February 12, 2024 • 45 mins
In 1935, Eunice Carter is at the center of the largest investigation of organized crime in U.S. history. Meanwhile, there's a power struggle raging in the heart of organized crime and as the dust settles, Lucky Luciano finds himself at the top.
As Lucky’s star rises, Eunice finds herself sidelined with the beat nobody seems to want: investigating mob links to New York’s sex work industry. As she pieces together seemingly innocuous pieces of gossip - a picture begins to emerge. Eunice forms a plan that leads her right to Lucky Luciano.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
Novel. Before we begin, a content warning the following episode
contains difficult themes and violence.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
The young and able lawyer Thomas E. Dewey appointed special
prosecutor to clean out the city's racketeers.
Speaker 3 (00:29):
That's the Dowey.
Speaker 4 (00:30):
You have been given the most difficult task, but the
opportunity of helping the people of this city.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
In the late thirties, the Republican Party produces a promotional film.
It opens on a man, dark slick hair and a
carefully groomed and distinct mustache, talks into a heavy telephone.
According to the no nonsense voiceover, this is Thomas E.
Speaker 5 (00:55):
Dewey.
Speaker 1 (00:56):
An office full of workers at their desks enters frame
arranged in neat lines like a classroom. They're all white
men in suits, their hair shiny with palmade. They're busy
going through paperwork, hard at their respective tasks for the day.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
Dewey's small, hand picked staff began its attack on the
underworld by perroting out secret records and getting the frightened
victims of the rackets to talk.
Speaker 1 (01:24):
The back of a witness's head appears.
Speaker 4 (01:26):
The man at the next is the man who hit
my husband on the head with a pipe. The man
directly behind him is the man who's threatened to beat
me and cut my hands off.
Speaker 1 (01:42):
This film is a re enactment of Dewey's investigation into
organized crime. Watching these films, you clearly see Dewey as
a man dedicated to showmanship, a man already deeply enamored
with the creation of his own legacy. Unfortunately, Dewey's hypnotizing
baritone can't cover his stilted acting.
Speaker 6 (02:04):
The cops who did that job work day.
Speaker 5 (02:07):
And night for a year.
Speaker 7 (02:11):
They're entitled to a promotion, and I think they ought
to happen.
Speaker 1 (02:15):
Maybe it's a good thing he went into.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
Law a mistakenly accumulating evidence. Dewey and his men, working
with city police, begin building up that cases.
Speaker 1 (02:26):
Only it wasn't just Dewey and his men responsible for
the investigation. There was one person, one woman in particular,
who was really the mastermind. And for just a moment
so quick you may not even notice, I see her.
(02:46):
While Dewey holds court, face always clear. She sits at
a table with her back to the camera. Eunice hunting
Carter Good is a seat at the table when no
one acknowledges that you built the table from the teams
(03:10):
at iHeartRadio and novel. I'm Nicole Perkins and this is
the Godmother Episode five, Up all night to get Lucky.
(03:54):
The daytime commute to the Woolworth Building must look familiar
but strange to Unis. She's used to arriving there in
the evening for her law school studies, but now she's
walking into the elevators during the bustle of the day,
and instead of the twenty eighth floor for classes, she
(04:16):
steps out onto the fourteenth floor for work.
Speaker 7 (04:20):
When you just got off the elevator, I think she
would have seen a buzz of activity, but it was
pretty low key. There was this air of secrecy about it.
I mean there had to be. Dewey did not want
people to know where they were what they were doing.
Speaker 1 (04:38):
From the plain closed police officers patrolling the building's lobby
to the telephone equipment secured against illegal tapping. There are
tamper proof file cabinets tucked inside a bank vault. Venetian
blinds keep people from spying. It's October nineteen thirty five
(04:58):
and a special prosecution is underway. Dewey has a hand
picked team of twenty attorneys plus investigators clerks, assistants, stenographers,
and a select group of NYPD officers, and of course
Eunice hunting Carter. As Unice walks toward her desk that day,
does she worry about trying to prove herself or does
(05:23):
she worry about appearing too confident? The news of her
appointment to Dewey's team arrived with whispers that it was
her connection to Harlem that earned her spot, and not
her skills or experience. In other words, what she hired
just because she's black. Maybe those whispers helped motivate her,
(05:44):
and there's nothing wrong with using her Harlem background to
move forward.
Speaker 8 (05:48):
There were a lot of people in Harlem who were like, no,
I'm not going to talk to Thomas Dewey and his
other nineteen white male prosecutors about this. Like I'm fine,
we can handle this in our own community.
Speaker 1 (06:01):
Access to that community is crucial to Dewey in these
first few months of his team's investigation, because they are
targeting the numbers racket and at its head the wild,
reckless mobster associate of Lucky Luciano's Dutch Schultz.
Speaker 8 (06:17):
Who would come in and take in control of the
Harlem numbers racket. Essentially strong armed a number of black
men and women in Harlem who'd run their own numbers games.
Speaker 1 (06:28):
Dutch is still battling with numbers running Queen Stephanie Saint Clair.
Dutch is a figurehead of Dewey's crusade against organized crime.
His plan use one high profile mobster as the focus,
build him up in the press as the root of
all evil, then quickly take him down. Of course, that
only works if Dewey gets his target and fast. Dutch
(06:52):
is all too aware of this renewed heat on him,
so Dutch creates his own plan.
Speaker 3 (06:58):
Hey, we need to kill Tomus Dewey.
Speaker 1 (07:05):
But someone unexpected as watching Dewey's back.
Speaker 3 (07:09):
Dutch Schultz went to Lucky Luciano and said, hey, we
need to get rid of him because he's trying to
get rid of us.
Speaker 1 (07:16):
And Lucky gives Dutch a response that will alter the
course of his life.
Speaker 3 (07:21):
Lucky Luciano said, no, we will not kill do it
because if we do that, then they'll really be after us.
Dutch Schultz did not listen. He hired a hitman.
Speaker 1 (07:37):
One morning, October twenty fourth, nineteen thirty five, As Eunice
weaves her way across the bustling office to get to
her desk. The clanging sounds of phones ringing is even
more urgent and NonStop than ever before. There is a
shocking development in the mob world.
Speaker 9 (07:55):
Unfortunately for dut Schultzer was Dutch Schultz who got assassinated.
Speaker 10 (08:07):
Schultz's death was a huge blow for Dewey, Eunice and
Dewey's investigation into Dutch Schultz has hit a sudden dead end.
Speaker 11 (08:18):
Literally difficult to imagine just how much of a like,
oh crap moment they had because they were building their
whole case on taking down Schultz.
Speaker 1 (08:30):
Dewey needs a new public enemy number one, and it
has to be someone even more high profile than Dutch.
Because Dewey has wasted a lot of time and money
on the Dutch false start. He needs results and soon.
There is, of course, only one person who really fits
the bill as Dutch's replacement.
Speaker 12 (08:53):
The new unofficial boss of bosses.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
There is a new muck shot from that heroin in
a hat box drug dealing charge a few decades ago
that Dewey pens on the courtboard in that fourteenth floor office.
Speaker 13 (09:12):
Dewey coughed out a prosecution against Charles Lucky Luciano. That
would garner a great deal of publicity, even in a
jaded city.
Speaker 1 (09:24):
Like New York. But what about Eunice, a rookie prosecutor
who's been selected for her a special knowledge about Harlem
and Dutch Schultz. What does she bring to the table now?
Speaker 8 (09:39):
Thomas Dewey needs to figure out something to do with her.
He puts her on sort of this dead end project, a.
Speaker 1 (09:46):
Beat no one particularly wants.
Speaker 8 (09:49):
Carter is primarily tasked with talking to every member of
the New York community who comes in and has a
complete about prostitution.
Speaker 1 (10:00):
And it turns out one thing New Yorkers want to
talk about is prostitution.
Speaker 8 (10:05):
It's really easy to say this is sexism or this
is racism. But I also think that Dewey knew that
they needed a woman to talk to people average regular
New Yorkers who walk into the office every single day
complaining about disorderly houses, as they're often referred to at
(10:25):
the time period. I do think that Dewey respected her
enough to know, Hey, you know this stuff, Let's see
if you can make anything out of it. And she did.
Speaker 1 (10:41):
During the fall and into winter of nineteen thirty five,
when citizens entered the Woolworth Building they received directions to.
Unice is listening to these complaints and the resultant paperwork,
supposed to be gruntwork for unis, something to keep her
precious little black female mind occupied while the big boys
(11:01):
did all the real work of the law. Whatever the
motivation for pushing Units away from the action and into
glorified secretarial work, people from all walks of life are
landing at Unice's desk, businessmen, paroles, and perhaps most importantly,
sex workers themselves. The info coming in is almost overwhelming.
(11:26):
New York's sex work industry is thriving. Units needs to
connect these low level vice complaints to these big shot mobsters,
and she knows there's something and all those complaints she's
receiving something crucial. She just hasn't quite put the jigsaw
puzzle together yet. But Unice doesn't mind having so many small,
(11:49):
seemingly innocuous pieces of info spread across her desk. She
lives for the details, and as more and more tip
offs pile up in front of her, a pattern begins
to emerge.
Speaker 8 (12:07):
She hears about Louis Wiener. Everyone pretty much knew this
guy was a booker for the Brothels.
Speaker 1 (12:13):
Eunice recognizes this name from her time at the Women's Court.
Other familiar names keep appearing.
Speaker 8 (12:19):
People talk about Abe carp who is one of these
attorneys who she remembers from her time on Women's Court.
Speaker 1 (12:25):
This is a lawyer whose name appeared to be all
over the booking forms of the sex workers who managed
to avoid successful prosecution.
Speaker 8 (12:34):
Carter starts piecing together all this information in.
Speaker 5 (12:38):
The women's courts where they prosecute prostitution cases, Eunice Carter
had seen a pattern of corruption that led her to
believe that the world of New York prostitution had been
infiltrated by the mob.
Speaker 1 (12:55):
Uni suspects. She's onto something, but she needs more proof.
The caared colleagues down the hall might be able to
get away with hunches and wild goose chases, but she
knows she needs irrefutable evidence. She heads to the Women's
Court archives to try to tie together more threads.
Speaker 7 (13:13):
Her Forte was going through documents and patient so when
she was in the Women's Court, in the prosecutor's office,
many of the cases involved prostitution, and so she's going
through these records, she's processing them.
Speaker 8 (13:32):
She's also reading through her old caseload when she was
at the Women's court and trying to figure out how
many times certain names come up, how many times certain
alibis come up? How many times does she see the
exact same monetary figures being discussed.
Speaker 7 (13:48):
She just starts every once in a while finding the
name of an attorney that isn't expensive attorney. There's two
or three of these. After going through hundreds of these,
she must have gotten to the point where she's thinking,
there's no way these prostitutes could afford these attorneys. She
(14:11):
brings this up to another person on the team, What
do you think of this? I think she was thinking,
am I crazy? What do you think of this? And
the other person on the team said, no, there's got
to be something here.
Speaker 1 (14:31):
Unice keeps listening to the citizen complaints as they roll in.
She keeps squinting through chicken scratch and blurring ink. Everything
was handwritten or types on a typewriter then no pocket
sized devices with screens you can double tap to zoom in.
Unice is probably way down with file folders of complaints, pens,
writing pads, copies of court documents. I wonder if she
(14:55):
sometimes carries any of her work home before stopping at
the grocery store or butcher, while her coworkers stop at
a bar for a drink, or maybe even one of
the disreputable houses she's cross referencing in all her paperwork.
Speaker 7 (15:08):
Painstaking, painstaking work.
Speaker 1 (15:12):
But slowly the beginnings of a promising case have begun
to develop.
Speaker 5 (15:18):
She brought that suspicion to Thomas Dewey and said, this
is an area where maybe we can focus our investigation.
Speaker 1 (15:26):
She probably knows every response Dewey's team could use to
discredit her idea to focus on VIIs It's just a
bunch of crazies, just a bunch of women. How can
we trust these prostitutes who are probably just trying to
get lesser charges. This is small time stuff compared to
the big mob guys. But she knows differently. Some men
(15:46):
need cameras and a spotlight to fail up in life,
and some women need the trust of their fellow citizens
and a quiet archive to succeed. And Yunis tells Dewey
she is convinced this is how they can get to lucky.
Speaker 9 (16:02):
We're not going to charge you with murder, even though
Luciano murdered a lot of people, not even tax evasion.
We don't have the numbers, but we can go after prostitution.
Speaker 5 (16:10):
Dewey was initially very skeptical.
Speaker 7 (16:12):
Dewey says, no, come on, First of all, the mob's
not involved in prostitution. And second, Dewey, very public relations minded,
said I'm not going after a bunch of poor, penniless
prostitutes in a mob case.
Speaker 8 (16:28):
Forget it.
Speaker 1 (16:30):
Eunice does not forget it. This is not the first
time her hard work has been dismissed. If she accepted
a no every time someone questioned her, she wouldn't have
even made it to Dewey's team in the first place.
Ambition doesn't believe in rejection. That's just a detour. Eunice
knows she's onto something, so she keeps working the leads
(16:53):
and keeps finding undeniable patterns.
Speaker 7 (16:56):
She goes back to her friend on the team and said,
there's got to be something here. I just think there is.
Speaker 1 (17:02):
Murray Gerfine is one of Yunus's colleagues. Maybe he's a
work friend. As a Jewish Man, he probably also knows
what it's like to have to prove himself constantly, and
maybe Eunice realizes she'll need the support of at least
one man to get Dewey to listen to her. Two outsiders,
one black woman, one Jewish man working together are better
(17:24):
than one, and, as too many working women know, sometimes
you have to get a man to repeat exactly what
you've just said to get other men to listen.
Speaker 7 (17:35):
The two of them persuaded Dewey. I mean, they had
to go back to Dewey a couple times, and Dewey
finally said, Okay, maybe there's something here.
Speaker 1 (17:43):
But Dewey wants even more evidence, because even if sex
work is connected to the mob, how does that help
tie it to their specific high profile investigation. Well, Eunice
has an answer for that too.
Speaker 8 (18:01):
She gets his permission to start wire tapping to piece
together who these people are, what they know, who works
for whom, and try to figure out who is.
Speaker 1 (18:12):
At the top.
Speaker 5 (18:14):
Because Luciano, unlike those more high profile flamboyant Irish and
Jewish mobsters of that era, he was surrounded by this
cone of silence.
Speaker 1 (18:27):
But this isn't a case of tapping a few phones
of a few gangsters. This is going to require extensive
wire tapping, and in nineteen thirties New York that means
something a little more complicated than calling up a phone
company with a warrant.
Speaker 8 (18:43):
Dewey ordered Eunice Carter and another man on the team,
Murray Gurfind to essentially create a list of dozens of
people that they wanted to wire tap, and.
Speaker 1 (18:54):
Then they have to physically get hardware onto all these
people's phone lines across New York. Sometimes detectives pay or
strong arm telephone repairman to go into buildings and play
small microphones into mouthpieces, or replace old phones with newer
ones with Mike's already installed.
Speaker 8 (19:12):
They wiretapped incredibly liberally.
Speaker 1 (19:16):
They kick off by wiretapping the bookers and bondsman's offices
of New York, but soon they're intercepting calls from offices
of mob members too. If there's a phone there, it's
not safe.
Speaker 8 (19:31):
Wire tapping laws in the nineteen twenties and thirties were
still very much up in the air, and in New
York wiretapping laws are a lot looser than in most
of the rest of the country. They took a lot
of connections through these telephone conversations, thousands of hours of
wiretaps that Unice Carter and the rest of the team
(19:52):
had to sift through in order to do this.
Speaker 1 (19:55):
And as they do, Unice and the team discover more
evidence that unice is suspicions might be correct.
Speaker 5 (20:02):
New York prostitution was in the process of being organized
by organized crime.
Speaker 1 (20:07):
They're able to tie sex work to the.
Speaker 5 (20:09):
Mob one man named Little Baby Pattillo and one man
named Tommy the Bull Pinocchio.
Speaker 1 (20:15):
You might recognize that last name as one of the
Mott Street Boys.
Speaker 5 (20:18):
The suspicion was Little Davy and Tommy the Bull were
working for Lucky Luciano, that there was a sole cadrey
of middlemen who were running prostitution and victimizing the prostitutes
and the madams in New York City.
Speaker 1 (20:32):
Unis may have felt like they were right on the
edge of the big breakthrough. Here are direct links to
the team's big target, Lucky Luciano.
Speaker 9 (20:43):
What she realized is that the gangsters were very vulnerable
on this. Not only was prostitution illegal, but the whole
story of prostitution was fairly brutal and it had such
tabloid qualities to it.
Speaker 8 (20:56):
After months of building all of this up, they finally
talk Dewey into a raid.
Speaker 1 (21:06):
The team begins planning in operation that will go down
in history. This isn't going to be the usual kind
of raid cops running into a single location and arresting
a handful of people. No, this is something much bigger.
Speaker 8 (21:43):
There's so much going on. It is madness. It is chaos.
Speaker 1 (21:47):
On the night of February first, nineteen thirty six, Eunice
Carter arrives yet again on the fourteenth floor of the
Woolworth Building. She may have been used to all the
commotion on the floor, but nothing could prepare her for
the scene she sees that night.
Speaker 8 (22:04):
Literally, there would have been people just all over floors, benches,
private rooms, not private rooms, everyone just sort of working feverishly.
No one's got a laptop. In nineteen thirty six, twenty
stenographers are working around the clock with their giant legal
pads and their pencils, with their little notebooks. You've got
people who've brought their typewriters in with them, feverishly taking
(22:29):
notes of their statements through the night and the early morning.
Keep in mind that this is February in New York,
so it is snowy and disgusting and wet, and people
are freezing cold. You've got cops in uniform, You've got
plain clothes who were prepared to act as John's. There's
so much going on. It is madness.
Speaker 1 (22:51):
It is chaos for once. The office is also full
of other women, eighty eight of them in total, most
of them sex work madams.
Speaker 8 (23:01):
And many of these women have been arrested in the
middle of a transaction, and so some of them are
wearing coats, and some of them are not wearing coats,
and some of them have on thousand dollars furs.
Speaker 1 (23:16):
As Eunice stands in that room, absorbing the chaos, I
wonder if she can tell that this case will be
the one she'd be remembered for. I wonder if she
felt proud of herself, if she thought she'd finally be
recognized for her hard work. All of that night's madness
starts at precisely eight fifty five PM.
Speaker 8 (23:41):
This is coordinated to the minute.
Speaker 1 (23:44):
One hundred and sixty plain clothes policemen from across New
York gathered together in Manhattan. The cops are divided so
that they're working with colleagues they've never worked with before.
Speaker 13 (23:57):
One would be on West fifty seventh Street, one would
be on each It's thirty six. I mean they would
just all over the place.
Speaker 1 (24:03):
They're split into teams of two and three. Each team
is given an envelope.
Speaker 5 (24:09):
With their dress audit, and exactly five minutes of nine,
they all opened their envelopes and read the instructions inside.
Speaker 1 (24:15):
These instructions dispatch the cops to top secret locations across
the city, like something out of a modern day reality
game show. None of them know what they're getting into
until they open the envelope.
Speaker 5 (24:29):
The instructions said, go to this address and arrest everybody
inside and bring them to the Woolworth Building.
Speaker 1 (24:36):
The police look at each other. This is clearly an
operation like no other.
Speaker 8 (24:42):
They want to make sure that when they are arresting,
they are not just taking women out of brothels. They
want women across the city caught in the act.
Speaker 1 (24:52):
At nine pm, cops set off. Once they reach their locations,
they start kicking down doors as they pour up stoops
and staircases and into apartment buildings across New York. They
emerge with men, but mostly women, in handcuffs. It's quickly
(25:16):
apparent the element of surprise has been a success.
Speaker 8 (25:27):
Best we can tell, they do wind up arresting about
one hundred and ten people. Those individuals are later detained.
The other like twenty or so are mostly John's. They
couldn't care less. These guys are not going to help
them get to Luciano, so they let them go.
Speaker 13 (25:44):
Eighty eight arrests all together. It was a pretty wild night,
even for a city like New York.
Speaker 1 (25:52):
And now back at the Woolworth Building, as Eunice and
Dewey survey the scene before them, they're already contemplating the
next mammoth task ahead.
Speaker 5 (26:02):
The idea was they were going to arrest the madams
and the prostitutes and hold them as material witnesses and
force them to give testimony against the middle management types
Patio and Pinocchio, and ultimately force them to flip and
implicate Lucky. Luciana was the head of prostitution in New York.
Speaker 1 (26:23):
Getting sex workers to snitch is no small feat because
they've become used to a specific type of mob protection
from law enforcement.
Speaker 5 (26:32):
The women were used to being arrested. They all had
been arrested dozens of times, so they assumed it was
business as usual. They weren't going to cooperate. They wouldn't
give their real names. They were blowing the prosecutors off.
Speaker 1 (26:43):
A fair chunk of their earnings goes to the Mob
for occasions just like this. That had been the promise
of the mob's move into sex work. You pay us,
we'll protect you, will bail you out, We'll set you
up with some of the best representation the justice system
has to offer. The women wait and wait and wait.
(27:05):
No one seems to be coming.
Speaker 5 (27:12):
The men who normally got them out were no longer there,
and they realized, oh, something difference going on.
Speaker 1 (27:19):
That's because the night before there had been another round
of secret.
Speaker 5 (27:24):
Arrests sixteen men on January thirty first, nineteen thirty six.
Speaker 1 (27:31):
The operation had been very discreet, and now as minutes
turned to hours in the holding cells, the mob guaranteed
bookers and lawyers who usually come to bail out the
women are a no show, and the women realize nobody
is coming to help this time. So a new chapter
(27:56):
of Unice's work begins, because now she and the rest
of Dewey's team have to figure out how much these
women know and how they might be connected to Lucky Luciano.
Speaker 8 (28:07):
The prostitution racket is so tricky because there's women who
are both madams and prostitutes, and then also wives of bookers.
Maybe they have a relationship with Luciano, but maybe they
don't have a relationship with Luciano.
Speaker 1 (28:24):
The longer it takes to get their ducks in a row,
the more time the mob has to regroup, reorganize, and hide.
Speaker 8 (28:32):
People like Unice Carter start personally interviewing these women almost immediately.
She is working around the clock.
Speaker 1 (28:40):
Those in custody don't get any sleep that night either,
which may have been a deliberate ploy.
Speaker 8 (28:46):
They were doing everything they can to just get as
much information as quickly as possible.
Speaker 1 (28:51):
Intentional sleep deprivation is recognized as a form of torture today.
Unis probably justifies this part of the operation as for
the greater good or even just for a personal win.
Could she have done anything about it anyway once the
ball was rolling In the end, these considerations don't matter
(29:12):
because none of the sex workers talk.
Speaker 5 (29:15):
So what happened was do we called a special judge
to come down to the Woolworth Building on Sunday and
he arranged all eighty seven prostitutes and madams as material
witnesses on bonds ranging from ten thousand dollars to twenty
five thousand dollars and today's dollars, ten thousand dollars is
(29:37):
like one hundred and eighty thousand dollars. Okay, no way
these women could have come up with what amounts to
one hundred and eighty thousand dollars each to get out
of jail. So basically, do we put these women in
jail on a bomb they could never meet and held
them in communicado in the women's house of detention.
Speaker 1 (29:55):
For months, for months without conviction are even a try.
After the raids on the brothels, as the days stretch
into weeks and into months, Unice essentially starts working her
way into the minds of these women. She's now at
the center of the investigation, talking constantly to the women
(30:17):
and eventually establishing relationships with them. Some of these women
become cooperating witnesses.
Speaker 12 (30:23):
She knew how smart women could be.
Speaker 6 (30:25):
She knew how much knowledge of their own that they
had that other people wouldn't have, and that is really
what made her so valuable both to starting the investigation
and continuing the investigation.
Speaker 1 (30:38):
Unice knows from firsthand experience how often women are overlooked
in rooms with men, how men will talk and share
secrets as if women are just pieces of furniture, and
yet she's exploiting that knowledge for her boss, a man
who wouldn't take her seriously until she had another man
(30:58):
to back up all the horror work she'd put into
this case.
Speaker 13 (31:02):
Many of the women were in pretty bad shape when
they were picked up. A lot of these girls were
drug addicts.
Speaker 8 (31:11):
Certainly, in the first three or four hours, this is
less of a concern.
Speaker 1 (31:15):
But as those hours stretch into day's the withdrawal symptoms
become agonizing.
Speaker 12 (31:26):
They were strung out, they were addicts.
Speaker 13 (31:30):
They would have to suffer a cold turkey cure on
the floor of a jail cell.
Speaker 12 (31:35):
They held that over their heads.
Speaker 13 (31:37):
All right, you want a hospital, sweetheart, or you want
a jail cell.
Speaker 12 (31:41):
Which is it.
Speaker 13 (31:42):
If you want a hospital, we can do that for you,
but you got to talk.
Speaker 1 (31:52):
Finally, the women start telling Yunis what she wants to hear,
including a very specific name.
Speaker 12 (32:02):
So now it was.
Speaker 13 (32:03):
Time to find out how many times they had heard
Charlie Lucky referred.
Speaker 12 (32:10):
To in conversation. That was what they built their casaw.
Speaker 13 (32:16):
So while these revelations were being recorded, a case was
being built against Charles Lucky Luciano.
Speaker 1 (32:26):
But if Eunice and Dewey think they'll be seeing Lucky
in handcuffs anytime soon. They're out of luck. Lucky is
nowhere to be found. The train from New York to
(32:56):
Hot Springs, Arkansas, takes thirty five hours at a minimum.
As you arrive in town, one of the first things
you notice, despite the lingering hold of winter nineteen thirty six,
it's just how many people there are out in the streets.
Speaker 14 (33:13):
Just packed with people, constantly packed with people year round.
You'd walk from the train station, which is about four
blocks from here to the National Park, and you'd walk
down Central Avenue, where there were twenty two hotels, a
lot of casinos. All the bath houses are open, either
(33:34):
doing baths or as bed and breakfasts. There's a brewery
where they brew beer from the thermal water. Even during prohibition,
because we had a hell of a moonshine industry.
Speaker 1 (33:47):
Here, this small town is booming.
Speaker 14 (33:51):
The New York Times called it America's first resort because
people could come here. They could fish, they could swim,
they could hike and drink, they could gamble. Prostitution industry
grew here. It was a man's world back then.
Speaker 1 (34:07):
In nineteen thirty six. Hot Springs, Arkansas is a must
see destination for a particular type of traveler.
Speaker 14 (34:14):
One hundred thousand people coming here to take bats. That
was really the main attraction, even for the mob to
begin with.
Speaker 1 (34:22):
That's right, Hot Springs isn't just a spa town. It's
a mafia town.
Speaker 13 (34:28):
There were a lot of underworld characters that were cooling
off in Hot Springs.
Speaker 1 (34:35):
What a brochure slogan that is. They're everywhere in the bars, brothels,
and casinos or just casually strolling down main Street and
their unmistakable wide pinstripes and double lapels. But the people
of Hot Springs don't seem to mind them.
Speaker 14 (34:53):
If you need to take somemar and r off of
what you've been doing and you don't want to get
killed doing it, you come to Hot Springs. Nobody bothered them.
Everybody talked to them. Hey, you're lucky at Luciano, how
are you? I mean, they were gentlemen, they were dressed nice,
they had a lot of money, they were super polite,
big tippers. You know, who's going to start trouble with
(35:15):
the mob? You know in the middle of Hot Springs, Arkansas.
Speaker 13 (35:19):
You know, the old Rolling Stones lyric every cop is
a criminal. That was especially true in the nineteen thirties
and in Hot Spring, Arkansas, because it was known as
a cooling off area where if they paid enough money,
they could be protected, and.
Speaker 1 (35:37):
The club of infamous gangsters taking advantage of this gets
an update in March nineteen thirty six when Lucky Luciano
also starts calling the town home. Ever since those February
raids on brothels across Manhattan. Feeling the net closing in,
he swaps the murky waters of New York for the
healing waters of Hot Springs. During that spring of nineteen
(36:01):
thirty six, two unfortunate New York burglars break the Hot
Springs etiquette, and so.
Speaker 14 (36:11):
The Hot Springs police farmer called a couple of New
York cops to come down and pick up a couple
of New York burglars who they captured here.
Speaker 2 (36:19):
While they were here.
Speaker 14 (36:20):
They were walking around like everybody else, and they spotted
Luciana walking on the promenade and they said, Lucky, the
Holy East Coast is looking for you.
Speaker 5 (36:31):
He said what for?
Speaker 14 (36:33):
And he told him compulsory prostitution, and he just laughed.
He said I can't believe that, but anyway, I appreciate
you telling me.
Speaker 10 (36:42):
So.
Speaker 14 (36:43):
Of course, the policeman that spotted him here, when he
got back to New York with his prisoner, he said,
you know, I saw a Lucky Luciano down there. They
said what he said, Yeah, he's walking down the promenade
and he's fixing to go take a bath.
Speaker 1 (36:58):
So that up you know who Thomas Dewey back in
New York, who was waiting to complete his mission.
Speaker 14 (37:09):
He got on the phones and he started calling and
send the telegrams and raising hell, arrest Lucky and bring
him back to New York.
Speaker 1 (37:17):
Unfortunately, for Dewey, it isn't quite that simple. He's paid
his fees to the cops.
Speaker 5 (37:23):
They were more interested in protecting Luccello than they were
in cooperating with Dewey.
Speaker 1 (37:28):
After several days, the governor of Arkansas calls Hot Springs
and kicks the sheriff into action. The sheriff brings Lucky
in on a traffic violation.
Speaker 14 (37:39):
They were forced to go pick him up. They spent
a few hours over at the Garland County jail. He
had an open door policy at the jail. You can
come and go if you want to go get some
sandwiches or something, that's fine.
Speaker 1 (37:52):
But his lawyers in Hot Springs get in touch with
his lawyers up in New York, and before long Lucky
gets a bailed out.
Speaker 14 (38:00):
Arkansas really wasn't going to make a mood take him anywhere.
Speaker 1 (38:04):
So the governor intervenes again, this time with a little
more aggression.
Speaker 5 (38:09):
A governor in Arkansas sent twenty armed state troopers to
Hot Springs to take Luciannol physically from Hot Springs to
Little Rock.
Speaker 1 (38:22):
From there, he's extradited back to New York with an
armed escort. After all the hullabaloo, no one wants to
be the one accused of letting Lucky Luciano get away.
The train line back to New York is uneventful. The
cops keep Lucky handcuffed between them at all times. When
he arrives in New.
Speaker 14 (38:41):
York, Junice Carter was there ready for him.
Speaker 1 (38:45):
On April eighth, nineteen thirty six, Lucky's indicted for ninety
counts of compulsory prostitution. The judge sets his bond at
three hundred and fifty thousand dollars. At the time, it's
the largest bond in New York history.
Speaker 5 (39:02):
That's about almost eight million in today's dollars.
Speaker 1 (39:06):
Lucky doesn't pay it. So while sitting in his jail
cell he has the chance to read his arrest warrant,
he notices a significant detail. Lucky isn't going to be
tried alone. Twelve of his associates are being indicted alongside him.
Speaker 13 (39:23):
Having everybody tried unto one indictment. That was called the
joins Ohlua. That was pretty revolutionary for its time, and
it was a sneaky trick that prosecutors used to lump
all these defendants onto one category.
Speaker 1 (39:41):
Behind the scenes, Dewey has been lobbying for a new law.
As they'd built the case against Lucky, he realized how
hard it would be to link the mob's top bosses
to the actions of their lieutenants and middlemen, and so
he's been trying to find a way to get them
all in court together back him up. They put the
(40:02):
law into effect at breakneck speed.
Speaker 5 (40:05):
That law actually passed like days before the Luciano trial.
Speaker 1 (40:08):
The rules of the game have changed. Find one guilty,
and you find them all guilty. This law is a
big deal, a huge deal. In fact, it's a precursor
to the Rico Law or Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act.
The Rico Law is still in use today and has
(40:28):
been used against all kinds of people and companies, from
John Gottie to Donald Trump to Shean fashion company.
Speaker 13 (40:36):
The guilt of innocence of one was the same as
the guilt or innocence of another.
Speaker 1 (40:41):
It becomes known as the Dewey Law. Dewey is determined
not to let Lucky slip through the cracks of the
judicial system, even if it means he has to seal
them himself.
Speaker 12 (40:53):
At that point, he knew he was toast.
Speaker 1 (41:00):
After months of painstaking work of morally dubious evidence, collection,
of office politics, and lobbying, Unice's master plan is about
to bring New York's most powerful gangster into the courtroom.
Will it pay off? Lucky and Eunice were set on
(41:21):
different trajectories the minute they arrived in New York in
nineteen oh six, and now, with Thomas Dewey between them.
Speaker 5 (41:30):
Their lives intersect in a courtroom for one month in
nineteen thirty six.
Speaker 1 (41:36):
That's coming up on episode six of The Godmother. You've
been listening to.
Speaker 7 (41:50):
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 Hunting Carter.
Speaker 8 (42:00):
I am Claire White, and I am the director of
Education at the Mob Museum in downtown Las Vegas.
Speaker 3 (42:07):
My name is doctor Clarissa Myriek Harris, and I am
a tenured professor of Africana Studies at Moorhouse College in Atlanta, Georgia.
Speaker 9 (42:20):
My name is Robert Whalan and I'm an emerathus Professor
of History at Queen's University of Charlotte here in Charlotte,
North Carolina.
Speaker 12 (42:29):
Why my name is Ellen Olson.
Speaker 13 (42:32):
I research and I write books about women who were
involved with notorious gangsters and desperadoes.
Speaker 5 (42:40):
My name is Chuck Greeves. Before 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, in which Luckily China was
prosecuted by Thomas Dewey.
Speaker 12 (42:59):
I'm Debbie aple Gate.
Speaker 6 (43:00):
I'm a historian and biographer, and I am the author
of Madam, The Biography of Polyadler, Icon of the jazz age.
Speaker 14 (43:08):
Robert Raines, author of Hot Springs from Capone to Costello,
Executive director of the Gaigster Museum of America, located in
Hot Springs National Park, Arkansas.
Speaker 1 (43:25):
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.
(43:45):
Our editor is Ajua Jima Broumpong. Additional story editing from
Max O'Brien and Mitha Lee Raw and our researcher is
Zianna Yusuf. Additional research from Mohammed Ahmed. David Waters is
our executive producer. Production by Tnito Romani and Pallas Shaw,
Sound design, mixing and scoring by Daniel Kempsen. Our score
(44:07):
was written, performed and recorded by Jeff Parker. Music supervision
by Nicholas Alexander and David Waters. Production management and endless
patients from Scharie Houston, Sarah Tobin, and Charlotte Wolfe. Fact
checking by Fendel Fulton and Dania Suleiman Story development by
Madeline Parr, Jess Swinburne, and Ziana Yusuf. Willard Foxen is
(44:31):
our Creative Director of Development. Special thanks to Leah Carter,
Stephen Carter, Angela J. Davis, Andrew Fernley, Marilyn Greenwald, Sondra Lebedy,
Katherine Godfrey, Nadia Maydi, Amalia Sortland, Sean Glenn, Neil Kushnan,
(44:51):
Julia Bromberg, Katrina Norvelle, Carly Frankel, and all the team
at w Emmy Novel
Novel. Before we begin, a content warning the following episode
contains difficult themes and violence.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
The young and able lawyer Thomas E. Dewey appointed special
prosecutor to clean out the city's racketeers.
Speaker 3 (00:29):
That's the Dowey.
Speaker 4 (00:30):
You have been given the most difficult task, but the
opportunity of helping the people of this city.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
In the late thirties, the Republican Party produces a promotional film.
It opens on a man, dark slick hair and a
carefully groomed and distinct mustache, talks into a heavy telephone.
According to the no nonsense voiceover, this is Thomas E.
Speaker 5 (00:55):
Dewey.
Speaker 1 (00:56):
An office full of workers at their desks enters frame
arranged in neat lines like a classroom. They're all white
men in suits, their hair shiny with palmade. They're busy
going through paperwork, hard at their respective tasks for the day.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
Dewey's small, hand picked staff began its attack on the
underworld by perroting out secret records and getting the frightened
victims of the rackets to talk.
Speaker 1 (01:24):
The back of a witness's head appears.
Speaker 4 (01:26):
The man at the next is the man who hit
my husband on the head with a pipe. The man
directly behind him is the man who's threatened to beat
me and cut my hands off.
Speaker 1 (01:42):
This film is a re enactment of Dewey's investigation into
organized crime. Watching these films, you clearly see Dewey as
a man dedicated to showmanship, a man already deeply enamored
with the creation of his own legacy. Unfortunately, Dewey's hypnotizing
baritone can't cover his stilted acting.
Speaker 6 (02:04):
The cops who did that job work day.
Speaker 5 (02:07):
And night for a year.
Speaker 7 (02:11):
They're entitled to a promotion, and I think they ought
to happen.
Speaker 1 (02:15):
Maybe it's a good thing he went into.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
Law a mistakenly accumulating evidence. Dewey and his men, working
with city police, begin building up that cases.
Speaker 1 (02:26):
Only it wasn't just Dewey and his men responsible for
the investigation. There was one person, one woman in particular,
who was really the mastermind. And for just a moment
so quick you may not even notice, I see her.
(02:46):
While Dewey holds court, face always clear. She sits at
a table with her back to the camera. Eunice hunting
Carter Good is a seat at the table when no
one acknowledges that you built the table from the teams
(03:10):
at iHeartRadio and novel. I'm Nicole Perkins and this is
the Godmother Episode five, Up all night to get Lucky.
(03:54):
The daytime commute to the Woolworth Building must look familiar
but strange to Unis. She's used to arriving there in
the evening for her law school studies, but now she's
walking into the elevators during the bustle of the day,
and instead of the twenty eighth floor for classes, she
(04:16):
steps out onto the fourteenth floor for work.
Speaker 7 (04:20):
When you just got off the elevator, I think she
would have seen a buzz of activity, but it was
pretty low key. There was this air of secrecy about it.
I mean there had to be. Dewey did not want
people to know where they were what they were doing.
Speaker 1 (04:38):
From the plain closed police officers patrolling the building's lobby
to the telephone equipment secured against illegal tapping. There are
tamper proof file cabinets tucked inside a bank vault. Venetian
blinds keep people from spying. It's October nineteen thirty five
(04:58):
and a special prosecution is underway. Dewey has a hand
picked team of twenty attorneys plus investigators clerks, assistants, stenographers,
and a select group of NYPD officers, and of course
Eunice hunting Carter. As Unice walks toward her desk that day,
does she worry about trying to prove herself or does
(05:23):
she worry about appearing too confident? The news of her
appointment to Dewey's team arrived with whispers that it was
her connection to Harlem that earned her spot, and not
her skills or experience. In other words, what she hired
just because she's black. Maybe those whispers helped motivate her,
(05:44):
and there's nothing wrong with using her Harlem background to
move forward.
Speaker 8 (05:48):
There were a lot of people in Harlem who were like, no,
I'm not going to talk to Thomas Dewey and his
other nineteen white male prosecutors about this. Like I'm fine,
we can handle this in our own community.
Speaker 1 (06:01):
Access to that community is crucial to Dewey in these
first few months of his team's investigation, because they are
targeting the numbers racket and at its head the wild,
reckless mobster associate of Lucky Luciano's Dutch Schultz.
Speaker 8 (06:17):
Who would come in and take in control of the
Harlem numbers racket. Essentially strong armed a number of black
men and women in Harlem who'd run their own numbers games.
Speaker 1 (06:28):
Dutch is still battling with numbers running Queen Stephanie Saint Clair.
Dutch is a figurehead of Dewey's crusade against organized crime.
His plan use one high profile mobster as the focus,
build him up in the press as the root of
all evil, then quickly take him down. Of course, that
only works if Dewey gets his target and fast. Dutch
(06:52):
is all too aware of this renewed heat on him,
so Dutch creates his own plan.
Speaker 3 (06:58):
Hey, we need to kill Tomus Dewey.
Speaker 1 (07:05):
But someone unexpected as watching Dewey's back.
Speaker 3 (07:09):
Dutch Schultz went to Lucky Luciano and said, hey, we
need to get rid of him because he's trying to
get rid of us.
Speaker 1 (07:16):
And Lucky gives Dutch a response that will alter the
course of his life.
Speaker 3 (07:21):
Lucky Luciano said, no, we will not kill do it
because if we do that, then they'll really be after us.
Dutch Schultz did not listen. He hired a hitman.
Speaker 1 (07:37):
One morning, October twenty fourth, nineteen thirty five, As Eunice
weaves her way across the bustling office to get to
her desk. The clanging sounds of phones ringing is even
more urgent and NonStop than ever before. There is a
shocking development in the mob world.
Speaker 9 (07:55):
Unfortunately for dut Schultzer was Dutch Schultz who got assassinated.
Speaker 10 (08:07):
Schultz's death was a huge blow for Dewey, Eunice and
Dewey's investigation into Dutch Schultz has hit a sudden dead end.
Speaker 11 (08:18):
Literally difficult to imagine just how much of a like,
oh crap moment they had because they were building their
whole case on taking down Schultz.
Speaker 1 (08:30):
Dewey needs a new public enemy number one, and it
has to be someone even more high profile than Dutch.
Because Dewey has wasted a lot of time and money
on the Dutch false start. He needs results and soon.
There is, of course, only one person who really fits
the bill as Dutch's replacement.
Speaker 12 (08:53):
The new unofficial boss of bosses.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
There is a new muck shot from that heroin in
a hat box drug dealing charge a few decades ago
that Dewey pens on the courtboard in that fourteenth floor office.
Speaker 13 (09:12):
Dewey coughed out a prosecution against Charles Lucky Luciano. That
would garner a great deal of publicity, even in a
jaded city.
Speaker 1 (09:24):
Like New York. But what about Eunice, a rookie prosecutor
who's been selected for her a special knowledge about Harlem
and Dutch Schultz. What does she bring to the table now?
Speaker 8 (09:39):
Thomas Dewey needs to figure out something to do with her.
He puts her on sort of this dead end project, a.
Speaker 1 (09:46):
Beat no one particularly wants.
Speaker 8 (09:49):
Carter is primarily tasked with talking to every member of
the New York community who comes in and has a
complete about prostitution.
Speaker 1 (10:00):
And it turns out one thing New Yorkers want to
talk about is prostitution.
Speaker 8 (10:05):
It's really easy to say this is sexism or this
is racism. But I also think that Dewey knew that
they needed a woman to talk to people average regular
New Yorkers who walk into the office every single day
complaining about disorderly houses, as they're often referred to at
(10:25):
the time period. I do think that Dewey respected her
enough to know, Hey, you know this stuff, Let's see
if you can make anything out of it. And she did.
Speaker 1 (10:41):
During the fall and into winter of nineteen thirty five,
when citizens entered the Woolworth Building they received directions to.
Unice is listening to these complaints and the resultant paperwork,
supposed to be gruntwork for unis, something to keep her
precious little black female mind occupied while the big boys
(11:01):
did all the real work of the law. Whatever the
motivation for pushing Units away from the action and into
glorified secretarial work, people from all walks of life are
landing at Unice's desk, businessmen, paroles, and perhaps most importantly,
sex workers themselves. The info coming in is almost overwhelming.
(11:26):
New York's sex work industry is thriving. Units needs to
connect these low level vice complaints to these big shot mobsters,
and she knows there's something and all those complaints she's
receiving something crucial. She just hasn't quite put the jigsaw
puzzle together yet. But Unice doesn't mind having so many small,
(11:49):
seemingly innocuous pieces of info spread across her desk. She
lives for the details, and as more and more tip
offs pile up in front of her, a pattern begins
to emerge.
Speaker 8 (12:07):
She hears about Louis Wiener. Everyone pretty much knew this
guy was a booker for the Brothels.
Speaker 1 (12:13):
Eunice recognizes this name from her time at the Women's Court.
Other familiar names keep appearing.
Speaker 8 (12:19):
People talk about Abe carp who is one of these
attorneys who she remembers from her time on Women's Court.
Speaker 1 (12:25):
This is a lawyer whose name appeared to be all
over the booking forms of the sex workers who managed
to avoid successful prosecution.
Speaker 8 (12:34):
Carter starts piecing together all this information in.
Speaker 5 (12:38):
The women's courts where they prosecute prostitution cases, Eunice Carter
had seen a pattern of corruption that led her to
believe that the world of New York prostitution had been
infiltrated by the mob.
Speaker 1 (12:55):
Uni suspects. She's onto something, but she needs more proof.
The caared colleagues down the hall might be able to
get away with hunches and wild goose chases, but she
knows she needs irrefutable evidence. She heads to the Women's
Court archives to try to tie together more threads.
Speaker 7 (13:13):
Her Forte was going through documents and patient so when
she was in the Women's Court, in the prosecutor's office,
many of the cases involved prostitution, and so she's going
through these records, she's processing them.
Speaker 8 (13:32):
She's also reading through her old caseload when she was
at the Women's court and trying to figure out how
many times certain names come up, how many times certain
alibis come up? How many times does she see the
exact same monetary figures being discussed.
Speaker 7 (13:48):
She just starts every once in a while finding the
name of an attorney that isn't expensive attorney. There's two
or three of these. After going through hundreds of these,
she must have gotten to the point where she's thinking,
there's no way these prostitutes could afford these attorneys. She
(14:11):
brings this up to another person on the team, What
do you think of this? I think she was thinking,
am I crazy? What do you think of this? And
the other person on the team said, no, there's got
to be something here.
Speaker 1 (14:31):
Unice keeps listening to the citizen complaints as they roll in.
She keeps squinting through chicken scratch and blurring ink. Everything
was handwritten or types on a typewriter then no pocket
sized devices with screens you can double tap to zoom in.
Unice is probably way down with file folders of complaints, pens,
writing pads, copies of court documents. I wonder if she
(14:55):
sometimes carries any of her work home before stopping at
the grocery store or butcher, while her coworkers stop at
a bar for a drink, or maybe even one of
the disreputable houses she's cross referencing in all her paperwork.
Speaker 7 (15:08):
Painstaking, painstaking work.
Speaker 1 (15:12):
But slowly the beginnings of a promising case have begun
to develop.
Speaker 5 (15:18):
She brought that suspicion to Thomas Dewey and said, this
is an area where maybe we can focus our investigation.
Speaker 1 (15:26):
She probably knows every response Dewey's team could use to
discredit her idea to focus on VIIs It's just a
bunch of crazies, just a bunch of women. How can
we trust these prostitutes who are probably just trying to
get lesser charges. This is small time stuff compared to
the big mob guys. But she knows differently. Some men
(15:46):
need cameras and a spotlight to fail up in life,
and some women need the trust of their fellow citizens
and a quiet archive to succeed. And Yunis tells Dewey
she is convinced this is how they can get to lucky.
Speaker 9 (16:02):
We're not going to charge you with murder, even though
Luciano murdered a lot of people, not even tax evasion.
We don't have the numbers, but we can go after prostitution.
Speaker 5 (16:10):
Dewey was initially very skeptical.
Speaker 7 (16:12):
Dewey says, no, come on, First of all, the mob's
not involved in prostitution. And second, Dewey, very public relations minded,
said I'm not going after a bunch of poor, penniless
prostitutes in a mob case.
Speaker 8 (16:28):
Forget it.
Speaker 1 (16:30):
Eunice does not forget it. This is not the first
time her hard work has been dismissed. If she accepted
a no every time someone questioned her, she wouldn't have
even made it to Dewey's team in the first place.
Ambition doesn't believe in rejection. That's just a detour. Eunice
knows she's onto something, so she keeps working the leads
(16:53):
and keeps finding undeniable patterns.
Speaker 7 (16:56):
She goes back to her friend on the team and said,
there's got to be something here. I just think there is.
Speaker 1 (17:02):
Murray Gerfine is one of Yunus's colleagues. Maybe he's a
work friend. As a Jewish Man, he probably also knows
what it's like to have to prove himself constantly, and
maybe Eunice realizes she'll need the support of at least
one man to get Dewey to listen to her. Two outsiders,
one black woman, one Jewish man working together are better
(17:24):
than one, and, as too many working women know, sometimes
you have to get a man to repeat exactly what
you've just said to get other men to listen.
Speaker 7 (17:35):
The two of them persuaded Dewey. I mean, they had
to go back to Dewey a couple times, and Dewey
finally said, Okay, maybe there's something here.
Speaker 1 (17:43):
But Dewey wants even more evidence, because even if sex
work is connected to the mob, how does that help
tie it to their specific high profile investigation. Well, Eunice
has an answer for that too.
Speaker 8 (18:01):
She gets his permission to start wire tapping to piece
together who these people are, what they know, who works
for whom, and try to figure out who is.
Speaker 1 (18:12):
At the top.
Speaker 5 (18:14):
Because Luciano, unlike those more high profile flamboyant Irish and
Jewish mobsters of that era, he was surrounded by this
cone of silence.
Speaker 1 (18:27):
But this isn't a case of tapping a few phones
of a few gangsters. This is going to require extensive
wire tapping, and in nineteen thirties New York that means
something a little more complicated than calling up a phone
company with a warrant.
Speaker 8 (18:43):
Dewey ordered Eunice Carter and another man on the team,
Murray Gurfind to essentially create a list of dozens of
people that they wanted to wire tap, and.
Speaker 1 (18:54):
Then they have to physically get hardware onto all these
people's phone lines across New York. Sometimes detectives pay or
strong arm telephone repairman to go into buildings and play
small microphones into mouthpieces, or replace old phones with newer
ones with Mike's already installed.
Speaker 8 (19:12):
They wiretapped incredibly liberally.
Speaker 1 (19:16):
They kick off by wiretapping the bookers and bondsman's offices
of New York, but soon they're intercepting calls from offices
of mob members too. If there's a phone there, it's
not safe.
Speaker 8 (19:31):
Wire tapping laws in the nineteen twenties and thirties were
still very much up in the air, and in New
York wiretapping laws are a lot looser than in most
of the rest of the country. They took a lot
of connections through these telephone conversations, thousands of hours of
wiretaps that Unice Carter and the rest of the team
(19:52):
had to sift through in order to do this.
Speaker 1 (19:55):
And as they do, Unice and the team discover more
evidence that unice is suspicions might be correct.
Speaker 5 (20:02):
New York prostitution was in the process of being organized
by organized crime.
Speaker 1 (20:07):
They're able to tie sex work to the.
Speaker 5 (20:09):
Mob one man named Little Baby Pattillo and one man
named Tommy the Bull Pinocchio.
Speaker 1 (20:15):
You might recognize that last name as one of the
Mott Street Boys.
Speaker 5 (20:18):
The suspicion was Little Davy and Tommy the Bull were
working for Lucky Luciano, that there was a sole cadrey
of middlemen who were running prostitution and victimizing the prostitutes
and the madams in New York City.
Speaker 1 (20:32):
Unis may have felt like they were right on the
edge of the big breakthrough. Here are direct links to
the team's big target, Lucky Luciano.
Speaker 9 (20:43):
What she realized is that the gangsters were very vulnerable
on this. Not only was prostitution illegal, but the whole
story of prostitution was fairly brutal and it had such
tabloid qualities to it.
Speaker 8 (20:56):
After months of building all of this up, they finally
talk Dewey into a raid.
Speaker 1 (21:06):
The team begins planning in operation that will go down
in history. This isn't going to be the usual kind
of raid cops running into a single location and arresting
a handful of people. No, this is something much bigger.
Speaker 8 (21:43):
There's so much going on. It is madness. It is chaos.
Speaker 1 (21:47):
On the night of February first, nineteen thirty six, Eunice
Carter arrives yet again on the fourteenth floor of the
Woolworth Building. She may have been used to all the
commotion on the floor, but nothing could prepare her for
the scene she sees that night.
Speaker 8 (22:04):
Literally, there would have been people just all over floors, benches,
private rooms, not private rooms, everyone just sort of working feverishly.
No one's got a laptop. In nineteen thirty six, twenty
stenographers are working around the clock with their giant legal
pads and their pencils, with their little notebooks. You've got
people who've brought their typewriters in with them, feverishly taking
(22:29):
notes of their statements through the night and the early morning.
Keep in mind that this is February in New York,
so it is snowy and disgusting and wet, and people
are freezing cold. You've got cops in uniform, You've got
plain clothes who were prepared to act as John's. There's
so much going on. It is madness.
Speaker 1 (22:51):
It is chaos for once. The office is also full
of other women, eighty eight of them in total, most
of them sex work madams.
Speaker 8 (23:01):
And many of these women have been arrested in the
middle of a transaction, and so some of them are
wearing coats, and some of them are not wearing coats,
and some of them have on thousand dollars furs.
Speaker 1 (23:16):
As Eunice stands in that room, absorbing the chaos, I
wonder if she can tell that this case will be
the one she'd be remembered for. I wonder if she
felt proud of herself, if she thought she'd finally be
recognized for her hard work. All of that night's madness
starts at precisely eight fifty five PM.
Speaker 8 (23:41):
This is coordinated to the minute.
Speaker 1 (23:44):
One hundred and sixty plain clothes policemen from across New
York gathered together in Manhattan. The cops are divided so
that they're working with colleagues they've never worked with before.
Speaker 13 (23:57):
One would be on West fifty seventh Street, one would
be on each It's thirty six. I mean they would
just all over the place.
Speaker 1 (24:03):
They're split into teams of two and three. Each team
is given an envelope.
Speaker 5 (24:09):
With their dress audit, and exactly five minutes of nine,
they all opened their envelopes and read the instructions inside.
Speaker 1 (24:15):
These instructions dispatch the cops to top secret locations across
the city, like something out of a modern day reality
game show. None of them know what they're getting into
until they open the envelope.
Speaker 5 (24:29):
The instructions said, go to this address and arrest everybody
inside and bring them to the Woolworth Building.
Speaker 1 (24:36):
The police look at each other. This is clearly an
operation like no other.
Speaker 8 (24:42):
They want to make sure that when they are arresting,
they are not just taking women out of brothels. They
want women across the city caught in the act.
Speaker 1 (24:52):
At nine pm, cops set off. Once they reach their locations,
they start kicking down doors as they pour up stoops
and staircases and into apartment buildings across New York. They
emerge with men, but mostly women, in handcuffs. It's quickly
(25:16):
apparent the element of surprise has been a success.
Speaker 8 (25:27):
Best we can tell, they do wind up arresting about
one hundred and ten people. Those individuals are later detained.
The other like twenty or so are mostly John's. They
couldn't care less. These guys are not going to help
them get to Luciano, so they let them go.
Speaker 13 (25:44):
Eighty eight arrests all together. It was a pretty wild night,
even for a city like New York.
Speaker 1 (25:52):
And now back at the Woolworth Building, as Eunice and
Dewey survey the scene before them, they're already contemplating the
next mammoth task ahead.
Speaker 5 (26:02):
The idea was they were going to arrest the madams
and the prostitutes and hold them as material witnesses and
force them to give testimony against the middle management types
Patio and Pinocchio, and ultimately force them to flip and
implicate Lucky. Luciana was the head of prostitution in New York.
Speaker 1 (26:23):
Getting sex workers to snitch is no small feat because
they've become used to a specific type of mob protection
from law enforcement.
Speaker 5 (26:32):
The women were used to being arrested. They all had
been arrested dozens of times, so they assumed it was
business as usual. They weren't going to cooperate. They wouldn't
give their real names. They were blowing the prosecutors off.
Speaker 1 (26:43):
A fair chunk of their earnings goes to the Mob
for occasions just like this. That had been the promise
of the mob's move into sex work. You pay us,
we'll protect you, will bail you out, We'll set you
up with some of the best representation the justice system
has to offer. The women wait and wait and wait.
(27:05):
No one seems to be coming.
Speaker 5 (27:12):
The men who normally got them out were no longer there,
and they realized, oh, something difference going on.
Speaker 1 (27:19):
That's because the night before there had been another round
of secret.
Speaker 5 (27:24):
Arrests sixteen men on January thirty first, nineteen thirty six.
Speaker 1 (27:31):
The operation had been very discreet, and now as minutes
turned to hours in the holding cells, the mob guaranteed
bookers and lawyers who usually come to bail out the
women are a no show, and the women realize nobody
is coming to help this time. So a new chapter
(27:56):
of Unice's work begins, because now she and the rest
of Dewey's team have to figure out how much these
women know and how they might be connected to Lucky Luciano.
Speaker 8 (28:07):
The prostitution racket is so tricky because there's women who
are both madams and prostitutes, and then also wives of bookers.
Maybe they have a relationship with Luciano, but maybe they
don't have a relationship with Luciano.
Speaker 1 (28:24):
The longer it takes to get their ducks in a row,
the more time the mob has to regroup, reorganize, and hide.
Speaker 8 (28:32):
People like Unice Carter start personally interviewing these women almost immediately.
She is working around the clock.
Speaker 1 (28:40):
Those in custody don't get any sleep that night either,
which may have been a deliberate ploy.
Speaker 8 (28:46):
They were doing everything they can to just get as
much information as quickly as possible.
Speaker 1 (28:51):
Intentional sleep deprivation is recognized as a form of torture today.
Unis probably justifies this part of the operation as for
the greater good or even just for a personal win.
Could she have done anything about it anyway once the
ball was rolling In the end, these considerations don't matter
(29:12):
because none of the sex workers talk.
Speaker 5 (29:15):
So what happened was do we called a special judge
to come down to the Woolworth Building on Sunday and
he arranged all eighty seven prostitutes and madams as material
witnesses on bonds ranging from ten thousand dollars to twenty
five thousand dollars and today's dollars, ten thousand dollars is
(29:37):
like one hundred and eighty thousand dollars. Okay, no way
these women could have come up with what amounts to
one hundred and eighty thousand dollars each to get out
of jail. So basically, do we put these women in
jail on a bomb they could never meet and held
them in communicado in the women's house of detention.
Speaker 1 (29:55):
For months, for months without conviction are even a try.
After the raids on the brothels, as the days stretch
into weeks and into months, Unice essentially starts working her
way into the minds of these women. She's now at
the center of the investigation, talking constantly to the women
(30:17):
and eventually establishing relationships with them. Some of these women
become cooperating witnesses.
Speaker 12 (30:23):
She knew how smart women could be.
Speaker 6 (30:25):
She knew how much knowledge of their own that they
had that other people wouldn't have, and that is really
what made her so valuable both to starting the investigation
and continuing the investigation.
Speaker 1 (30:38):
Unice knows from firsthand experience how often women are overlooked
in rooms with men, how men will talk and share
secrets as if women are just pieces of furniture, and
yet she's exploiting that knowledge for her boss, a man
who wouldn't take her seriously until she had another man
(30:58):
to back up all the horror work she'd put into
this case.
Speaker 13 (31:02):
Many of the women were in pretty bad shape when
they were picked up. A lot of these girls were
drug addicts.
Speaker 8 (31:11):
Certainly, in the first three or four hours, this is
less of a concern.
Speaker 1 (31:15):
But as those hours stretch into day's the withdrawal symptoms
become agonizing.
Speaker 12 (31:26):
They were strung out, they were addicts.
Speaker 13 (31:30):
They would have to suffer a cold turkey cure on
the floor of a jail cell.
Speaker 12 (31:35):
They held that over their heads.
Speaker 13 (31:37):
All right, you want a hospital, sweetheart, or you want
a jail cell.
Speaker 12 (31:41):
Which is it.
Speaker 13 (31:42):
If you want a hospital, we can do that for you,
but you got to talk.
Speaker 1 (31:52):
Finally, the women start telling Yunis what she wants to hear,
including a very specific name.
Speaker 12 (32:02):
So now it was.
Speaker 13 (32:03):
Time to find out how many times they had heard
Charlie Lucky referred.
Speaker 12 (32:10):
To in conversation. That was what they built their casaw.
Speaker 13 (32:16):
So while these revelations were being recorded, a case was
being built against Charles Lucky Luciano.
Speaker 1 (32:26):
But if Eunice and Dewey think they'll be seeing Lucky
in handcuffs anytime soon. They're out of luck. Lucky is
nowhere to be found. The train from New York to
(32:56):
Hot Springs, Arkansas, takes thirty five hours at a minimum.
As you arrive in town, one of the first things
you notice, despite the lingering hold of winter nineteen thirty six,
it's just how many people there are out in the streets.
Speaker 14 (33:13):
Just packed with people, constantly packed with people year round.
You'd walk from the train station, which is about four
blocks from here to the National Park, and you'd walk
down Central Avenue, where there were twenty two hotels, a
lot of casinos. All the bath houses are open, either
(33:34):
doing baths or as bed and breakfasts. There's a brewery
where they brew beer from the thermal water. Even during prohibition,
because we had a hell of a moonshine industry.
Speaker 1 (33:47):
Here, this small town is booming.
Speaker 14 (33:51):
The New York Times called it America's first resort because
people could come here. They could fish, they could swim,
they could hike and drink, they could gamble. Prostitution industry
grew here. It was a man's world back then.
Speaker 1 (34:07):
In nineteen thirty six. Hot Springs, Arkansas is a must
see destination for a particular type of traveler.
Speaker 14 (34:14):
One hundred thousand people coming here to take bats. That
was really the main attraction, even for the mob to
begin with.
Speaker 1 (34:22):
That's right, Hot Springs isn't just a spa town. It's
a mafia town.
Speaker 13 (34:28):
There were a lot of underworld characters that were cooling
off in Hot Springs.
Speaker 1 (34:35):
What a brochure slogan that is. They're everywhere in the bars, brothels,
and casinos or just casually strolling down main Street and
their unmistakable wide pinstripes and double lapels. But the people
of Hot Springs don't seem to mind them.
Speaker 14 (34:53):
If you need to take somemar and r off of
what you've been doing and you don't want to get
killed doing it, you come to Hot Springs. Nobody bothered them.
Everybody talked to them. Hey, you're lucky at Luciano, how
are you? I mean, they were gentlemen, they were dressed nice,
they had a lot of money, they were super polite,
big tippers. You know, who's going to start trouble with
(35:15):
the mob? You know in the middle of Hot Springs, Arkansas.
Speaker 13 (35:19):
You know, the old Rolling Stones lyric every cop is
a criminal. That was especially true in the nineteen thirties
and in Hot Spring, Arkansas, because it was known as
a cooling off area where if they paid enough money,
they could be protected, and.
Speaker 1 (35:37):
The club of infamous gangsters taking advantage of this gets
an update in March nineteen thirty six when Lucky Luciano
also starts calling the town home. Ever since those February
raids on brothels across Manhattan. Feeling the net closing in,
he swaps the murky waters of New York for the
healing waters of Hot Springs. During that spring of nineteen
(36:01):
thirty six, two unfortunate New York burglars break the Hot
Springs etiquette, and so.
Speaker 14 (36:11):
The Hot Springs police farmer called a couple of New
York cops to come down and pick up a couple
of New York burglars who they captured here.
Speaker 2 (36:19):
While they were here.
Speaker 14 (36:20):
They were walking around like everybody else, and they spotted
Luciana walking on the promenade and they said, Lucky, the
Holy East Coast is looking for you.
Speaker 5 (36:31):
He said what for?
Speaker 14 (36:33):
And he told him compulsory prostitution, and he just laughed.
He said I can't believe that, but anyway, I appreciate
you telling me.
Speaker 10 (36:42):
So.
Speaker 14 (36:43):
Of course, the policeman that spotted him here, when he
got back to New York with his prisoner, he said,
you know, I saw a Lucky Luciano down there. They
said what he said, Yeah, he's walking down the promenade
and he's fixing to go take a bath.
Speaker 1 (36:58):
So that up you know who Thomas Dewey back in
New York, who was waiting to complete his mission.
Speaker 14 (37:09):
He got on the phones and he started calling and
send the telegrams and raising hell, arrest Lucky and bring
him back to New York.
Speaker 1 (37:17):
Unfortunately, for Dewey, it isn't quite that simple. He's paid
his fees to the cops.
Speaker 5 (37:23):
They were more interested in protecting Luccello than they were
in cooperating with Dewey.
Speaker 1 (37:28):
After several days, the governor of Arkansas calls Hot Springs
and kicks the sheriff into action. The sheriff brings Lucky
in on a traffic violation.
Speaker 14 (37:39):
They were forced to go pick him up. They spent
a few hours over at the Garland County jail. He
had an open door policy at the jail. You can
come and go if you want to go get some
sandwiches or something, that's fine.
Speaker 1 (37:52):
But his lawyers in Hot Springs get in touch with
his lawyers up in New York, and before long Lucky
gets a bailed out.
Speaker 14 (38:00):
Arkansas really wasn't going to make a mood take him anywhere.
Speaker 1 (38:04):
So the governor intervenes again, this time with a little
more aggression.
Speaker 5 (38:09):
A governor in Arkansas sent twenty armed state troopers to
Hot Springs to take Luciannol physically from Hot Springs to
Little Rock.
Speaker 1 (38:22):
From there, he's extradited back to New York with an
armed escort. After all the hullabaloo, no one wants to
be the one accused of letting Lucky Luciano get away.
The train line back to New York is uneventful. The
cops keep Lucky handcuffed between them at all times. When
he arrives in New.
Speaker 14 (38:41):
York, Junice Carter was there ready for him.
Speaker 1 (38:45):
On April eighth, nineteen thirty six, Lucky's indicted for ninety
counts of compulsory prostitution. The judge sets his bond at
three hundred and fifty thousand dollars. At the time, it's
the largest bond in New York history.
Speaker 5 (39:02):
That's about almost eight million in today's dollars.
Speaker 1 (39:06):
Lucky doesn't pay it. So while sitting in his jail
cell he has the chance to read his arrest warrant,
he notices a significant detail. Lucky isn't going to be
tried alone. Twelve of his associates are being indicted alongside him.
Speaker 13 (39:23):
Having everybody tried unto one indictment. That was called the
joins Ohlua. That was pretty revolutionary for its time, and
it was a sneaky trick that prosecutors used to lump
all these defendants onto one category.
Speaker 1 (39:41):
Behind the scenes, Dewey has been lobbying for a new law.
As they'd built the case against Lucky, he realized how
hard it would be to link the mob's top bosses
to the actions of their lieutenants and middlemen, and so
he's been trying to find a way to get them
all in court together back him up. They put the
(40:02):
law into effect at breakneck speed.
Speaker 5 (40:05):
That law actually passed like days before the Luciano trial.
Speaker 1 (40:08):
The rules of the game have changed. Find one guilty,
and you find them all guilty. This law is a
big deal, a huge deal. In fact, it's a precursor
to the Rico Law or Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act.
The Rico Law is still in use today and has
(40:28):
been used against all kinds of people and companies, from
John Gottie to Donald Trump to Shean fashion company.
Speaker 13 (40:36):
The guilt of innocence of one was the same as
the guilt or innocence of another.
Speaker 1 (40:41):
It becomes known as the Dewey Law. Dewey is determined
not to let Lucky slip through the cracks of the
judicial system, even if it means he has to seal
them himself.
Speaker 12 (40:53):
At that point, he knew he was toast.
Speaker 1 (41:00):
After months of painstaking work of morally dubious evidence, collection,
of office politics, and lobbying, Unice's master plan is about
to bring New York's most powerful gangster into the courtroom.
Will it pay off? Lucky and Eunice were set on
(41:21):
different trajectories the minute they arrived in New York in
nineteen oh six, and now, with Thomas Dewey between them.
Speaker 5 (41:30):
Their lives intersect in a courtroom for one month in
nineteen thirty six.
Speaker 1 (41:36):
That's coming up on episode six of The Godmother. You've
been listening to.
Speaker 7 (41:50):
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 Hunting Carter.
Speaker 8 (42:00):
I am Claire White, and I am the director of
Education at the Mob Museum in downtown Las Vegas.
Speaker 3 (42:07):
My name is doctor Clarissa Myriek Harris, and I am
a tenured professor of Africana Studies at Moorhouse College in Atlanta, Georgia.
Speaker 9 (42:20):
My name is Robert Whalan and I'm an emerathus Professor
of History at Queen's University of Charlotte here in Charlotte,
North Carolina.
Speaker 12 (42:29):
Why my name is Ellen Olson.
Speaker 13 (42:32):
I research and I write books about women who were
involved with notorious gangsters and desperadoes.
Speaker 5 (42:40):
My name is Chuck Greeves. Before 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, in which Luckily China was
prosecuted by Thomas Dewey.
Speaker 12 (42:59):
I'm Debbie aple Gate.
Speaker 6 (43:00):
I'm a historian and biographer, and I am the author
of Madam, The Biography of Polyadler, Icon of the jazz age.
Speaker 14 (43:08):
Robert Raines, author of Hot Springs from Capone to Costello,
Executive director of the Gaigster Museum of America, located in
Hot Springs National Park, Arkansas.
Speaker 1 (43:25):
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.
(43:45):
Our editor is Ajua Jima Broumpong. Additional story editing from
Max O'Brien and Mitha Lee Raw and our researcher is
Zianna Yusuf. Additional research from Mohammed Ahmed. David Waters is
our executive producer. Production by Tnito Romani and Pallas Shaw,
Sound design, mixing and scoring by Daniel Kempsen. Our score
(44:07):
was written, performed and recorded by Jeff Parker. Music supervision
by Nicholas Alexander and David Waters. Production management and endless
patients from Scharie Houston, Sarah Tobin, and Charlotte Wolfe. Fact
checking by Fendel Fulton and Dania Suleiman Story development by
Madeline Parr, Jess Swinburne, and Ziana Yusuf. Willard Foxen is
(44:31):
our Creative Director of Development. Special thanks to Leah Carter,
Stephen Carter, Angela J. Davis, Andrew Fernley, Marilyn Greenwald, Sondra Lebedy,
Katherine Godfrey, Nadia Maydi, Amalia Sortland, Sean Glenn, Neil Kushnan,
(44:51):
Julia Bromberg, Katrina Norvelle, Carly Frankel, and all the team
at w Emmy Novel
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