How a Changing Landscape Brought Down the Mob in Brooklyn

The mafia was an unlikely victim of Brooklyn’s gentrification.

Hipster coffee shops and Edison string lights aren’t the whole reason South Brooklyn’s mob scene has faded away, but the arrival of upscale businesses and yuppies was a contributing factor, according to Frank DiMatteo, author of The President Street Boys: Growing Up Mafia. The mafia lifestyle centered around the clubs and restaurants of a given gang’s turf. Many of these were legitimate business fronts for not-so-legitimate organized crime. Others weren’t owned by the gangs, but had business relationships that funneled money back to them. The arrival of big chains in old neighborhoods scuttled many a family business, which in turned affected the family business.