Parnell Edwards

Parnell Steven “Stacks” Edwards (January 15, 1947-December 18, 1978) was an African-American associate of the Lucchese crime family of the Italian-American Mafia from 1967 until his death in 1978. In the 1990 film entitled Goodfellas, he was performed by Samuel L. Jackson.

Biography

Parnell Edwards was born in 1947 in The Bronx, New York City. His paternal ancestors were from North Carolina and his maternal ancestors were from Virginia. Both had escaped slavery during the 19th century. At one point, he worked as a bodyguard for Muhammad Ali.

He met Tommy DeSimone, Jimmy Burke, and Henry Hill in 1967 at the age of twenty. At the time, he was a struggling blues rock musician who was desperate for fame. They introduced him to Paul Vario and he became a member of his crew. He began partaking in illegal activities with them and had already been addicted to marijuana.

Parnell Edwards was in a blues rock band called Grand Central Station in the early 1970s. He relied heavily on organized crime rackets as a means of making money, following his introduction to the Vario Crew. Growing up, Parnell Edwards was a very big fan of blues and rock music. His favorite musicians in both childhood and adulthood included Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson, Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, The Big Bopper, Chuck Berry, The Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, The Doors, Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Aerosmith, Thin Lizzy, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and AC/DC.

Edwards earned a reputation within the Vario Crew as being an "under the limit" master in credit card fraud. He would go to a shopping center with a panel truck and purchase merchandise from the stores until he ran out of room on the truck. He would make $45 purchases on a card with a $50-expenditure limit every afternoon. His rampant shopping sprees would consist of blenders, transistor radios, cigarettes, razor blades and within two hours of steady shopping, call it quits.

He had a girl from South Ozone Park, Queens who worked for MasterCharge, delivering cards. She would bring Edwards official office memos keeping him informed about security checkups and credit checks. Among his contacts Edwards included a female associate who worked at a local bank. She would give him duplicates of the cards and inform him of the amount of credit that was attached. Before a card was put in an envelope for delivery to the cardholder, Edwards would have a duplicate. If a card had a $500 credit line he would go into stores where he and members of the Vario Crew were known, or visit places like The Suite, The Bamboo Lounge and Robert's Lounge where he would punch out credit card slips. The associates he knew in the stores would call the bank and get authorization for whatever merchandise he wanted. The cardholder waiting for his card would never receive it and Edwards usually had enough time to make purchases on the certain card for about a month before it would be reported stolen.

Sometime after Malcolm X's assassination in 1965, Parnell, like many other 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 more radical. He agreed with Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton's rejection of the integrationist 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, Bobby Seale was attempting to reform the Black Panthers to an institution for worldwide social justice, regardless of the nationality or ethnicity of the oppressed people. The Black Panthers supporters eventually rejected cultural nationalists as black racists.

Parnell's involvement in the Counterculture movement of the 1960s angered Jimmy Burke and fellow mobsters, causing him to be a further outcast among the fellow robbers. 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 the Italian mobsters. 

On December 11, 1978, he partook in the Lufthansa heist as the getaway driver. $5 million was stolen from the JFK Airport. Parnell was killed by Tommy DeSimone a week later.