who were too slow. Canada eventually deported Galante back to the United States. Heroin And The Zips In 1957, Joseph Bonanno and Carmine Galante held a meeting of various mafia and gangster chieftains — including the real-life Mafia godfather Lucky Luciano — at the Grand Hotel des Palmes in Palermo, Sicily. An agreement was reached where the Sicilian mob would smuggle heroin into the U.S. and the Bonannos would distribute it. Arthur Brower/New York Times/Getty ImagesFederal agents escort a handcuffed Galante to court after his arrest on the Garden State Parkway in New Jersey for narcotics conspiracy. June 3, 1959. Galante recruited Sicilians from his hometown, so-called “Zips,” a slang term of indeterminate origin, to act as his bodyguards, contract killers, and enforcers. Galante trusted the “Zips” more than American-born gangsters, which would ultimately doom him. In 1958 and again in 1960, Galante was indicted for narcotics trafficking. His first court proceedings in 1960 ended in a mistrial when the foreman of the jury broke his back in a mysterious fall inside an abandoned building. “There was no question but that he was pushed,” said William Tendy, a former assistant U.S. attorney. After a second trial in 1962, Galante was convicted and sentenced to 20 years in federal prison. Galante, who was 52 at the time of his sentencing, seemed washed up, but he plotted to come back in a big way. Carmine Galante’s Comeback While Galante was in prison, mafia boss Joe Bonanno was forced to retire by the Commission, the shadowy body governing the rules of the American Mafia, for conspiring against the other families. When Galante was paroled in 1974, he found only an interim chief of the Bonanno organization in place. Galante took control of the Bonannos in a swift coup d’état. Carmine Galante ratcheted up the narcotics trade while plotting war on his rivals. He held the Gambinos and their boss, Carlo Gambino, in particular contempt because of their longstanding rivalry with the Bonannos, and because they had been muscling into the Bonanno drug empire. Galante reputedly raked in millions of dollars per day, but he was too brash and contemptuous. He roamed the streets of Little Italy like an aristocrat and allegedly had eight Gambino family members murdered to cement his power in the drug trade. “Not since the days of Vito Genovese has there been a more ruthless and feared individual,” said Lieutenant Remo Franceschini, head of the organized crime intelligence section of the New York City Police Department. “The rest of them are copper; he is pure steel.” The other families feared his power grab. It became clear what Galante’s ultimate goal was when he bragged to an associate he was becoming “the boss of bosses,” thereby threatening the Commission itself. Even after a 1977 New York Times exposé detailing his rise as a Mafia don and an FBI target, Galante was so confident in his power that he did not bother to carry a gun. He remarked to a journalist, “No one will ever kill me — they wouldn’t dare. If they want to call me boss of bosses, that’s all right. Between you and me, all I do is grow tomatoes.” The Commission decided that Galante had to go and ordered his execution. It is even reported that Joe Bonanno consented. Lunch At Joe And Mary’s On Thursday, July 12, 1979, Carmine Galante visited Joe & Mary’s, an Italian restaurant on Knickerbocker Avenue in Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighborhood that was owned by his friend Giuseppe Turano. He dined with Turano in the sunlit garden patio with no guns in sight. They were soon joined by a friend, 40-year-old Leonard Coppola, and two Zips named Baldassare Amato and Cesare Bonventre. At 2:45 p.m., three men in ski masks entered the premises. The bodies of Carmine Galante (right) and associate Leonardo Coppola lie in the backyard of a restaurant at 205 Knickerbocker Avenue in Brooklyn where they were murdered. Chalk marks indicate the slugs, casings, and impact points in the assassination. In moments, Galante was “blown backward by the force of a shotgun blast that struck him in the upper chest and by bullets that pierced his left eye and riddled his chest.” He was 69 years old. Turano and Coppola were both shot in the head and died. Amato and Bonventre were unharmed – they were suspected to have abetted the assassination. Mary DiBiase/NY Daily News Archive/Getty ImagesThe public’s final image of Carmine Galante. The New York Post ran a front-page photo of the grisly scene: Carmine Galante splayed dead with his last cigar hanging from his mouth. Above the photo was a single word: “GREED!” After learning about unhinged Bonanno mob boss Carmine Galante, read how Vincent Gigante nearly outfoxed the feds by feigning insanity. Then, meet Joe Valachi, the mobster who exposed the Mafia’s secrets on national television. The post Carmine Galante Had A Mental Age Of 14 — And Was The King Of Heroin appeared first on All That's Interesting.

Gregor Mendel described his experiments with pea plants and proved that genes are transmitted in discrete units, with certain fundamental laws of inheritance.

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