Gangsters: Fifty Years of Madness, Drugs, and Death on the Streets of America

Abstract

When Lewis Yablonsky, in his introduction to his book on gangsters and death on American streets, describes his experiences as a youth growing up near a Black ghetto in Newark, New Jersey, we can see that he learned role reversal long before he even heard of J. L. Moreno. He relates that in the ghetto as a minority "ofay" (White boy), he was subjected to shake downs and beatings while at the same time he developed considerable empathy for his aggressors and their families in their struggle for survival and to move out of
their basement hovels. Subsequently, Yablonsky went on as a sociologist with a love of psychodrama and his mentor, J. L. Moreno, to become one of our foremost criminologists.