February 7, 2024 • 49 mins
While Eunice learns the letter of the law, her neighbors in Harlem are surviving by breaking it, and the mob’s power over nearly every facet of New York life grows stronger.
New Yorkers are looking for a crusader, and in Thomas Dewey they find one. He’s New York’s newest mob-busting special prosecutor, and he finds himself in need of a certain plucky young attorney, with a deep knowledge of the Harlem community.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
Novel.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Before we begin, a content warning. The following episode contains
difficult themes and violence. Mama, I called my mom back
in the middle of lunch recently?
Speaker 3 (00:24):
What you doing looking at YouTube videos?
Speaker 2 (00:31):
I'd missed her earlier call, and she tends to worry
if I take too long to call her back. So
I thought I'd make use of the opportunity to ask
her about a connection I have to Eunice Carter's story.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
Let me ask you this.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
Do you know anybody who ran numbers?
Speaker 3 (00:45):
Play dumb?
Speaker 4 (00:46):
Yes?
Speaker 5 (00:47):
Yeah, uh huh.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
Let me see what was his name? He was a
big number man in Nashville, Girl. He long needed money
to get the bath hom fixed.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
My childhood in Nashville and Harlem nineteen twenties are quite
different in lots of ways. But if the little slips
of paper I sometimes saw in my uncle's pockets as
a child, or anything to go by black folks playing
the numbers is a shared history across America. My late
great uncle was a hard working, respectable man. He was quiet, stern,
(01:21):
kept his own private stash of Pepsi's no one else
was allowed to drink. But he had a gold tooth
that winked out at the world when he laughed, showing
a little bit of the slick country charm that must
have stolen my aunt's heart. He believed in the stability
of an honest day's work, but he also enjoyed taking
a chance on the game of numbers. There was community
(01:43):
in the game. If the meteorologist on television said we
were going to have four days of ninety eight degree weather,
a living room chorus of elders would erupt four ninety eight.
Write that down, play that number. The numbers game is
like an unofficial lottery. To play, you start by selecting
any three digit number and betting some money on it
(02:04):
with a bookmaker.
Speaker 3 (02:06):
You could claim the number and you put a nickel
like just say on at a thirteen.
Speaker 2 (02:13):
The winning digits are announced the next day by whoever
runs the game. They're usually drawn from some random, publicly published,
hard to predict number, like the last three digits of
Federal Reserve Bank clearings for that day. A lot of
people had a special system for figuring out which numbers
to bet. My great uncle was one of them.
Speaker 3 (02:33):
He would sit down to workout numbers certain times, so
the years, certain numbers always fall.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
I remember one time my uncle deviated from his system
by asking my cousin, who was studying to become a
preacher at the time, to look in the Bible for
some divine help.
Speaker 3 (02:50):
And she wouldn't do it.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
She wouldn't do it.
Speaker 3 (02:53):
Yeah, the numbers game is a game of chance.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
My aunt and her husband would host our extended family
for almost all the major holidays and family events. My
uncle's friends would come over, and after all the greeting
formalities were out of the way, they'd ask what it
hit for, and the jargon would fly too quickly for
my child's mind to follow. I still wasn't really sure
what the numbers were. I just knew that a lot
(03:21):
of conversations with a certain group of elders included them
asking each other if their number had hit today, and
if someone showed up with a new car, they look
at the license plate and say, I'm gonna play that number.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
One time. Maybe. When I was around six years.
Speaker 2 (03:38):
Old, the house was full of people and music and food.
All the big elders were sitting at the kitchen table
reminiscing and laughing. There was a gallon jug of what
I thought was great fruit punch sitting there between the
ash trays and discarded dessert plates. I decided to help
myself to a cup. But I remember I'm thinking that
(04:00):
it was great creature cooler because it was just in
a one of them regular old classic gallon jumps. I
thought it was a local brand of fruit punch. My
granddaddy stopped me just in time to keep me from
drinking some homemade wine.
Speaker 3 (04:14):
Yeah it to you, so whatever you know.
Speaker 2 (04:24):
As fuzzy as this memory is, it's one of my favorites,
especially now that forty years later, so much has changed.
Granddaddy's been gone a long time. We can't trust my
great aunt, once famous for her hot water corn bread
and potato salad, to cook anymore, and my great uncle,
her husband, passed away several years ago as well. By
(04:49):
the time I was a teenager, my great aunt and
uncle had stopped drinking and smoking, but I think my
uncle maintained.
Speaker 1 (04:55):
At least that one little vice.
Speaker 2 (05:02):
As Unice Hunting Carter walked through the streets of Harlem,
perhaps on her way to and from law school, the
numbers game would have been going on all around her too,
not necessarily out in the open. Playing the numbers is
a secretive business. That's why some of my mom's answers
are a bit frustratingly vague.
Speaker 6 (05:22):
People that were running the numbers, they looked like your
average person. You could go to the barber shops, the
beauty shops, the worst store.
Speaker 2 (05:31):
To who though like it had to be somebody on
the side. It wasn't actually going to Kroger and placing
a bit with crogh.
Speaker 3 (05:38):
The Tennessee has a state.
Speaker 1 (05:40):
Lottery, right, but I'm not talking about the lottery. I'm
talking about numbers like that's nothing different.
Speaker 3 (05:47):
Numbers were supposed to be illegal.
Speaker 2 (05:50):
It was a shared, open secret between friends. Lucrative but illegal.
Speaker 6 (05:56):
Well, but your contact was they would tell you who
you need to see in.
Speaker 3 (06:02):
The grocery store. Agana could have worked there. It could
have been the butcher, could have been anybody in Nick.
The reason why it was illegal is because it was
an underground thing and it was mostly in the black neighborhoods,
just like up in Harlem.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
So in Harlem, as the twenties turned to the thirties
and Eunice was learning the letter of the law, she
passes many of her neighbors who are surviving by breaking it.
Not that many play the numbers because they thought it
was going to make them rich.
Speaker 1 (06:36):
The odds of winning are six hundred to one.
Speaker 3 (06:39):
The more money you put on it to bi of
your return. So they would put.
Speaker 6 (06:44):
A penny on the number, they put a.
Speaker 3 (06:47):
Niffle, they put a quarter. People didn't make a whole lot.
Speaker 2 (06:50):
Of money in it as ordinary to my childhood as
a cabbage patch kid or the sounds of MTV playing
in the background. For a long time. It's also been
a way to establish hope and agency and black communities,
especially when times got hard. But where does all the
money go?
Speaker 3 (07:11):
Nobody win, but people like the people all at what
all that money adds up?
Speaker 2 (07:18):
Seems like in Unice's days, just as in my childhood,
the people running the game are the ones making the profits.
And in Harlem in the nineteen twenties and into the
early thirties, one of those people was called Stephanie Saint Clair,
as glamorous and as ambitious as Unice. But just as
we saw in Atlanta in nineteen oh six during the
(07:40):
violent riots that shaped the trajectory of Unus's life, black
wealth attracts a lot of white attention.
Speaker 3 (07:49):
Black folks said that then white folks won it.
Speaker 2 (07:53):
They could from the teams at iHeartRadio and novel. I'm
Nicole Perkins and this is the God Episode four Panic,
(08:38):
New York City, Wednesday morning, November twentieth, nineteen twenty nine,
and unus hunting. Carter has just started her break from
Fordham Law School. This morning, she's getting ready for a
day of political campaigning for Republican mayorial candidate Fiorella LaGuardia.
But right now, in this moment, she's taking time for
(09:01):
herself to read the newspaper. She opens the New York
Amsterdam News. Her eyes are immediately drawn to a large ad.
It features a glamorous black woman looking back at Unice.
She's wearing a coat, jewels what looks like a close hat.
Her hands rest just above her hips. Beneath the picture,
(09:24):
she's written a letter addressed to the people of New
York City.
Speaker 1 (09:28):
To the members of my race.
Speaker 2 (09:30):
I have received letters and telephone messages from men who
have annoyed me very much, and I take this occasion
to ask them publicly to please not annoy me. I,
Madame Saint clair Am not looking for a husband or
a sweetheart. Eunice recognizes the woman in the ad immediately, so.
Speaker 7 (09:56):
Stephanie Sinclair is very, very flamboyant.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
One of Harlem's wealthiest and more notorious residents. And maybe
the two of them have more in common than at
first glance.
Speaker 7 (10:10):
Their backgrounds are different, but these two women are the same.
They want the same things. Then they see themselves as leaders.
Speaker 2 (10:19):
By this point, at the end of the twenties, Stephanie
Saint Clair is in the paper all the time, in
her own ads like this one and in news articles.
By today's standards, she'd be a millionaire, and she is
not coy about it.
Speaker 8 (10:36):
She's one of those people who would definitely be famous
in twenty twenty three. Stephanie Sinclair knew how to use
the press. She knew how to use word of mouth.
She knew how to use gossip.
Speaker 2 (10:54):
Stephanie Saint Clair lives at an address that many of
the other movers and shakers of Harlem's Renaissance also call home.
Up on sugar Hill four to oh nine Edgecombe Avenue,
the Grand thirteen story complex, my Harlem tour guide had
told me about during my visit to the neighborhood. It
sits on a raised section of Harlem with sweeping views
(11:15):
to the east. It's home to the likes of W. E. B.
Du Boyce, Aaron Douglas, and, of course, later in her life, Eunice.
But in the winter of nineteen twenty nine, another resident
is walking across the parquet floors and through its lush lobby,
tipping her hat to the dorman.
Speaker 7 (11:34):
When Stephanie Saint Clair lived in that building during the
twenties and the early nineteen thirties, everyone who lived in
that building knew who she was, and they knew what
she did for a living.
Speaker 2 (11:48):
Stephanie Saint Clair is an illegal gambling racketeer, and a
successful one at that. She's known as Harlem's policy Queen.
That means she hed runs the neighborhood numbers game being
played all over Harlem. Saint Clair employs at least fifty
runners who spill out across Harlem, collecting slips and bets
(12:10):
and salons, grocers and living rooms. She is arrogant, fashionable, glamorous,
and smart. She has a reputation for profanity.
Speaker 8 (12:21):
All of this led an air to mystery to her.
That was a part of her mystique.
Speaker 2 (12:28):
She's kagy about the details of her past, but we
know she arrived in New York City from the Caribbean
just prior to the Great Migration, and she's said to
have led a local gang called the Forty Thieves in
her youth until she found her niche in.
Speaker 1 (12:41):
The numbers game.
Speaker 7 (12:42):
Here you have a woman who's able to really build
a small empire in a short amount of time.
Speaker 2 (12:49):
Soon, Eunice Hunting Carter and Stephanie Saint Clair will share
a common enemy, but it's Stephanie who will learn his
name first.
Speaker 7 (13:01):
So Dutch Schultz is this bootlegger. He's a roofless gangster.
Speaker 2 (13:08):
Dutch was a major figure in organized crime from the
nineteen twenties. His family had owned a trucking company, which
came in handy for the transportation of illegal alcohol. But
in nineteen thirty three, with prohibition coming to an end,
his prospects look less profitable. So, just like his associate
Lucky Luciano, he's searching for new opportunities to exploit. Unlike Lucky,
(13:30):
he doesn't have the same kind of charisma about him,
or forethought for that matter.
Speaker 8 (13:36):
Every time he has a run in with someone, he
sort of doubles down, like I gotta kill more people.
I gotta be more aggressive next time. He sort of
consistently learns the wrong lessons.
Speaker 2 (13:50):
So as Lucky's Mott Street boys are moving into sex work,
Dutch Schultz's idea for a new revenue stream is the
neighborhood numbers games, particularly one neighborhood where it appears to
be flourishing.
Speaker 7 (14:03):
This is someone who wants to really control Harlem's numbers racket.
He had been pretty successful in forcing black numbers bankers
out of their businesses by force by violence.
Speaker 2 (14:19):
But just like Eunice, Harlem's policy queen is no pushover.
Speaker 7 (14:28):
Stephanie Sainclair is not going to let someone like a
Dutch Shultz come in and take the business.
Speaker 2 (14:43):
So in the early thirties, just as Unice is holding
her ground, trying to find a path forward in the
male dominated world of law and preventing her career from stagnating,
Stephanie Saint Clair is holding her ground too. She's engaged
in a game of cat and mouse with Schultz. Rumor
has it she's taken to walking across Harlem's rooftops to
(15:04):
avoid being spotted by Dutch or his cronies on the street.
Because Stephanie is still working her numbers business even as
Dutch is trying to box her out, but the mafia
has no issues with strong arming women. With the walls
of prohibition coming down, mobsters across New York are on
the move.
Speaker 9 (15:26):
It's not just the occasional bandit that would stick up
a liquor store. It was very well organized and very
violent coming out of prohibition.
Speaker 2 (15:34):
And the press are jumping on this emerging story. Suddenly,
these mobsters are no longer the friendly facilitators of your
boozy party are putting the wine on your table with dinner.
Speaker 1 (15:45):
They're coming for you.
Speaker 2 (15:47):
They want a thumb in every pie, and they don't
care if that pie is baked with your blood. It's
a story that's salacious, it's got drama. It's perfect for
crime reporters to fill their columns.
Speaker 10 (16:03):
All of a sudden, we began to see more panic.
Speaker 2 (16:09):
And readers are told this crime wave isn't just in
the underworld. It's seeping into everyday life. The rise of
the criminal underworld. Every mobster is a direct threat to
the American way of life. Imagine opening up your morning
paper and reading that while you do your god given
(16:30):
duty as an American husband and father, going to work
each day to put food on the table. Some flashy
gangster wants to rob your store, or kidnap your daughter,
or make you give up your hard earned salary for protection.
Nowhere is safe. Everything has value to the mob.
Speaker 9 (16:58):
This market economy crazy. Everything's for sale. The leading hoodlums
of the day as well as Luciano, talked about everything
being for sale. This is the ultimate market. So cops
are for sale, prosecutors are for sale, judges are for sale.
Sex is for sale. Women are for sale. Everything's for sale.
And whether it's the cop on a beat, then you
give them five bucks to look the other way, or
(17:20):
whether it's somebody higher up in the system or wherever
they were ineffective.
Speaker 2 (17:24):
Those who have been quietly operating on just the other
side of the law until recently, whether it's numbers like
Stephanie Saint Clair or in sex work like Coochie Flow,
are now labeled as complicit with the ones trying to
take over their businesses. Suddenly they're the culprit. It's in
a much bigger scandal.
Speaker 9 (17:41):
New York was practically a failed city. The ability of
the state and the police to maintain law and order
in a democratic way was largely failing, and that there
were all these people. All these gangsters of all kinds,
who operated as virtually independent warlords were practically taking or
the city.
Speaker 2 (18:03):
Are things really as bad as they seem? Is the
very fabric of society falling apart. By the time the
Guardia is elected as mayor on January first, nineteen thirty four,
it doesn't seem to matter.
Speaker 9 (18:18):
Every politician in New York promised to do something about this.
Certainly a Fiorella or the Guardia promised that he would
be the one who would find some way to deal
with completely out of control of crime. There was a
push by all sorts of people to do something.
Speaker 2 (18:46):
The story of how New York came to a point
is mob Crusader is a little convoluted. For the detail oriented,
it's a story Unis might enjoy herself, but for others
it was essentially on the one hand, a problem.
Speaker 9 (19:00):
In New York was, how do you take this random
mayhem of violence and bring it under the law. How
do you do that? That's very difficult.
Speaker 1 (19:10):
And on the other a seemingly unlikely solution.
Speaker 9 (19:14):
Let's have a democratic process that is competent, that is transparent,
but is also strong enough to repress all of this
terrible violence. That was the great challenge that LaGuardia faced
in the thirties.
Speaker 2 (19:29):
The stars needed to somehow align for someone to be
given actual power to go after the mob But who, who,
in the corrupt world of nineteen thirties politics, would be
given that kind of authority, and who would even want
to take on such a dangerous task.
Speaker 1 (19:46):
Well, the answer.
Speaker 2 (19:47):
Came from something called a runaway grand jury. They're basically
a group of citizens chosen to investigate specific allegations of
corruption and vice. But the New York d who appointed
them had underestimated how impatient.
Speaker 1 (20:02):
They were for change.
Speaker 2 (20:04):
They've had enough of the state of politics and corruption
in New York.
Speaker 9 (20:08):
And there was a big stink.
Speaker 2 (20:10):
And so the grand jury ran away all the way
to the Governor of New York up in Albany.
Speaker 9 (20:15):
Grand juries can do lots of stuff, and once they're impaneled,
they not only can call in witnesses and so on,
but they can complain about attorneys.
Speaker 2 (20:24):
Their runaway grand jury demands the governor appoint someone strong
enough to rid the city of mobsters once and for all.
Speaker 9 (20:33):
All right, all right, all right, I'll appoint a special
prosecutor to basically replace the sitting district attorney.
Speaker 2 (20:40):
But the still raises the question of who would want
to do this. It's not like there's a long list
of bipartisan people with the necessary experience who are going
to raise their hands to make matters worse. All of
the governor's initial candidates for the job are rejected by
the grand Jury members. They want someone's an energetic.
Speaker 9 (21:01):
Efficient, confident, hardworking, not camera.
Speaker 2 (21:05):
Shy, focused and ambitious, someone with an extremely striking mustache.
Speaker 11 (21:11):
Thomas Dewey enters the picture on that platform.
Speaker 2 (21:19):
Just a few years after Addie and William Hunton welcomed
their sugar into the world and named her Unice. Thomas
Dewey was born to a middle class family in a Wassaw, Michigan.
Like Eunice, his education was marked by academic excellence. Also,
like Eunice, Dewey's parents were committed Republicans. His dad was
a newspaper man who owned and published a Michigan paper.
Speaker 9 (21:42):
It was an abolitionist newspaper, a pro Lincoln newspaper, and
Dewey himself was very attentive to the media of the day.
As a child, he grew up with this realization that
the printed paper that was important.
Speaker 2 (21:54):
Ever since his early days, Dewey had been something of
a ham. He loves putting on a good show, despite
what some consider an unremarkable appearance. Always well groomed, He's
average height with slick backed hair, part it carefully on
the left side. You could practically count the teeth marks
from his comb. But that facial hair he.
Speaker 9 (22:17):
Insisted on having his little mustache that irritated people. I
can remember my dad, who grew up in New York State,
saying he'd never vote for that Dewey guy because of
that badgum mustache. And I would think, Dad, what's the
mustache got to do with it?
Speaker 1 (22:31):
And Dewey's demeanor yloof, cocky, conceded, condescending, He rubbed a
lot of people the wrong way.
Speaker 9 (22:38):
But he was also ambitious.
Speaker 1 (22:42):
Dewey has one powerful tool for success.
Speaker 9 (22:45):
As a very young man growing up in Michigan, he
was blessed with this remarkable voice, this great baritone voice.
He thought he was going to be a singer, and
he always had a kind of theatrical side to him.
Speaker 2 (22:57):
In college, he'd actually traveled down to North Carolina for
a singing competition.
Speaker 9 (23:02):
And young Tom Dewey sang his way around in the mountains.
Speaker 1 (23:05):
Singing was how Dewey met his future wife.
Speaker 2 (23:08):
Of course, in the end he doesn't pursue a singing career,
but he'd continued to use that voice.
Speaker 12 (23:15):
You witnessed the tragic effect of crime on its victims,
the unbelievable viciousness of the underworld.
Speaker 2 (23:22):
This is from a radio show dow We had on WNYC.
Somehow hypnotic yet energizing at the same time.
Speaker 12 (23:30):
The hardships under which the police another law enforcement agencies labor,
and the schemes and tricks to which criminals resort to
get around the law.
Speaker 2 (23:41):
As Eunice was starting her writing and social career during
the nineteen twenties Harlem Renaissance, Dewey had moved to New
York and launched his legal career, initially in private practice
as a lawyer on Wall Street.
Speaker 1 (23:52):
But that was just the start. Thomas E.
Speaker 13 (23:55):
Dewey decided at one point to have political aspiration along
with his law enforcement aspirations.
Speaker 1 (24:04):
For Dewey, the law is just a wrong on a ladder.
Speaker 9 (24:08):
The problem is that as a politician he lived in
an age of basically very charming and lovable politicians. Franklin
Roosevelt had enough charm for about twelve different people. Fiorella
LaGuardia also a very charming kind of character. So Dewey
had great strengths, but on the charm scale he was
(24:29):
a little challenged.
Speaker 2 (24:30):
But as the son of a newspaper man, do we
know some things the other want to be politicians don't.
Speaker 9 (24:37):
He was friendly with the press because he understood that
to get attention to him, which he craved, it was
important to be involved with the.
Speaker 2 (24:45):
Media, and that irritating little mustache doesn't have quite the
same impact over the airwaves six.
Speaker 4 (24:51):
Pm Naval Observatory Time, New York City's own station WNYC.
Speaker 2 (24:57):
As far as cutting edge mass media tech goes in
the nineteen thirties, audio is it.
Speaker 4 (25:04):
Ladies and gentlemen of the radio audiuce.
Speaker 2 (25:06):
And Dewey is learning how to use it for his
own purposes.
Speaker 4 (25:09):
Station WNYC occupies a prominent place among the radio stations
of our country in the presentation and discussion of the many,
complex and multiple problems which confront all people.
Speaker 2 (25:21):
Radio is his specialty, but as his career progresses, he
keeps all the media close, making sure he's making the
right kind of news.
Speaker 14 (25:30):
I don't think he ever felt that he couldn't manipulate
the press. He knew exactly how to deal with reporters
and with journalists. Did he get that from his family,
from his father?
Speaker 1 (25:41):
Maybe he did.
Speaker 14 (25:42):
He knew how to manipulate people, he knew how to
talk to people.
Speaker 2 (25:46):
By the time Eunice was finishing law school, Dewey had
left Wall Street behind for new opportunities, and around the
time she's failing her first law exams in nineteen thirty one,
he's being appointed as a prosecutor and chief Assistant US Attorney.
As Dewey looks around him at the career trajectory of
other lawyers in his new role, it.
Speaker 1 (26:06):
Seems obvious.
Speaker 2 (26:11):
The higher the profile of the defendant in the dock,
the more pressed attention the prosecutor gets, and the faster
they move up the career ladder. So in nineteen thirty three,
just as Eunice was about to set up her own
law practice down the street from the Tree of Hope,
Dewey gets his shot in the crosshairs. Was a notorious
(26:34):
former bootlegger.
Speaker 9 (26:35):
Waxy Gordon was one of his first.
Speaker 2 (26:37):
Targets, and Dewey is soon making headlines for convicting this
wanted gangster on tax evasion.
Speaker 9 (26:44):
And that's how he first got involved with prosecuting organized crime.
Speaker 2 (26:49):
Next, Dewey turns his eye toward another gangster with another
great name, a colleague of Lucky Luciano's.
Speaker 11 (26:56):
And that was Irish American gangster Jack Legg's diamond.
Speaker 2 (27:01):
Dewey helps put Leg's diamond away too. And so when
nineteen thirty five comes around and the Governor of New
York is looking to appoint his mob busting special prosecutor,
there was the man with the mustache.
Speaker 1 (27:20):
Thomas E.
Speaker 13 (27:21):
Dewey came up like the boys Scout prosecutor.
Speaker 2 (27:29):
Someone not yet tainted by corruption by partisan white male do.
Speaker 9 (27:35):
We had a reputation among both Republicans and Democrats.
Speaker 2 (27:39):
Honestly, the governor doesn't have many other options.
Speaker 11 (27:42):
Thomas Dewey was an idealist. Thomas Dewey was a crusader
who grabbed on to the general public's disenchantment with gangsterism
as a whole.
Speaker 1 (27:57):
It has to be Dewey.
Speaker 11 (27:58):
He totally fit the bill for a guy to take
down the mob.
Speaker 2 (28:16):
Dewey is officially appointed to the role in the spring
of nineteen thirty five He's thirty three years old with
about a decade of law experience. Dewey knows he needs
to strike strategically. A high profile blow was the answer,
like Waxy and Legs, but this time he needs someone
(28:36):
even bigger, someone with an even more violent reputation. One
of these gangsters had gotten rich during Prohibition and is
now spreading out his operations across New York. A huge,
high profile target, he chooses Dutch Schultz. Dutch is going
(28:59):
to be Dewey's ticket to the top, and Dewey knows
he's not going to be able to take him out
on his own. As Dutch chases Stephanie Saint Clair across
Harlem's rooftops, Dewey knows he needs someone on the ground uptown.
(29:35):
It's important to remember respectability is a type of performance.
Lucky Luciano dresses himself in fancy clothes and jewelry to
hide his rough beginnings and fit in places he may
not have been allowed otherwise, And from the summer of
nineteen thirty five, Dewey has his mob crusade to rebuild
the public's trust in the law. Even though Eunice came
(29:57):
from a middle class, well educated black family, it's easy
to assume she still has to be careful about showcasing
her intelligence and predominantly white spaces to avoid ruffling any feathers,
both in her legal career and as she starts participating
in politics working for the LaGuardia campaign. In nineteen twenty nine,
when Unice first started political campaigning during that temporary break
(30:20):
from law school, the Republican Party was losing black voters,
and by nineteen thirty two, as she's graduating from Fordham
and setting up her own practice, the Republican Party is
running black candidates in urban districts. In Harlem, an otherwise
popular incumbent had his campaign severely weakened by corruption allegations.
(30:41):
The Republican Party hoped to find the right candidate to
replace him in the State Assembly. Ideally, they wanted a
black person who was smart, ambitious, outspoken, someone from a
good family who knew Harlem well Eunice Hunting Carter. The
summer of nineteen thirty four is the hottest on record,
(31:04):
and as Unice begins campaigning for the nineteenth district Assembly seat,
I picked to her standing in the heat of a
curious but skeptical Harlem crowd.
Speaker 1 (31:13):
As she makes this.
Speaker 5 (31:13):
Speech for myself, I make no please. I live here,
I have lived here, I am going to continue to
live here. I am one of you, and I want
things for Harlem. I have an eight year old son
whom I hope will live and who I expect to
work here. You have known me for the better part
(31:37):
of half of my life that I have lived right
here with you. I need say no more as to
my interest in this community than the fact that I
will put the community first.
Speaker 2 (31:51):
Despite her socialized status, Unice could not have failed to
see the way many in Harlem had suffered during the
Great Depression.
Speaker 7 (31:58):
So if you were already poor during the Harlem Renaissance,
than you were extremely poor during the nineteen thirties. Now,
people who were already subjected to low wage household work
have to compete with white people who in normal times
would not take those low paying jobs.
Speaker 2 (32:19):
Unice's commitment to the community wins her the endorsement of
the Amsterdam News and the New York Age. She opens
a campaign headquarters just a few blocks north of her
law practice on the Boulevard of Dreams, even closer to
the Tree of Hope this time, so she might have
seen with her own eyes the day workmen arrived to
cut it down. It's a Monday in late August. That
(32:44):
hottest of summer is drawing to a close. Seventh Avenue
is set to be widened, and so the tree has
got to go. A crowd of onlookers gathered to watch,
taking chips of bark with them as souvenirs for a
piece of luck. Just a couple of months after the
(33:05):
tree of Hope comes down, so too do Unice's dreams
of political office.
Speaker 14 (33:11):
She lost by an extremely narrow margin. She almost beat
somebody very popular and incumbent.
Speaker 2 (33:24):
Unice doesn't win the Assembly seat, but she does win herself.
Some powerful political allies. Fiorello LaGuardia, who's now won his
second run at mayor, is among them, and soon she'll
have the opportunity to put her commitment to community to
the test.
Speaker 14 (33:42):
Shortly after that election, there was this terrible race riot
in Harlem.
Speaker 2 (33:54):
March nineteen thirty five is the day the Harlem race
riot began. Art when a teenage boy gets arrested at
a local store.
Speaker 15 (34:03):
After being accused of shoplifting and a store, a white
store in Harlem.
Speaker 7 (34:08):
The police beat him up a little bit, But there's
this room that spreads in Harlem that he's killed.
Speaker 15 (34:13):
He's not killed, he was whisked away by the police.
Speaker 2 (34:16):
This kid, Lino Rivera, is assumed to have been beaten
to death. An agitated crowd descends on the store. A
nearby ambulance speeding away from the scene heightens their confusion.
Suddenly frustrations reached the surface.
Speaker 15 (34:36):
Black people were angry, not only because of the arrest
of that young black man. This is during the depression
when everybody was suffering, but African Americans suffered even more.
All of Black Harlem was not wealthy or elite, lack
of jobs, lack of adequate housing, just determed of getting
a meal, getting something.
Speaker 7 (34:55):
To eat, being surveiled by police, subject to verbal violence
by the police, physical violence by the police, intense policing
of black bodies, and also black spaces to any type
of public space becomes criminalized because there's this perception about
(35:18):
black people and who they are.
Speaker 2 (35:23):
Within hours, hundreds have gathered in protest. Then someone throws
a rock through the store window.
Speaker 15 (35:31):
That was the spark that really ignited.
Speaker 2 (35:34):
Rioting begins throughout the neighborhood. Even though the teenager originally
accused of theft had already been arrested and released. Misinformation, confusion,
and long held grievances take over.
Speaker 15 (35:49):
The revolt against the conditions in which the majority of
black people were living during that time.
Speaker 2 (36:01):
When the rioting subsides, three people have died. There is
an estimated two million dollars in property damage across the community.
Speaker 14 (36:12):
The Mayor, Firella LaGuardia immediately said we have to do something.
Within days, he appointed a commission to look into what
are the causes of this riot and how do we
stop this from happening again.
Speaker 2 (36:28):
Mayor LaGuardia staffs up his commission with more black members
than white, and he.
Speaker 14 (36:33):
Knew Unus just because she had run for office.
Speaker 15 (36:37):
She was the only woman on the commission.
Speaker 14 (36:40):
And as secretary she kept the books. She was kind
of you in charge of what was going on and
keeping the minutes. So this group met and they came
up with some really great suggestions.
Speaker 15 (36:54):
And their report pointed out the reasons for the revolt
and what needed to be done to ensure that African Americans'
concerns were addressed.
Speaker 14 (37:06):
They did a great job, and this was partially because
of Unis.
Speaker 15 (37:10):
If you look at that final version of that report
and was for the time radical in its own right,
because it clearly pinpointed the issues that black people were
dealing with and noted that there were specific kinds of
changes that needed to occur to address the concerns of
the black community.
Speaker 2 (37:28):
The significance of this movement is probably not in what
the Commission would go on to achieve. Many of their
final report recommendations are seen as too progressive, and it
will not surprise you to learn that police brutality, inequality,
and economic disparity all continue in Harlem despite the work
Units and her peers put into the Commission. The Commission
(37:50):
may have been window dressing, but it also marks another
key moment in Unice's ambition. Units had been chosen by
white men nificant power. Her name is clearly out there
now for positions of influence. She's a name the establishment
feels they can trust.
Speaker 1 (38:08):
To call on.
Speaker 2 (38:09):
Maybe not across all of New York, but definitely in Harlem.
While Eunice is working on this committee, she's also spending
some of her time volunteering as a kind of law
clerk in a women's court.
Speaker 13 (38:24):
Sounds outrageously sexist today, but there actually was a women's court.
Speaker 10 (38:31):
In New York City. The women's court is in a
building that still stands, called the Jefferson Market Courthouse.
Speaker 13 (38:38):
It is a.
Speaker 10 (38:39):
Beautiful old Gothic brick building with a big bell tower.
Now actually not far from where the Mott Street Gang
began and had their headquarters. A court that was devoted
entirely to females cremitting crimes like shoplifting or prostitution, or
whatever kinds of vagrancy, whatever sorts of things that women
(39:01):
could be accused of, came out of that same period
that prohibition comes out of that. It seems unlady like
to have strangers sitting in court staring at these women
as they talk about these vice ridden lifestyles and all
these crimes.
Speaker 2 (39:19):
In the summer of nineteen thirty five, Unice's volunteering pays off.
The New York DA appoints Unice as an assistant prosecutor
in the court.
Speaker 14 (39:30):
So when Eunice was hired at the Prosecutor's office in
thirty five, she was the first black woman in the
New York Prosecutor's Office.
Speaker 2 (39:39):
I'm fascinated by Unice's decision to become a prosecutor and
not a public defender. For someone looking to uplift the
black community, it seems an unusual choice.
Speaker 16 (39:50):
I wonder if she saw it as a challenge as
one of the few women and African Americans going into
being a prosecutor. Anyone who is a prosecutor, they were
all pretty feisty and self confident, and I really admire that.
At the same time, I think there are African Americans
who go into becoming prosecutors because it is a traditional
(40:11):
route to power.
Speaker 2 (40:14):
A route to power. Maybe that's it. It's certainly not.
Speaker 1 (40:18):
The glamour of the women's court.
Speaker 10 (40:20):
It was dingy and dirty. There weren't even electric lights
for much of the early twentieth century. It was jammed
with lawyers and dirty cops and judges. It was no
place that anybody wanted to be, but many women were
there of dozens and dozens of times.
Speaker 2 (40:44):
The drama of the court has to get Unice's blood
pumping more than the wills and contracts he was leaving
behind in her private practice. Plus Unice excels and research
like going through court documents, so there's plenty of work,
booking forms, evidence sheets, courtroom transcripts. Detail heaven for someone
like Unice, she looks through every piece of paper she can.
(41:08):
I can picture Unis at a table in the courtroom
with poor lighting, in a room that smells like smoke.
Everyone smoked in public back then. I wonder if she
has a little ashtray by her side. As she pours
over the documents, she probably likes noticing the way information
gets distilled from the frantic energy of the courtroom into
the stenographer's notes. And as she sits there, she starts
(41:31):
noticing patterns. Who signs their names with ex's how often
the same women get picked up, or how so many
of them have the same lawyer it's the same lawyer
for all the women being released without a conviction.
Speaker 1 (41:54):
Does she talk.
Speaker 2 (41:55):
About this pattern with her colleagues? Someone as detail focused
ash she is probably begins taking her own notes, just
in case they'll be useful later. Unice doesn't strike me
as a woman who would notice these things and shrug them.
Speaker 8 (42:11):
Off, files that knowledge away.
Speaker 2 (42:17):
Unice keeps her nose to the grindstone. But soon someone
from city Hall calls looking for her. Because while Unice
has been learning the ropes at the Women's Court, Thomas
Dewey has been appointed new York's Special Prosecutor, and now
he's assembling a team.
Speaker 14 (42:39):
Thomas Dewey said, I am looking for the twenty best
attorneys in New York.
Speaker 2 (42:46):
Hey receives a huge number of applications from lawyers who
all believe they're worthy.
Speaker 14 (42:51):
Because everybody wanted this glamorous, kind of sexy case.
Speaker 2 (42:55):
But Dewey doesn't just want the best. He's looking for
people with very specific skills.
Speaker 14 (43:01):
I don't care their race, I don't care their religion,
I don't care their gender. I want the best people.
He also named Jewish attorneys at the time there were
such a strong streak of anti Semitism.
Speaker 2 (43:12):
Who first suggested the name Eunice Hunting Carter, one.
Speaker 14 (43:16):
Of Dewey's assistants, described her was, Oh, she's a real
go getter. Dewey said, let me interview her. She looks
like she might be a candidate for this.
Speaker 2 (43:26):
Now.
Speaker 14 (43:27):
What made it even harder for Unice was, you can
imagine all these people are white. They're all men. You know,
how on earth would a black woman be on this team.
It was the mid thirties.
Speaker 1 (43:38):
This doesn't seem to put Dewey off.
Speaker 8 (43:43):
He knows he needs to assemble a strong team, but
he also has to assemble a kind of diverse and
also kind of unknown team. And that's because he has
to assemble people who if they're going out into the community,
if they're questioning witnesses, if they're questioning anyone, they don't
(44:06):
necessarily want immediately for someone like dut Schultz to be like,
I know that cop, I know that prosecutor. I've seen
that attorney before. They want people who are knowledgeable but
still a little bit outside of this world.
Speaker 1 (44:23):
Like Unice Carter.
Speaker 14 (44:27):
She knows Harlem. Dewey talk to her and he said, yes,
I want her on my team.
Speaker 2 (44:37):
On July first, nineteen thirty five, Special Prosecutor Thomas A.
Dewey appoints Unice Hunting Carter as a deputy Assistant prosecutor
and the largest investigation of organized crime in US history.
Unice Carter is just thirty six years old, the only
woman and the only person of color on Dewey's team, the.
Speaker 1 (45:00):
Only black woman.
Speaker 2 (45:02):
Her hiring instantly makes national news, but that's nothing compared
to the headlines she's about to generate that's coming up
in episode five of The Godmother. In this episode of
(45:24):
The Godmother, you heard.
Speaker 10 (45:27):
I'm Debbie Applegate. I'm a historian and biographer, and I
am the author of Madam, The Biography of Polyadler Icon
of the Jazz Age.
Speaker 11 (45:37):
My name is Christian Sippolini and I am an organized
crime historian and author.
Speaker 14 (45:44):
I'm Marilyn Greenwald. I'm a professor Emerita of Journalism at
Ohio University, and I'm the author of five biographies, including
one of Eunice Hunt and Carter.
Speaker 1 (45:53):
My name is Leshawn Harris.
Speaker 7 (45:55):
I am an Associate professor of history at Michigan State
University in the Department of History.
Speaker 15 (46:01):
My name is doctor Clarissa Myrik Harris, and I am
a tenured professor of Africana Studies at Moorhouse College in Atlanta, Georgia.
Speaker 2 (46:15):
HI.
Speaker 17 (46:15):
My name is Ellen Paulson. My research and I write
books about criminal acts and davis that took place during
the nineteen thirties in the United States, and my focus
so far has been women who were involved with notworious
gangsters and desperadoes.
Speaker 9 (46:36):
My name is Robert Whalan and I'm an Amerithus Professor
of History at Queen's University of Charlotte here in Charlotte,
North Carolina.
Speaker 8 (46:45):
I am Claire White, and I am the director of
Education at the Mob Museum in downtown Las Vegas.
Speaker 16 (46:52):
I'm Gatherine Powell, the Unis Hunt and Carter Research Professor
of Law at Port of Law School.
Speaker 9 (46:58):
My name is Chuck Greeves.
Speaker 18 (47:00):
Becoming a writer, I spent twenty five years as a
Los Angeles trial lawyer. My fourth novel was basically a
fictionalization of the famous nineteen thirty six vice trial.
Speaker 2 (47:20):
The Godmother is produced by Novel for iHeartRadio. For more
from novel, visit novel dot Audio. The Godmother is hosted
and written by me Nicole Perkins. Our producer is Leona Hamid.
Additional production from Ajuajima Broumpong, Ronald Young Junior and Zianna Yusuf.
(47:41):
Our editor is Ajua Jima Broumpong. Additional story editing from
Max O'Brien and Mitha Lee Raw and our researcher is
Ziana Yusuf. Additional research from Mohammed Ahmed. David Waters is
our executive producer. Field production by Tnito Romani and Pallas Shaw,
Sound design, mixing and school by Daniel Kempsen. Our score
(48:02):
was written, performed and recorded by Jeff Parker. Music supervision
by Nicholas Alexander and David Waters. Production management and endless
patients from Charie Houston, Sarah Tobin and Charlotte Wolfe. Fact
checking by Fendel Fulton and Donia Suleiman. Story development by
Madeline Parr, Jess Swinburne, Esseana Yusuf. Willard Foxton is our
(48:26):
Creative Director of Development. Special thanks to Leah Carter, Stephen Carter,
Angela J. Davis, Andrew Fernley, Marilyn Greenwald, Sondra Lebedy, Katherine Godfrey,
Nadia Maidie, Amalia Sortland, Sean Glenn, Neil Krishnan, Julia Bromberg,
(48:48):
Katrina Norvelle, Carly Frankel, and all the team at w
Emmy
Speaker 1 (49:02):
Novel
Novel.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Before we begin, a content warning. The following episode contains
difficult themes and violence. Mama, I called my mom back
in the middle of lunch recently?
Speaker 3 (00:24):
What you doing looking at YouTube videos?
Speaker 2 (00:31):
I'd missed her earlier call, and she tends to worry
if I take too long to call her back. So
I thought I'd make use of the opportunity to ask
her about a connection I have to Eunice Carter's story.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
Let me ask you this.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
Do you know anybody who ran numbers?
Speaker 3 (00:45):
Play dumb?
Speaker 4 (00:46):
Yes?
Speaker 5 (00:47):
Yeah, uh huh.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
Let me see what was his name? He was a
big number man in Nashville, Girl. He long needed money
to get the bath hom fixed.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
My childhood in Nashville and Harlem nineteen twenties are quite
different in lots of ways. But if the little slips
of paper I sometimes saw in my uncle's pockets as
a child, or anything to go by black folks playing
the numbers is a shared history across America. My late
great uncle was a hard working, respectable man. He was quiet, stern,
(01:21):
kept his own private stash of Pepsi's no one else
was allowed to drink. But he had a gold tooth
that winked out at the world when he laughed, showing
a little bit of the slick country charm that must
have stolen my aunt's heart. He believed in the stability
of an honest day's work, but he also enjoyed taking
a chance on the game of numbers. There was community
(01:43):
in the game. If the meteorologist on television said we
were going to have four days of ninety eight degree weather,
a living room chorus of elders would erupt four ninety eight.
Write that down, play that number. The numbers game is
like an unofficial lottery. To play, you start by selecting
any three digit number and betting some money on it
(02:04):
with a bookmaker.
Speaker 3 (02:06):
You could claim the number and you put a nickel
like just say on at a thirteen.
Speaker 2 (02:13):
The winning digits are announced the next day by whoever
runs the game. They're usually drawn from some random, publicly published,
hard to predict number, like the last three digits of
Federal Reserve Bank clearings for that day. A lot of
people had a special system for figuring out which numbers
to bet. My great uncle was one of them.
Speaker 3 (02:33):
He would sit down to workout numbers certain times, so
the years, certain numbers always fall.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
I remember one time my uncle deviated from his system
by asking my cousin, who was studying to become a
preacher at the time, to look in the Bible for
some divine help.
Speaker 3 (02:50):
And she wouldn't do it.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
She wouldn't do it.
Speaker 3 (02:53):
Yeah, the numbers game is a game of chance.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
My aunt and her husband would host our extended family
for almost all the major holidays and family events. My
uncle's friends would come over, and after all the greeting
formalities were out of the way, they'd ask what it
hit for, and the jargon would fly too quickly for
my child's mind to follow. I still wasn't really sure
what the numbers were. I just knew that a lot
(03:21):
of conversations with a certain group of elders included them
asking each other if their number had hit today, and
if someone showed up with a new car, they look
at the license plate and say, I'm gonna play that number.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
One time. Maybe. When I was around six years.
Speaker 2 (03:38):
Old, the house was full of people and music and food.
All the big elders were sitting at the kitchen table
reminiscing and laughing. There was a gallon jug of what
I thought was great fruit punch sitting there between the
ash trays and discarded dessert plates. I decided to help
myself to a cup. But I remember I'm thinking that
(04:00):
it was great creature cooler because it was just in
a one of them regular old classic gallon jumps. I
thought it was a local brand of fruit punch. My
granddaddy stopped me just in time to keep me from
drinking some homemade wine.
Speaker 3 (04:14):
Yeah it to you, so whatever you know.
Speaker 2 (04:24):
As fuzzy as this memory is, it's one of my favorites,
especially now that forty years later, so much has changed.
Granddaddy's been gone a long time. We can't trust my
great aunt, once famous for her hot water corn bread
and potato salad, to cook anymore, and my great uncle,
her husband, passed away several years ago as well. By
(04:49):
the time I was a teenager, my great aunt and
uncle had stopped drinking and smoking, but I think my
uncle maintained.
Speaker 1 (04:55):
At least that one little vice.
Speaker 2 (05:02):
As Unice Hunting Carter walked through the streets of Harlem,
perhaps on her way to and from law school, the
numbers game would have been going on all around her too,
not necessarily out in the open. Playing the numbers is
a secretive business. That's why some of my mom's answers
are a bit frustratingly vague.
Speaker 6 (05:22):
People that were running the numbers, they looked like your
average person. You could go to the barber shops, the
beauty shops, the worst store.
Speaker 2 (05:31):
To who though like it had to be somebody on
the side. It wasn't actually going to Kroger and placing
a bit with crogh.
Speaker 3 (05:38):
The Tennessee has a state.
Speaker 1 (05:40):
Lottery, right, but I'm not talking about the lottery. I'm
talking about numbers like that's nothing different.
Speaker 3 (05:47):
Numbers were supposed to be illegal.
Speaker 2 (05:50):
It was a shared, open secret between friends. Lucrative but illegal.
Speaker 6 (05:56):
Well, but your contact was they would tell you who
you need to see in.
Speaker 3 (06:02):
The grocery store. Agana could have worked there. It could
have been the butcher, could have been anybody in Nick.
The reason why it was illegal is because it was
an underground thing and it was mostly in the black neighborhoods,
just like up in Harlem.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
So in Harlem, as the twenties turned to the thirties
and Eunice was learning the letter of the law, she
passes many of her neighbors who are surviving by breaking it.
Not that many play the numbers because they thought it
was going to make them rich.
Speaker 1 (06:36):
The odds of winning are six hundred to one.
Speaker 3 (06:39):
The more money you put on it to bi of
your return. So they would put.
Speaker 6 (06:44):
A penny on the number, they put a.
Speaker 3 (06:47):
Niffle, they put a quarter. People didn't make a whole lot.
Speaker 2 (06:50):
Of money in it as ordinary to my childhood as
a cabbage patch kid or the sounds of MTV playing
in the background. For a long time. It's also been
a way to establish hope and agency and black communities,
especially when times got hard. But where does all the
money go?
Speaker 3 (07:11):
Nobody win, but people like the people all at what
all that money adds up?
Speaker 2 (07:18):
Seems like in Unice's days, just as in my childhood,
the people running the game are the ones making the profits.
And in Harlem in the nineteen twenties and into the
early thirties, one of those people was called Stephanie Saint Clair,
as glamorous and as ambitious as Unice. But just as
we saw in Atlanta in nineteen oh six during the
(07:40):
violent riots that shaped the trajectory of Unus's life, black
wealth attracts a lot of white attention.
Speaker 3 (07:49):
Black folks said that then white folks won it.
Speaker 2 (07:53):
They could from the teams at iHeartRadio and novel. I'm
Nicole Perkins and this is the God Episode four Panic,
(08:38):
New York City, Wednesday morning, November twentieth, nineteen twenty nine,
and unus hunting. Carter has just started her break from
Fordham Law School. This morning, she's getting ready for a
day of political campaigning for Republican mayorial candidate Fiorella LaGuardia.
But right now, in this moment, she's taking time for
(09:01):
herself to read the newspaper. She opens the New York
Amsterdam News. Her eyes are immediately drawn to a large ad.
It features a glamorous black woman looking back at Unice.
She's wearing a coat, jewels what looks like a close hat.
Her hands rest just above her hips. Beneath the picture,
(09:24):
she's written a letter addressed to the people of New
York City.
Speaker 1 (09:28):
To the members of my race.
Speaker 2 (09:30):
I have received letters and telephone messages from men who
have annoyed me very much, and I take this occasion
to ask them publicly to please not annoy me. I,
Madame Saint clair Am not looking for a husband or
a sweetheart. Eunice recognizes the woman in the ad immediately, so.
Speaker 7 (09:56):
Stephanie Sinclair is very, very flamboyant.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
One of Harlem's wealthiest and more notorious residents. And maybe
the two of them have more in common than at
first glance.
Speaker 7 (10:10):
Their backgrounds are different, but these two women are the same.
They want the same things. Then they see themselves as leaders.
Speaker 2 (10:19):
By this point, at the end of the twenties, Stephanie
Saint Clair is in the paper all the time, in
her own ads like this one and in news articles.
By today's standards, she'd be a millionaire, and she is
not coy about it.
Speaker 8 (10:36):
She's one of those people who would definitely be famous
in twenty twenty three. Stephanie Sinclair knew how to use
the press. She knew how to use word of mouth.
She knew how to use gossip.
Speaker 2 (10:54):
Stephanie Saint Clair lives at an address that many of
the other movers and shakers of Harlem's Renaissance also call home.
Up on sugar Hill four to oh nine Edgecombe Avenue,
the Grand thirteen story complex, my Harlem tour guide had
told me about during my visit to the neighborhood. It
sits on a raised section of Harlem with sweeping views
(11:15):
to the east. It's home to the likes of W. E. B.
Du Boyce, Aaron Douglas, and, of course, later in her life, Eunice.
But in the winter of nineteen twenty nine, another resident
is walking across the parquet floors and through its lush lobby,
tipping her hat to the dorman.
Speaker 7 (11:34):
When Stephanie Saint Clair lived in that building during the
twenties and the early nineteen thirties, everyone who lived in
that building knew who she was, and they knew what
she did for a living.
Speaker 2 (11:48):
Stephanie Saint Clair is an illegal gambling racketeer, and a
successful one at that. She's known as Harlem's policy Queen.
That means she hed runs the neighborhood numbers game being
played all over Harlem. Saint Clair employs at least fifty
runners who spill out across Harlem, collecting slips and bets
(12:10):
and salons, grocers and living rooms. She is arrogant, fashionable, glamorous,
and smart. She has a reputation for profanity.
Speaker 8 (12:21):
All of this led an air to mystery to her.
That was a part of her mystique.
Speaker 2 (12:28):
She's kagy about the details of her past, but we
know she arrived in New York City from the Caribbean
just prior to the Great Migration, and she's said to
have led a local gang called the Forty Thieves in
her youth until she found her niche in.
Speaker 1 (12:41):
The numbers game.
Speaker 7 (12:42):
Here you have a woman who's able to really build
a small empire in a short amount of time.
Speaker 2 (12:49):
Soon, Eunice Hunting Carter and Stephanie Saint Clair will share
a common enemy, but it's Stephanie who will learn his
name first.
Speaker 7 (13:01):
So Dutch Schultz is this bootlegger. He's a roofless gangster.
Speaker 2 (13:08):
Dutch was a major figure in organized crime from the
nineteen twenties. His family had owned a trucking company, which
came in handy for the transportation of illegal alcohol. But
in nineteen thirty three, with prohibition coming to an end,
his prospects look less profitable. So, just like his associate
Lucky Luciano, he's searching for new opportunities to exploit. Unlike Lucky,
(13:30):
he doesn't have the same kind of charisma about him,
or forethought for that matter.
Speaker 8 (13:36):
Every time he has a run in with someone, he
sort of doubles down, like I gotta kill more people.
I gotta be more aggressive next time. He sort of
consistently learns the wrong lessons.
Speaker 2 (13:50):
So as Lucky's Mott Street boys are moving into sex work,
Dutch Schultz's idea for a new revenue stream is the
neighborhood numbers games, particularly one neighborhood where it appears to
be flourishing.
Speaker 7 (14:03):
This is someone who wants to really control Harlem's numbers racket.
He had been pretty successful in forcing black numbers bankers
out of their businesses by force by violence.
Speaker 2 (14:19):
But just like Eunice, Harlem's policy queen is no pushover.
Speaker 7 (14:28):
Stephanie Sainclair is not going to let someone like a
Dutch Shultz come in and take the business.
Speaker 2 (14:43):
So in the early thirties, just as Unice is holding
her ground, trying to find a path forward in the
male dominated world of law and preventing her career from stagnating,
Stephanie Saint Clair is holding her ground too. She's engaged
in a game of cat and mouse with Schultz. Rumor
has it she's taken to walking across Harlem's rooftops to
(15:04):
avoid being spotted by Dutch or his cronies on the street.
Because Stephanie is still working her numbers business even as
Dutch is trying to box her out, but the mafia
has no issues with strong arming women. With the walls
of prohibition coming down, mobsters across New York are on
the move.
Speaker 9 (15:26):
It's not just the occasional bandit that would stick up
a liquor store. It was very well organized and very
violent coming out of prohibition.
Speaker 2 (15:34):
And the press are jumping on this emerging story. Suddenly,
these mobsters are no longer the friendly facilitators of your
boozy party are putting the wine on your table with dinner.
Speaker 1 (15:45):
They're coming for you.
Speaker 2 (15:47):
They want a thumb in every pie, and they don't
care if that pie is baked with your blood. It's
a story that's salacious, it's got drama. It's perfect for
crime reporters to fill their columns.
Speaker 10 (16:03):
All of a sudden, we began to see more panic.
Speaker 2 (16:09):
And readers are told this crime wave isn't just in
the underworld. It's seeping into everyday life. The rise of
the criminal underworld. Every mobster is a direct threat to
the American way of life. Imagine opening up your morning
paper and reading that while you do your god given
(16:30):
duty as an American husband and father, going to work
each day to put food on the table. Some flashy
gangster wants to rob your store, or kidnap your daughter,
or make you give up your hard earned salary for protection.
Nowhere is safe. Everything has value to the mob.
Speaker 9 (16:58):
This market economy crazy. Everything's for sale. The leading hoodlums
of the day as well as Luciano, talked about everything
being for sale. This is the ultimate market. So cops
are for sale, prosecutors are for sale, judges are for sale.
Sex is for sale. Women are for sale. Everything's for sale.
And whether it's the cop on a beat, then you
give them five bucks to look the other way, or
(17:20):
whether it's somebody higher up in the system or wherever
they were ineffective.
Speaker 2 (17:24):
Those who have been quietly operating on just the other
side of the law until recently, whether it's numbers like
Stephanie Saint Clair or in sex work like Coochie Flow,
are now labeled as complicit with the ones trying to
take over their businesses. Suddenly they're the culprit. It's in
a much bigger scandal.
Speaker 9 (17:41):
New York was practically a failed city. The ability of
the state and the police to maintain law and order
in a democratic way was largely failing, and that there
were all these people. All these gangsters of all kinds,
who operated as virtually independent warlords were practically taking or
the city.
Speaker 2 (18:03):
Are things really as bad as they seem? Is the
very fabric of society falling apart. By the time the
Guardia is elected as mayor on January first, nineteen thirty four,
it doesn't seem to matter.
Speaker 9 (18:18):
Every politician in New York promised to do something about this.
Certainly a Fiorella or the Guardia promised that he would
be the one who would find some way to deal
with completely out of control of crime. There was a
push by all sorts of people to do something.
Speaker 2 (18:46):
The story of how New York came to a point
is mob Crusader is a little convoluted. For the detail oriented,
it's a story Unis might enjoy herself, but for others
it was essentially on the one hand, a problem.
Speaker 9 (19:00):
In New York was, how do you take this random
mayhem of violence and bring it under the law. How
do you do that? That's very difficult.
Speaker 1 (19:10):
And on the other a seemingly unlikely solution.
Speaker 9 (19:14):
Let's have a democratic process that is competent, that is transparent,
but is also strong enough to repress all of this
terrible violence. That was the great challenge that LaGuardia faced
in the thirties.
Speaker 2 (19:29):
The stars needed to somehow align for someone to be
given actual power to go after the mob But who, who,
in the corrupt world of nineteen thirties politics, would be
given that kind of authority, and who would even want
to take on such a dangerous task.
Speaker 1 (19:46):
Well, the answer.
Speaker 2 (19:47):
Came from something called a runaway grand jury. They're basically
a group of citizens chosen to investigate specific allegations of
corruption and vice. But the New York d who appointed
them had underestimated how impatient.
Speaker 1 (20:02):
They were for change.
Speaker 2 (20:04):
They've had enough of the state of politics and corruption
in New York.
Speaker 9 (20:08):
And there was a big stink.
Speaker 2 (20:10):
And so the grand jury ran away all the way
to the Governor of New York up in Albany.
Speaker 9 (20:15):
Grand juries can do lots of stuff, and once they're impaneled,
they not only can call in witnesses and so on,
but they can complain about attorneys.
Speaker 2 (20:24):
Their runaway grand jury demands the governor appoint someone strong
enough to rid the city of mobsters once and for all.
Speaker 9 (20:33):
All right, all right, all right, I'll appoint a special
prosecutor to basically replace the sitting district attorney.
Speaker 2 (20:40):
But the still raises the question of who would want
to do this. It's not like there's a long list
of bipartisan people with the necessary experience who are going
to raise their hands to make matters worse. All of
the governor's initial candidates for the job are rejected by
the grand Jury members. They want someone's an energetic.
Speaker 9 (21:01):
Efficient, confident, hardworking, not camera.
Speaker 2 (21:05):
Shy, focused and ambitious, someone with an extremely striking mustache.
Speaker 11 (21:11):
Thomas Dewey enters the picture on that platform.
Speaker 2 (21:19):
Just a few years after Addie and William Hunton welcomed
their sugar into the world and named her Unice. Thomas
Dewey was born to a middle class family in a Wassaw, Michigan.
Like Eunice, his education was marked by academic excellence. Also,
like Eunice, Dewey's parents were committed Republicans. His dad was
a newspaper man who owned and published a Michigan paper.
Speaker 9 (21:42):
It was an abolitionist newspaper, a pro Lincoln newspaper, and
Dewey himself was very attentive to the media of the day.
As a child, he grew up with this realization that
the printed paper that was important.
Speaker 2 (21:54):
Ever since his early days, Dewey had been something of
a ham. He loves putting on a good show, despite
what some consider an unremarkable appearance. Always well groomed, He's
average height with slick backed hair, part it carefully on
the left side. You could practically count the teeth marks
from his comb. But that facial hair he.
Speaker 9 (22:17):
Insisted on having his little mustache that irritated people. I
can remember my dad, who grew up in New York State,
saying he'd never vote for that Dewey guy because of
that badgum mustache. And I would think, Dad, what's the
mustache got to do with it?
Speaker 1 (22:31):
And Dewey's demeanor yloof, cocky, conceded, condescending, He rubbed a
lot of people the wrong way.
Speaker 9 (22:38):
But he was also ambitious.
Speaker 1 (22:42):
Dewey has one powerful tool for success.
Speaker 9 (22:45):
As a very young man growing up in Michigan, he
was blessed with this remarkable voice, this great baritone voice.
He thought he was going to be a singer, and
he always had a kind of theatrical side to him.
Speaker 2 (22:57):
In college, he'd actually traveled down to North Carolina for
a singing competition.
Speaker 9 (23:02):
And young Tom Dewey sang his way around in the mountains.
Speaker 1 (23:05):
Singing was how Dewey met his future wife.
Speaker 2 (23:08):
Of course, in the end he doesn't pursue a singing career,
but he'd continued to use that voice.
Speaker 12 (23:15):
You witnessed the tragic effect of crime on its victims,
the unbelievable viciousness of the underworld.
Speaker 2 (23:22):
This is from a radio show dow We had on WNYC.
Somehow hypnotic yet energizing at the same time.
Speaker 12 (23:30):
The hardships under which the police another law enforcement agencies labor,
and the schemes and tricks to which criminals resort to
get around the law.
Speaker 2 (23:41):
As Eunice was starting her writing and social career during
the nineteen twenties Harlem Renaissance, Dewey had moved to New
York and launched his legal career, initially in private practice
as a lawyer on Wall Street.
Speaker 1 (23:52):
But that was just the start. Thomas E.
Speaker 13 (23:55):
Dewey decided at one point to have political aspiration along
with his law enforcement aspirations.
Speaker 1 (24:04):
For Dewey, the law is just a wrong on a ladder.
Speaker 9 (24:08):
The problem is that as a politician he lived in
an age of basically very charming and lovable politicians. Franklin
Roosevelt had enough charm for about twelve different people. Fiorella
LaGuardia also a very charming kind of character. So Dewey
had great strengths, but on the charm scale he was
(24:29):
a little challenged.
Speaker 2 (24:30):
But as the son of a newspaper man, do we
know some things the other want to be politicians don't.
Speaker 9 (24:37):
He was friendly with the press because he understood that
to get attention to him, which he craved, it was
important to be involved with the.
Speaker 2 (24:45):
Media, and that irritating little mustache doesn't have quite the
same impact over the airwaves six.
Speaker 4 (24:51):
Pm Naval Observatory Time, New York City's own station WNYC.
Speaker 2 (24:57):
As far as cutting edge mass media tech goes in
the nineteen thirties, audio is it.
Speaker 4 (25:04):
Ladies and gentlemen of the radio audiuce.
Speaker 2 (25:06):
And Dewey is learning how to use it for his
own purposes.
Speaker 4 (25:09):
Station WNYC occupies a prominent place among the radio stations
of our country in the presentation and discussion of the many,
complex and multiple problems which confront all people.
Speaker 2 (25:21):
Radio is his specialty, but as his career progresses, he
keeps all the media close, making sure he's making the
right kind of news.
Speaker 14 (25:30):
I don't think he ever felt that he couldn't manipulate
the press. He knew exactly how to deal with reporters
and with journalists. Did he get that from his family,
from his father?
Speaker 1 (25:41):
Maybe he did.
Speaker 14 (25:42):
He knew how to manipulate people, he knew how to
talk to people.
Speaker 2 (25:46):
By the time Eunice was finishing law school, Dewey had
left Wall Street behind for new opportunities, and around the
time she's failing her first law exams in nineteen thirty one,
he's being appointed as a prosecutor and chief Assistant US Attorney.
As Dewey looks around him at the career trajectory of
other lawyers in his new role, it.
Speaker 1 (26:06):
Seems obvious.
Speaker 2 (26:11):
The higher the profile of the defendant in the dock,
the more pressed attention the prosecutor gets, and the faster
they move up the career ladder. So in nineteen thirty three,
just as Eunice was about to set up her own
law practice down the street from the Tree of Hope,
Dewey gets his shot in the crosshairs. Was a notorious
(26:34):
former bootlegger.
Speaker 9 (26:35):
Waxy Gordon was one of his first.
Speaker 2 (26:37):
Targets, and Dewey is soon making headlines for convicting this
wanted gangster on tax evasion.
Speaker 9 (26:44):
And that's how he first got involved with prosecuting organized crime.
Speaker 2 (26:49):
Next, Dewey turns his eye toward another gangster with another
great name, a colleague of Lucky Luciano's.
Speaker 11 (26:56):
And that was Irish American gangster Jack Legg's diamond.
Speaker 2 (27:01):
Dewey helps put Leg's diamond away too. And so when
nineteen thirty five comes around and the Governor of New
York is looking to appoint his mob busting special prosecutor,
there was the man with the mustache.
Speaker 1 (27:20):
Thomas E.
Speaker 13 (27:21):
Dewey came up like the boys Scout prosecutor.
Speaker 2 (27:29):
Someone not yet tainted by corruption by partisan white male do.
Speaker 9 (27:35):
We had a reputation among both Republicans and Democrats.
Speaker 2 (27:39):
Honestly, the governor doesn't have many other options.
Speaker 11 (27:42):
Thomas Dewey was an idealist. Thomas Dewey was a crusader
who grabbed on to the general public's disenchantment with gangsterism
as a whole.
Speaker 1 (27:57):
It has to be Dewey.
Speaker 11 (27:58):
He totally fit the bill for a guy to take
down the mob.
Speaker 2 (28:16):
Dewey is officially appointed to the role in the spring
of nineteen thirty five He's thirty three years old with
about a decade of law experience. Dewey knows he needs
to strike strategically. A high profile blow was the answer,
like Waxy and Legs, but this time he needs someone
(28:36):
even bigger, someone with an even more violent reputation. One
of these gangsters had gotten rich during Prohibition and is
now spreading out his operations across New York. A huge,
high profile target, he chooses Dutch Schultz. Dutch is going
(28:59):
to be Dewey's ticket to the top, and Dewey knows
he's not going to be able to take him out
on his own. As Dutch chases Stephanie Saint Clair across
Harlem's rooftops, Dewey knows he needs someone on the ground uptown.
(29:35):
It's important to remember respectability is a type of performance.
Lucky Luciano dresses himself in fancy clothes and jewelry to
hide his rough beginnings and fit in places he may
not have been allowed otherwise, And from the summer of
nineteen thirty five, Dewey has his mob crusade to rebuild
the public's trust in the law. Even though Eunice came
(29:57):
from a middle class, well educated black family, it's easy
to assume she still has to be careful about showcasing
her intelligence and predominantly white spaces to avoid ruffling any feathers,
both in her legal career and as she starts participating
in politics working for the LaGuardia campaign. In nineteen twenty nine,
when Unice first started political campaigning during that temporary break
(30:20):
from law school, the Republican Party was losing black voters,
and by nineteen thirty two, as she's graduating from Fordham
and setting up her own practice, the Republican Party is
running black candidates in urban districts. In Harlem, an otherwise
popular incumbent had his campaign severely weakened by corruption allegations.
(30:41):
The Republican Party hoped to find the right candidate to
replace him in the State Assembly. Ideally, they wanted a
black person who was smart, ambitious, outspoken, someone from a
good family who knew Harlem well Eunice Hunting Carter. The
summer of nineteen thirty four is the hottest on record,
(31:04):
and as Unice begins campaigning for the nineteenth district Assembly seat,
I picked to her standing in the heat of a
curious but skeptical Harlem crowd.
Speaker 1 (31:13):
As she makes this.
Speaker 5 (31:13):
Speech for myself, I make no please. I live here,
I have lived here, I am going to continue to
live here. I am one of you, and I want
things for Harlem. I have an eight year old son
whom I hope will live and who I expect to
work here. You have known me for the better part
(31:37):
of half of my life that I have lived right
here with you. I need say no more as to
my interest in this community than the fact that I
will put the community first.
Speaker 2 (31:51):
Despite her socialized status, Unice could not have failed to
see the way many in Harlem had suffered during the
Great Depression.
Speaker 7 (31:58):
So if you were already poor during the Harlem Renaissance,
than you were extremely poor during the nineteen thirties. Now,
people who were already subjected to low wage household work
have to compete with white people who in normal times
would not take those low paying jobs.
Speaker 2 (32:19):
Unice's commitment to the community wins her the endorsement of
the Amsterdam News and the New York Age. She opens
a campaign headquarters just a few blocks north of her
law practice on the Boulevard of Dreams, even closer to
the Tree of Hope this time, so she might have
seen with her own eyes the day workmen arrived to
cut it down. It's a Monday in late August. That
(32:44):
hottest of summer is drawing to a close. Seventh Avenue
is set to be widened, and so the tree has
got to go. A crowd of onlookers gathered to watch,
taking chips of bark with them as souvenirs for a
piece of luck. Just a couple of months after the
(33:05):
tree of Hope comes down, so too do Unice's dreams
of political office.
Speaker 14 (33:11):
She lost by an extremely narrow margin. She almost beat
somebody very popular and incumbent.
Speaker 2 (33:24):
Unice doesn't win the Assembly seat, but she does win herself.
Some powerful political allies. Fiorello LaGuardia, who's now won his
second run at mayor, is among them, and soon she'll
have the opportunity to put her commitment to community to
the test.
Speaker 14 (33:42):
Shortly after that election, there was this terrible race riot
in Harlem.
Speaker 2 (33:54):
March nineteen thirty five is the day the Harlem race
riot began. Art when a teenage boy gets arrested at
a local store.
Speaker 15 (34:03):
After being accused of shoplifting and a store, a white
store in Harlem.
Speaker 7 (34:08):
The police beat him up a little bit, But there's
this room that spreads in Harlem that he's killed.
Speaker 15 (34:13):
He's not killed, he was whisked away by the police.
Speaker 2 (34:16):
This kid, Lino Rivera, is assumed to have been beaten
to death. An agitated crowd descends on the store. A
nearby ambulance speeding away from the scene heightens their confusion.
Suddenly frustrations reached the surface.
Speaker 15 (34:36):
Black people were angry, not only because of the arrest
of that young black man. This is during the depression
when everybody was suffering, but African Americans suffered even more.
All of Black Harlem was not wealthy or elite, lack
of jobs, lack of adequate housing, just determed of getting
a meal, getting something.
Speaker 7 (34:55):
To eat, being surveiled by police, subject to verbal violence
by the police, physical violence by the police, intense policing
of black bodies, and also black spaces to any type
of public space becomes criminalized because there's this perception about
(35:18):
black people and who they are.
Speaker 2 (35:23):
Within hours, hundreds have gathered in protest. Then someone throws
a rock through the store window.
Speaker 15 (35:31):
That was the spark that really ignited.
Speaker 2 (35:34):
Rioting begins throughout the neighborhood. Even though the teenager originally
accused of theft had already been arrested and released. Misinformation, confusion,
and long held grievances take over.
Speaker 15 (35:49):
The revolt against the conditions in which the majority of
black people were living during that time.
Speaker 2 (36:01):
When the rioting subsides, three people have died. There is
an estimated two million dollars in property damage across the community.
Speaker 14 (36:12):
The Mayor, Firella LaGuardia immediately said we have to do something.
Within days, he appointed a commission to look into what
are the causes of this riot and how do we
stop this from happening again.
Speaker 2 (36:28):
Mayor LaGuardia staffs up his commission with more black members
than white, and he.
Speaker 14 (36:33):
Knew Unus just because she had run for office.
Speaker 15 (36:37):
She was the only woman on the commission.
Speaker 14 (36:40):
And as secretary she kept the books. She was kind
of you in charge of what was going on and
keeping the minutes. So this group met and they came
up with some really great suggestions.
Speaker 15 (36:54):
And their report pointed out the reasons for the revolt
and what needed to be done to ensure that African Americans'
concerns were addressed.
Speaker 14 (37:06):
They did a great job, and this was partially because
of Unis.
Speaker 15 (37:10):
If you look at that final version of that report
and was for the time radical in its own right,
because it clearly pinpointed the issues that black people were
dealing with and noted that there were specific kinds of
changes that needed to occur to address the concerns of
the black community.
Speaker 2 (37:28):
The significance of this movement is probably not in what
the Commission would go on to achieve. Many of their
final report recommendations are seen as too progressive, and it
will not surprise you to learn that police brutality, inequality,
and economic disparity all continue in Harlem despite the work
Units and her peers put into the Commission. The Commission
(37:50):
may have been window dressing, but it also marks another
key moment in Unice's ambition. Units had been chosen by
white men nificant power. Her name is clearly out there
now for positions of influence. She's a name the establishment
feels they can trust.
Speaker 1 (38:08):
To call on.
Speaker 2 (38:09):
Maybe not across all of New York, but definitely in Harlem.
While Eunice is working on this committee, she's also spending
some of her time volunteering as a kind of law
clerk in a women's court.
Speaker 13 (38:24):
Sounds outrageously sexist today, but there actually was a women's court.
Speaker 10 (38:31):
In New York City. The women's court is in a
building that still stands, called the Jefferson Market Courthouse.
Speaker 13 (38:38):
It is a.
Speaker 10 (38:39):
Beautiful old Gothic brick building with a big bell tower.
Now actually not far from where the Mott Street Gang
began and had their headquarters. A court that was devoted
entirely to females cremitting crimes like shoplifting or prostitution, or
whatever kinds of vagrancy, whatever sorts of things that women
(39:01):
could be accused of, came out of that same period
that prohibition comes out of that. It seems unlady like
to have strangers sitting in court staring at these women
as they talk about these vice ridden lifestyles and all
these crimes.
Speaker 2 (39:19):
In the summer of nineteen thirty five, Unice's volunteering pays off.
The New York DA appoints Unice as an assistant prosecutor
in the court.
Speaker 14 (39:30):
So when Eunice was hired at the Prosecutor's office in
thirty five, she was the first black woman in the
New York Prosecutor's Office.
Speaker 2 (39:39):
I'm fascinated by Unice's decision to become a prosecutor and
not a public defender. For someone looking to uplift the
black community, it seems an unusual choice.
Speaker 16 (39:50):
I wonder if she saw it as a challenge as
one of the few women and African Americans going into
being a prosecutor. Anyone who is a prosecutor, they were
all pretty feisty and self confident, and I really admire that.
At the same time, I think there are African Americans
who go into becoming prosecutors because it is a traditional
(40:11):
route to power.
Speaker 2 (40:14):
A route to power. Maybe that's it. It's certainly not.
Speaker 1 (40:18):
The glamour of the women's court.
Speaker 10 (40:20):
It was dingy and dirty. There weren't even electric lights
for much of the early twentieth century. It was jammed
with lawyers and dirty cops and judges. It was no
place that anybody wanted to be, but many women were
there of dozens and dozens of times.
Speaker 2 (40:44):
The drama of the court has to get Unice's blood
pumping more than the wills and contracts he was leaving
behind in her private practice. Plus Unice excels and research
like going through court documents, so there's plenty of work,
booking forms, evidence sheets, courtroom transcripts. Detail heaven for someone
like Unice, she looks through every piece of paper she can.
(41:08):
I can picture Unis at a table in the courtroom
with poor lighting, in a room that smells like smoke.
Everyone smoked in public back then. I wonder if she
has a little ashtray by her side. As she pours
over the documents, she probably likes noticing the way information
gets distilled from the frantic energy of the courtroom into
the stenographer's notes. And as she sits there, she starts
(41:31):
noticing patterns. Who signs their names with ex's how often
the same women get picked up, or how so many
of them have the same lawyer it's the same lawyer
for all the women being released without a conviction.
Speaker 1 (41:54):
Does she talk.
Speaker 2 (41:55):
About this pattern with her colleagues? Someone as detail focused
ash she is probably begins taking her own notes, just
in case they'll be useful later. Unice doesn't strike me
as a woman who would notice these things and shrug them.
Speaker 8 (42:11):
Off, files that knowledge away.
Speaker 2 (42:17):
Unice keeps her nose to the grindstone. But soon someone
from city Hall calls looking for her. Because while Unice
has been learning the ropes at the Women's Court, Thomas
Dewey has been appointed new York's Special Prosecutor, and now
he's assembling a team.
Speaker 14 (42:39):
Thomas Dewey said, I am looking for the twenty best
attorneys in New York.
Speaker 2 (42:46):
Hey receives a huge number of applications from lawyers who
all believe they're worthy.
Speaker 14 (42:51):
Because everybody wanted this glamorous, kind of sexy case.
Speaker 2 (42:55):
But Dewey doesn't just want the best. He's looking for
people with very specific skills.
Speaker 14 (43:01):
I don't care their race, I don't care their religion,
I don't care their gender. I want the best people.
He also named Jewish attorneys at the time there were
such a strong streak of anti Semitism.
Speaker 2 (43:12):
Who first suggested the name Eunice Hunting Carter, one.
Speaker 14 (43:16):
Of Dewey's assistants, described her was, Oh, she's a real
go getter. Dewey said, let me interview her. She looks
like she might be a candidate for this.
Speaker 2 (43:26):
Now.
Speaker 14 (43:27):
What made it even harder for Unice was, you can
imagine all these people are white. They're all men. You know,
how on earth would a black woman be on this team.
It was the mid thirties.
Speaker 1 (43:38):
This doesn't seem to put Dewey off.
Speaker 8 (43:43):
He knows he needs to assemble a strong team, but
he also has to assemble a kind of diverse and
also kind of unknown team. And that's because he has
to assemble people who if they're going out into the community,
if they're questioning witnesses, if they're questioning anyone, they don't
(44:06):
necessarily want immediately for someone like dut Schultz to be like,
I know that cop, I know that prosecutor. I've seen
that attorney before. They want people who are knowledgeable but
still a little bit outside of this world.
Speaker 1 (44:23):
Like Unice Carter.
Speaker 14 (44:27):
She knows Harlem. Dewey talk to her and he said, yes,
I want her on my team.
Speaker 2 (44:37):
On July first, nineteen thirty five, Special Prosecutor Thomas A.
Dewey appoints Unice Hunting Carter as a deputy Assistant prosecutor
and the largest investigation of organized crime in US history.
Unice Carter is just thirty six years old, the only
woman and the only person of color on Dewey's team, the.
Speaker 1 (45:00):
Only black woman.
Speaker 2 (45:02):
Her hiring instantly makes national news, but that's nothing compared
to the headlines she's about to generate that's coming up
in episode five of The Godmother. In this episode of
(45:24):
The Godmother, you heard.
Speaker 10 (45:27):
I'm Debbie Applegate. I'm a historian and biographer, and I
am the author of Madam, The Biography of Polyadler Icon
of the Jazz Age.
Speaker 11 (45:37):
My name is Christian Sippolini and I am an organized
crime historian and author.
Speaker 14 (45:44):
I'm Marilyn Greenwald. I'm a professor Emerita of Journalism at
Ohio University, and I'm the author of five biographies, including
one of Eunice Hunt and Carter.
Speaker 1 (45:53):
My name is Leshawn Harris.
Speaker 7 (45:55):
I am an Associate professor of history at Michigan State
University in the Department of History.
Speaker 15 (46:01):
My name is doctor Clarissa Myrik Harris, and I am
a tenured professor of Africana Studies at Moorhouse College in Atlanta, Georgia.
Speaker 2 (46:15):
HI.
Speaker 17 (46:15):
My name is Ellen Paulson. My research and I write
books about criminal acts and davis that took place during
the nineteen thirties in the United States, and my focus
so far has been women who were involved with notworious
gangsters and desperadoes.
Speaker 9 (46:36):
My name is Robert Whalan and I'm an Amerithus Professor
of History at Queen's University of Charlotte here in Charlotte,
North Carolina.
Speaker 8 (46:45):
I am Claire White, and I am the director of
Education at the Mob Museum in downtown Las Vegas.
Speaker 16 (46:52):
I'm Gatherine Powell, the Unis Hunt and Carter Research Professor
of Law at Port of Law School.
Speaker 9 (46:58):
My name is Chuck Greeves.
Speaker 18 (47:00):
Becoming a writer, I spent twenty five years as a
Los Angeles trial lawyer. My fourth novel was basically a
fictionalization of the famous nineteen thirty six vice trial.
Speaker 2 (47:20):
The Godmother is produced by Novel for iHeartRadio. For more
from novel, visit novel dot Audio. The Godmother is hosted
and written by me Nicole Perkins. Our producer is Leona Hamid.
Additional production from Ajuajima Broumpong, Ronald Young Junior and Zianna Yusuf.
(47:41):
Our editor is Ajua Jima Broumpong. Additional story editing from
Max O'Brien and Mitha Lee Raw and our researcher is
Ziana Yusuf. Additional research from Mohammed Ahmed. David Waters is
our executive producer. Field production by Tnito Romani and Pallas Shaw,
Sound design, mixing and school by Daniel Kempsen. Our score
(48:02):
was written, performed and recorded by Jeff Parker. Music supervision
by Nicholas Alexander and David Waters. Production management and endless
patients from Charie Houston, Sarah Tobin and Charlotte Wolfe. Fact
checking by Fendel Fulton and Donia Suleiman. Story development by
Madeline Parr, Jess Swinburne, Esseana Yusuf. Willard Foxton is our
(48:26):
Creative Director of Development. Special thanks to Leah Carter, Stephen Carter,
Angela J. Davis, Andrew Fernley, Marilyn Greenwald, Sondra Lebedy, Katherine Godfrey,
Nadia Maidie, Amalia Sortland, Sean Glenn, Neil Krishnan, Julia Bromberg,
(48:48):
Katrina Norvelle, Carly Frankel, and all the team at w
Emmy
Speaker 1 (49:02):
Novel
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