10 Places in Alabama The Mob Used to Control

Ten places in Alabama the mob used to control, from a nightclub carved inside a cave to Phenix City and an office in Montgomery. In 1955 Hollywood filmed a movie about a murder on the same Alabama streets where it happened, barely a year after the shooting. The famous nightclub in that movie never existed. Almost everything else in it did. Alabama's mob rarely looked like the gangster movies. It wore a badge, carried a law license, and kept its money in a bank built for bootleggers. This countdown starts underground, at the Blount County cave that became America's only underground nightclub, with a gambling room behind a guarded door, and a Talladega County cavern people called the Bloody Bucket. It moves through Ensley in Birmingham, where the state's one real Mafia family is said to have simply grown too old to go on, and the November day in 1923 when federal agents arrested a sheriff, a police chief and a bank president in Mobile. Then it crosses the Chattahoochee to Phenix City, right across the river from Fort Benning, where soldiers' pay fed a machine that fixed elections, kept dead men on the jury lists, and packed twelve gambling joints onto a single block. We follow a 1946 murder trial where two lawyers sat at the same defense table, and what happened to both of them eight years later. We also go down to the Mobile docks and a federal union payoff case from the 1970s, told straight from the court record. Real names, real dates, and what stands at each place today. The trail ends in Montgomery, higher than almost anyone expected it to reach. WATCH NEXT ▶ Exploring Alabama: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4UGAVyqmTg&list=PLKZr9z2MwI-8&pp=0gcJCbwFa94AFGB0sAgC SUBSCRIBE ▶ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-9o1jfKyaASz4am9yTtxNA?sub_confirmation=1 Did anyone in your family serve at Fort Benning or grow up near Phenix City? Tell me what they remember. Historical documentary. Names, dates, and cases are drawn from the public record and published reporting. Some footage is illustrative. #Alabama #AlabamaHistory #PhenixCity