Why Armstrong, Sinatra and Crosby all had mob connections: ‘Get yourself the biggest gangster’

nypost.com:

Dangerous Rhythms: Jazz and the Underworld,” which comes out on Aug. 2, explains why jazz greats such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Frank Sinatra flourished within mob empires headed by the likes of Al Capone, Meyer Lansky, John T. “Legs” Diamond and Charles “Lucky” Luciano.“Jazz began at the end of a long sustained period of lynching after the Emancipation Proclamation,” English told The Post, speaking from his Manhattan home where he has lived for 32 years. “The music seems to me an attempt to create a new reality,” he added. “The music says, ‘We are alive.’ I see jazz as a response to terror and violence.”   English, who has written several books about the criminal underworld, as well as episodes for TV’s “NYPD Blue” and “Homicide: Life on the Street,” said the unlikely connection between black musicians and Italian mobsters made sense in the context of an oppressive turn-of-the-century social order.Jazz first started bubbling in New Orleans, where Sicilian immigrants and black Americans faced the same predicament — they were shut out of wealthy white Anglo-Saxon Protestant society and harassed by corrupt white police officers.“Black people had less to fear from a Mafiosa boss than a white police officer,” said English, a self-confessed jazz fan. “They saw the mob as their protection in the commercial marketplace.

That was very true of Louis Armstrong. He knew you had to have your gangster for protection. Louis said, ‘Get yourself the biggest gangster you can.’ ”The New Orleans recipe — where black performers aligned themselves with mobsters who oversaw one of the nation’s first legal red-light districts, Storyville, where brothels and bars thrived  — spread to Kansas City, Chicago, New York, and then Las.