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Mob-run gay bars were notorious for charging high-prices for lousy, watered-down drinks from bootlegged liquor (“Mafia house beer,” one patron dubbed it.) The Stonewall Inn itself was an unlicensed “bottle club,” often dirty, with no running water behind the bar. The Stonewall was secretly owned by Matthew “Matty the Horse” Ianiello, a high-level caporegime (captain) in the Genovese crime family who held hidden interests in a series of gay bars and porn stores in the Greenwich Village and Times Square neighborhoods. Less well known is that the turbulent nights of June 28-29, 1969, were very much a rebellion against the Mafia, as well.
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Photo by Craig Warga/NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images. Matthew “Matty the Horse” Ianniello, capo with the Genovese crime family, controlled a large number of gay clubs in New York City in the 1960s and ’70s. “Stonewall” later became seen as perhaps the most important symbolic event in the modern LGBT rights movement.
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For two nights, gay men and women fought back against the police until they withdrew. Nearly 50 years ago, on June 28, 1969, LGBT people – led by drag queens – rebelled against a raid by the New York Police Department on the Stonewall Inn gay nightclub. Photo from NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images. A crowd attempts to impede police arrests outside the Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village on June 28, 1969.