Parnell Edwards

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Parnell Steven "Stacks" Edwards (January 15, 1947 Baton Rouge, Louisiana-December 18, 1978 Ozone Park, Queens, New York) was an African-American petty thief and supporter of the Black Panther Party who became associated with the infamous Jimmy Burke during the 1978 Lufthansa Heist. In addition, mobster Henry Hill used to use him in his credit card fraud operations. He was eventually assassinated by Tommy DeSimone and Angelo John Sepe for not fulfilling his role in the heist properly. Parnell Edwards is portrayed by Samuel L. Jackson. His girlfriend is played by Berlinda Tolbert.

There is some dispute about the spelling of Parnell's nickname, Volkman and Cummings, two experts, spelled the name 'Stax'. Wiseguy author Nicholas Pileggi spelled it "Stacks," as did Hill's later co-author Gus Russo.

1 Biography
2 Involvement in Black Nationalism and The Black Panthers
3 Robert's Lounge and the Lufthansa Heist
4 Death
5 In popular culture
6 References
7 External links

[edit] Biography

Parnell met Henry Hill in 1967 through Tommy DeSimone as a struggling blues-rock musician on the street in downtown Queens and the two became involved in credit card fraud and hijacking together. Parnell was a Ozone Park, Queens born mulatto-skinned black man who was said to have been quite tall. Parnell was a heavy drug-user and sometime in the 1970's started injecting heroin. Parnell moved from Baton Rouge as a child to New York city with his family. As a child growing up he was a large fan of jazz, jump blues and black gospel music. Growing up he his interest in music increased and he learned how to play the acoustic guitar. He was introduced into the life of crime by Tommy DeSimone. As Edwards got older his tastes turned to Fats Domino, Clarence "Frogman" Henry, Frankie Ford, Irma Thomas, The Neville Brothers and Dr. John. When rhythm and blues became outdated he listened to Ray Charles, Sam Cooke and James Brown and started performing blues-rock. Parnell worked the night-club circuit and was hired on occasion by Jimmy Burke for performances at "Robert's Lounge", and by Henry Hill at his night club "The Suite" as a regular performer from 1966 to 1972 until he was sent to prison.

[edit] Involvement in Black Nationalism and The Black Panthers

Sometime after Malcolm X's assassination in 1965, Parnell, like many other disgruntled African-Americans became involved in the civil rights movement, supporting the Black Panther Party. It was at this time that the Black Panthers were becoming moreradical. He agreed with Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton's rejection of the intergrationist stance of Martin Luther King, and also agreed with their rejection of what they called the "power struggle".

At the time of Edward's followership, Seale was attempting to reform the Black Panthers to an institution for worldwide social justice, regardless of the nationality or ethnicicity of the oppressed people. Black Panther supporters eventually rejected cultural nationalists as black racists. Parnell's involvement in the counter culture movement of the 1960s angered Jimmy Burke and fellow mobsters, causing him to be a further outcast among the fellow robbers. By 1979, Parnell was a firm radical believer in the Black Panther Party and he adopted the party's radical views on white people. He complained about suffering from racism at the hands of his fellow Italian mobsters.

His black nationalist views were displayed to the fellow hijackers while he was attending a Christmas Day celebration at Robert's Lounge in Queens, New York that was being thrown by Burke. Edwards attended the party even after it was known that the authorities had found the truck he was supposed to dispose of. That truck included fingerprints on a wallet stolen from one of the Lufthansa employees who was attacked during the robbery. Henry Hill later recalled the attendance of Edwards at the party in Wiseguy: Life In A Mafia Family with the following passage:

We were all having a good time when "Stacks" sees Henry Hill's, {my} amount of money on me, and started to do his "black dude" number, "How come I'm fucking broke and all you whities got the money?" And then Edwards would persist in making racial jokes about the "May-fia guys who got all those millions from the airport.

Hill recalled later in Nicholas Pileggi's Wiseguy: My Life In A Mafia Family that, "I {he} knew that Stacks had signed his death warrant that day."

Parnell's black nationalism, his increasing addiction to heroin, and his bungling of the Lufthansa heist pushed Burke and the fellow gangsters to the limit, and Parnell was murdered a short time afterward.

[edit] Robert's Lounge and the Lufthansa Heist

Stacks' ambition was to be a successful blues singer and as such he performed at Jimmy Burke's bar in Ozone Park, New York. His agent was Dante Barzotini, who he met through Henry Hill and was brought on as a client. He gradually became involved in many schemes, including buying goods on stolen credit cards. He also acted as a chauffeur for Jimmy Burke and Paul Vario and was usually paid in stolen goods. He would take the stolen goods and sell them to independent stores in the neighborhoods of Harlem, Queens and Jackson Heights or at flea markets in the area.

In 1978 Henry Hill, working from a tip-off from bookmaker Martin Krugman, told Jimmy Burke of vast sums of cash being held overnight in a safe at the Lufthansa cargo terminal at JFK airport in New York. Burke analysed the possibilities and drew the conclusion that about 6 men, according to airport insider Lou Werner, and two panel trucks would be needed to successfully steal the cash. The money was in the millions and was in totally untraceable money, i.e. once they had the money they could, within limits, spend it without question. This was the first stage of the Lufthansa Heist.

Burke assembled a crew, involving Joe Manri, Robert McMahon, Louis Cafora, Tommy DeSimone, Paolo LiCastri Martin Krugman, Teressa Ferrara and Angelo John Sepe, including Parnell Edwards. Edwards' job was to take the panel truck used in the heist and drive it to a junkyard in New Jersey, where mafia contacts would compact it and the evidence would be destroyed.

The heist worked out better than Burke could have imagined, but Parnell had neglected his duty and had used marijuana, visited his girlfriend and fallen asleep. Unfortunately for Parnell the police had found the panel truck, with a muddy boot print (matching a pair of shoes owned by Parnell) and fingerprints had been taken from the wheel.

[edit] Death

Being a friend of Edwards, when Tommy DeSimone was handed the contract from mobster Joseph DiPalermo, he was torn apart, at first, about killing one of his best friends. Although DeSimone had killed 8 or 9 people up to that point in his life he was still, he felt, no closer to being a made-man and as such wasn't pleased about killing Stacks, but DiPalermo sneakily told him that he could be 'made' by this murder.

Stacks had gone into hiding in an Ozone Park apartment and had been sitting at his kitchen table eating his breakfast one morning when Tommy walked in and fired several shots into Stacks' head and chest using a .32 silencer-equipped pistol, killing him.

As a gesture of good will Henry Hill spent the week before Christmas of 1978 with the distraught family of Edwards at his wake; curiously DeSimone, supposedly a loyal friend, never attended.

[edit] In popular culture

In the 1990 film GoodFellas Parnell Edwards was played by actor Samuel L. Jackson
In the 2001 film for TV The Big Heist, he was portrayed by Bo Rucker.