December 19, 2023 • 48 mins
This is the story of the one of the first female African-American lawyers, Eunice Hunton Carter, who took down America's most powerful mobster.
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This series is hosted by Mary Kay McBrayer. Check out more of her work at www.marykaymcbrayer.com.
This episode was written by Nora Batelle
Editorial Direction by Nora Batelle
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Produced by Antonio Enriquez
Edited and directed by Mark Francis
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Executive Produced by Scott Waxman, Mark Francis, and Jacob Bronstein
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:07):
Diversion audio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
A note this episode contains mature content that may be
disturbing for some listeners. Please take care and listening. Eunice
(00:33):
Hunting Carter sat in her little coby of an office
at the Manhattan DA scribbling down notes. She couldn't count
the number of people she'd interviewed at this point, sex workers,
concerned citizens who happened to live next door to brothels,
paroles like this one Francis Kleinman, who were seeing very
(00:54):
alarming things happening at the edges of the law. Francis
said there was a gang in her neighborhood. They sold
drugs and roped women into sex work. She might have
gone to the police, but she was worried that if
she informed, the police wouldn't do anything to help. They
just put her in jail again and nothing would change.
(01:17):
Unice saw the real fear in frances eyes. She heard
it in her voice. It was fear of the gang,
but also fear of the police, fear that the police
weren't on her side, but on the side of the criminals.
(01:38):
Unice wrote down every word. She never took sloppy notes
because no one else was listening to these people and
What she was learning from listening all by herself was
that their stories were important. Their stories were her key
(01:58):
to taking down the biggest boss in the city, Lucky Luciano.
(02:20):
Welcome to the greatest true crime stories ever told. I'm
Mary Kay mcbraer. I'm a writer of true crime, which
means I live inside the research wormhole. I'm constantly reading
about every aspect of crime, from the blood baths to
the forensics to the justice system. But whatever I'm exploring,
(02:41):
the thing that keeps me hooked is always the people
behind these stories and what we can learn about society
by looking at their experiences. That's what I explore here
every week when I dig into crimes where a woman
is not just a victim. She might be the detective,
(03:02):
the lawyer, the witness, the coroner, the criminal, or a
combination of these roles. As you probably already know, women
can do anything. Today's episode is called sex Worker's Tip Line.
It's Eunice Hunting Carter's story. She was one of the
(03:24):
first black female lawyers in America. She also single handedly
figured out how to take down one of history's most notorious,
powerful and feared mafiosi, the man who was widely considered
to be the father of organized crime in America. Lucky Luciana.
(04:21):
All right, I feel like I should start with an
apology because I love mob shit. I really do. There's
no excuse. I am a total sucker. I'm a total
civilian sucker. I've seen every episode of The Wire and
The Sopranos. I can quote from Goodfellas verbatim, and I
(04:42):
tend to think that Frank Sinatra is a big old
baby from how he tried to get the production of
The Godfather shut down, at least that's how they showed
it going down in the offer. I've even read all
of Selwyn Rob's Tome, The Five Families and Gay Talisa's
Honor Thy Father, and I clock it every time jay
(05:02):
Z calls himself ill Padrino or somebody's wearing a scarfaced
tea in their music video. It fucking fascinates me. But
a lot of us, and I'm definitely including myself here,
we didn't grow up around complex criminal organizations that could
go rogue whenever they wanted and were icing cops and
fellow criminals left and right. If people I knew were
(05:26):
getting laid out on the corner, and that was just
how I grew up. There would be no romanticizing that,
there would be no equivocating for a different set of
morals that allowed murder. In the nineteen thirties, New York
City was run by organized crime. There were the gangsters
(05:48):
out on the street, controlling every illegal business like gambling
and the sale of stolen goods, and lots of ostensibly
legal endeavors as well, like bakeries and labor unions. The
stories I love paint mobsters as honorable guys in their
own way. They had their own code of ethics, even
if those ethics weren't the same as yours or mine.
(06:12):
For a lot of us, and I think it's fair
to include myself in this too, even though I do
know better. The mob represents the underdog. The running narrative
is the government didn't serve and protect me, so now
I have to go make a new government that protects
you from this corrupt system. Now kiss the ring or else.
(06:35):
In Americans, we love an underdog. It's in our culture.
It's one of the principles our country was founded on.
But in reality, these guys were not underdogs. They were
just mean, power hungry bullies with no moral compass at all.
In reality, the mob controlled its business by taking from
(06:57):
those that didn't have the power to stop them, and
they used violence to do it, sometimes even murder. But
it gets worse. In the nineteen thirties New York, the
mobsters weren't just on the streets. They also ran the government.
(07:17):
Back then, a lot of New York's politics were controlled
by the men collectively known as Tammany Hall, Tammany Hall
being the place where they all gathered to make the
backroom deals, take bribes, and generally ignore the crimes of
mobsters in exchange for payoffs. Their corruption trickled down into
all the cities agencies, including the police. I don't really
(07:40):
see a better term for them than organized criminals. They
were mostly committing white collar crimes, sure, but their willingness
to turn to blind eye in exchange for cash was
a big part of why violent mafioso's were so powerful.
New Yorkers at the time were getting tired of these
two connected problems streets run by mobsters and corrupt politicians
(08:05):
who turned a blind eye. When Franklin Roosevelt took office
as New York State governor in nineteen twenty nine, he
read the room and committed to rooting out corruption. In
nineteen thirty two, he actually helped force the mayor of
New York City out of office for taking bribes, and
(08:27):
in nineteen thirty four, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, an anti Tammany candidate,
took office. So things were starting to look better on
the political end, but the corruption ran deep, so deep
that to address this problem, Mayor LaGuardia knew he couldn't
(08:52):
turn to anyone in the rank and file of the
city government, anyone could be taking bribes. Instead, he asked
Thomas Dewey, a celebrated lawyer currently in private practice, to
join the administration as a special prosecutor with the explicit
task of taking down both the mob and political corruption.
(09:18):
By the way, I'm going to call him Dewey instead
of Thomas, just because it's such a recognizable name that
I can't help but think of him that way. So
Dewey had exactly the same thought as LaGuardia. He couldn't
trust anyone in the city government. He knew that there
were plenty of officials who would see him as an
inconvenience to be thwarted. The minute he took the job.
(09:41):
They'd try to make his investigation as difficult as they could,
and they'd do everything in their power to make sure
he failed. He also knew that going after the mob
might lead to real personal danger for him. These were
the kinds of criminals who might actually consider murdering a
New York City prosecutor. But Dewey also knew this was
(10:08):
the opportunity of a lifetime. If he could bypass the
Tammany politicians and root out the leaders of the mob,
he'd make a real name for himself. So he took
the position with one condition. He needed total independence from
the existing city government, so he needed the power to
(10:31):
appoint every single member of his staff lawyers, investigators, stenographers,
and clerks. Everyone LaGuardia agreed this was officially happening. Dewey
was going to find the most upstanding lawyers in town,
(10:51):
the best investigators to go out and collect evidence, the
best clerks to keep the investigation going, the best of everything,
and together they were going to bring down the leaders
of New York's underground. The process started immediately with Dewey's
(11:24):
soliciting applications for lawyers, and he got a lot of them.
Three thousand lawyers applied that was one sixth of all
lawyers in New York. These professionals, many of them young
and ambitious, had the same thought as Dewey. While the
odds were stacked against the task force and the dangers
(11:44):
to their actual lives were very real, if they succeeded,
the glory would be enormous. Dewey conducted each interview himself.
In the end, he landed on his dream team twenty
young lawyers, Nineteen of them were white men, although it's
(12:05):
worth noting that ninety percent of his team was actually Jewish,
which at the time made them a fairly diverse bunch
compared to the overwhelmingly Protestant major law firms of the city.
From what I could find, this appears to have been coincidence.
These were just the lawyers that Dewey found the most
talented among his applicants, although it seems likely that ambitious,
(12:29):
talented Jewish lawyers may have been more likely to apply
than Protestants, considering they had a tougher time being hired elsewhere.
And then there was the twentieth member of the team,
Unice Hunt and Carter, a thirty four year old black
woman lawyer living in Harlem to put Unice and this
(12:51):
time period in some context. Three of Eunice's grandparents were slaves,
the fourth was a free black woman. Her parents both
managed to acquire an education against enormous odds, and they
built the Hunt and family into a notable clan of
black intellectuals, eventually settling in New York. Unice had a
(13:17):
burning ambition to make a name for herself. It took
her just four years to graduate from Smith College with
both a bachelor's in government and a master's in social work.
She did some of the things expected of a daughter
of black New York's prominent families, and married a wealthy
Harlem dentist, one of the first black dentists in New York.
(13:39):
But Unice wasn't satisfied with the life of a society wife.
In the nineteen twenties, she started writing short stories for
local magazines, finding herself at the heart of the Harlem Renaissance.
Speaker 1 (13:54):
And then she.
Speaker 2 (13:56):
Decided that, despite her success, writing wasn't her calling. She
decided to fulfill a childhood promise she'd made to a
little friend on the beach one summer a long time ago,
to go to law school. In nineteen thirty two, Unice
(14:16):
became the first black woman to graduate from New York's
Fordham School of Law. Now that is all incredible period
For anyone, these would be amazing accomplishments, but Unice was
doing this all the time when both women and black
people were considered second class citizens. She had privilege within
(14:40):
Harlem's high society considering her family name, but don't let
that minimize her accomplishments. A lot of these institutions she
was moving through were predominantly white, predominantly male, or both
as in like close to one hundred percent white and male.
In twenty eighteen, Unice's grandson, Stephen L. Carter, wrote a
(15:03):
biography of his grandmother called Invisible. A lot of the
details of Unice's life that I'm sharing in this episode
come from Stephen's book, which is full of both family
lore and super thorough research. I want to shout it out,
especially because there's so much I won't have time to
(15:24):
share here. So just know, if you want all the
details of Unice's amazing accomplishments, check out the book Invisible.
There's a link in our show notes. But in the meantime,
after Unice graduated from law school, Unsurprisingly, her story was
not smooth sailing. Uni struggled to find enough work. She
(15:46):
split her time between what law jobs she could get
and social work, and topped it off with political campaigning,
not to mention having a child. She was busy, but
she really wanted to have a career as a lawyer,
and it was frustrating that she couldn't make it a
full time thing. That is until Thomas Dewey put out
(16:11):
his call for lawyers uncorrupted by Tammany Hall, looking to
make a name for themselves by taking down New York's
worst organized criminals, and picked Unice. She didn't know why
he picked her, and I don't know exactly why he
picked her. I mean, I'd hope it was because Dewey
(16:32):
was just above the rampant prejudice. And actually, in later
years Dewey commented on his choice and basically said that
it was exactly that he could tell Unice was brilliant
and talented and would be an asset to the team,
so of course he hired her. At the time, though
some people and some newspapers thought she was more of
a token. They said that Dewey wanted a black lawyer
(16:55):
on his staff. To satisfy Harlem, or a woman to
satisfy women, or he wanted a black lawyer because he'd
be targeting the numbers racket, which was especially popular in Harlem.
The white press seemed to think that a black person
would automatically know about all of that, you know, all
the old iterations of the undermining we still hear with
(17:18):
diversity hires. The reality was that Eunice wasn't a numbers
player and didn't know much about it, and Dewey Witten
in the end put her on the number side of
the investigation anyway. Regardless, Unis didn't waste time worrying about
whispers or even Dewey's motives. She was here and this
(17:40):
was her moment to prove herself to a bigoted society
and to change the history of crime in New York forever.
All she had to do now was figure out how
to prosecute one of the slipperiest men in New York's underworld.
(18:13):
Eunice Hunting Carter was assigned one of the smallest offices
at the far end of the busy hall, occupied by
Dewey's little lawyer army. That was her first annoyance, But
what was more galling was her assignment. Dewey split up
his army to look into different areas where organized crime
(18:33):
was running things like supermarkets, bakeries, and the numbers racket.
They were tasked with looking for any clues that could
tie those industries to organized crime, and, most importantly, the
organized crime to the mob bosses that ran things. Dewey
wasn't interested in the fixers and the heavies. He wanted
(18:56):
to take down the king of the underworld. If you
cut off the head, the body dies too, they say,
and at the time, it was common knowledge that the
king was mobster Dutch Schultz. Dewey's lawyers got to work
trying to prove Schultz was running half the businesses.
Speaker 1 (19:14):
In New York.
Speaker 2 (19:16):
Eunice, meanwhile, was assigned the sex work angle. If you're
like me, your immediate reaction to that assignment is, oh,
fuck him. So is that why he hired her then?
But the answer is actually no. Dewey didn't want to
(19:38):
explore that angle at all. He was adamant that his
task force not be seen as a morality police. This
was about serious crime. Sex work was not the kind
of thing he wanted his name attached to. There was
something petty about going after it as far as Dewey
was concerned, And I have to agree. If he's not
(20:00):
bothering with the fixers and the heavies, why focus on
the sex workers. Plus, he shared the common understanding of
brothels as something that just kind of sprung up wherever
people were. That old line. Prostitution is the oldest profession.
(20:20):
I probably don't even have to point out to you,
dear listener, that people usually fall into this type of
sex work out of necessity or force. Dewey thought there
was no way this organic manifestation of human vice could
be any key part of organized crime. There were just
too many houses and too many women for a syndicate
(20:40):
to control. But Dewey's office had put out a call
for tips from the public, and a lot of those
tips seemed to be about brothels and other sex work
related issues. So Dewey had to put someone on the job.
(21:01):
That someone was, of course, the woman in the office,
the black woman in the office. Whatever noble intentions do
we had or did not have when he hired Unice,
the white man was popping out. Now Unice had made
it onto the project, but still she found herself shunted
(21:23):
to the sidelines once again, though, Unice was determined to
do the best with the job she'd been assigned, and
what incredible resolve. She took interviews with everyone who came
to the office ready to spill about anything related to
sex work. She read through written tips diligently, and what
(21:52):
she found was interesting. Many of the complaints from non
sex workers were about the way the sex work industry
seemed to have changed in the last few years. Brothels
were raided by police, but then seemed to immediately open
back up, with all the women and their madams magically
(22:14):
out of jail. One Harlem woman had observed that the
police collected payoffs from the building next to hers twice
a week, like clockwork, in exchange for ignoring what went
on there. Meanwhile, there were stories about the law instantly
squashing new competition with existing houses. Eunice wrote up reports
(22:38):
about these stories and sent them up to Dewey. She
didn't hear back. She collected more tips, she wrote more reports.
She still didn't hear back. Dewey just wasn't interested in
this angle, even with all the tips coming in, which
meant Unice was left to look at her reports at
(23:00):
day after day. But the thing is in the quiet
of her little office, she was starting to put the
pieces together. Okay, at first I was pissed that she'd
been relegated to this little side office, but now I'm thinking,
you know what, that's exactly where I'd want to be,
off the beaten path, alone with my thoughts and this
(23:21):
tip line. And yeah, Dewey seems to have dismissed her,
but Eunice knew better. She knew that if anyone other
than her was manning this line pun very much intended,
they wouldn't be getting the information she was getting and
no one would be recognizing it for the serious evidence.
It was either if some brothels were left alone by
(23:45):
the law and others were targeted, that supported the idea
that the syndicate was icing whole police departments. Eunice looked
into the records of the so called women's courts where
the sex workers were tried, and yes, that was a thing.
The courts also sometimes tried cases related to adultery or
(24:06):
child support there. Originally, they were founded during the progressive
era with the intention of giving women a clean, safe
courthouse environment, but by the nineteen thirties. Of course, they
were crowded, dirty, and basically the opposite of those already
questionable intentions. Anyway, Unice was absolutely right to look into
(24:29):
their records because she found that in the past few
years there was one lawyer who started representing a huge
number of these women, women who surely couldn't afford his services,
and he was getting them off every time. That suggested
organized crime too to pay for the lawyer, and a
(24:53):
corrupt judicial system to ensure the women always got off.
Units started talking to sex workers about their working conditions,
and as the months went on, their collective picture of
life in the industry was becoming more and more clear
to her. One thing that stuck out were the points
(25:16):
all the sex workers had taken out of their earnings
before they ever saw any money. There was the madam's cut,
then a fee that went to someone called a booker,
who told the women which brothels to report to on
any given day. Essentially, they were freelance workers, with someone
booking them at a variety of houses depending on whether
it was demand. These bookers sometimes appeared to manage as
(25:41):
many as one hundred women. They were basically pimps, but
as of the summer of nineteen thirty three, the bookers
also started taking an additional cut, which the women called
their quote bonding fee. This was the fee that got
(26:02):
women that lawyer, the fee that got their bail paid
and kept them out of jail. One might think that
perk should have been included in the other taxes, but
maybe that's just me. That was the fee that went
to someone they just knew as the Boss and the
(26:24):
so called bondsman that worked for him. With that, Eunice
had no doubt in her mind. These signs all pointed
to one indisputable fact. The entire sex work industry in
(26:45):
New York was run by a single point person, someone
with powerful influence over the police and even the courts.
Whoever was running this racket was surely running others. It
was the Boss that Dewey's task force was created to destroy,
(27:07):
and if they put real resources behind this lead, they
could get him. Unice just had to somehow convince Dewey
that her lead was worth pursuing, and for that she
needed to show him she had a plan, a plan
(27:28):
to connect all this illegal activity with one central player,
the Boss. But there was a problem with finding the
Boss because Dewey's team didn't know who he was anymore.
On October twenty third, nineteen thirty five, Dutch Schultz, whom
(27:53):
they'd been pursuing as their primary target, was shot while
eating at an Italian restaurant in New Jersey by his
own guys because he had openly threatened to kill Thomas
Dewey and frankly, they didn't need that kind of heat
from a loose cannon with the law already hot on
their heels. Schultz was embarrassingly sloppy, so he had to go.
(28:20):
Schultz died in the hospital the next day, and now
he was beyond the judgment of the courts.
Speaker 1 (28:30):
Dewey did not.
Speaker 2 (28:31):
See the death of Dutch Schultz as a major blow
to his investigation, just to set back. Now they had
to identify the new mafia boss, adjust their target, and
keep on looking for ways to prosecute that boss for
his crimes. Still, the office was in something of an
(28:53):
uproar because of the Schultz assassination, and perhaps because of
all this chaos, perhaps because he knew his strategy had
to shift, Dewey was finally willing to sit down with
Unice and have a conversation with her. For Unice, it
(29:13):
was perfect timing. She just started examining a new set
of records sent her way by the rest of Dewey's
uninterested staff. It was a list of brothels in New
York City, compiled by exactly the kind of moral crusaders
that Dewey did not want to be. But as Unice
(29:33):
looked through these documents and compared them to the notes
on brothels she'd been putting together for months, she had
a realization. She now had the most comprehensive list of
brothel locations in New York City in existence, which meant
(29:54):
she knew exactly how this task force could weed out
the man at the center of the sex work racket.
It would take some time and some help from the
rest of the Dewey brigade, but she had a plan.
All she had to do now was use this meeting
with Dewey wisely and get him on board. Unice was
(30:19):
careful and thorough as she laid out her evidence that
New York's sex work was indeed organized and run by
a central criminal. If it wasn't Dutch Schultz anymore, it
was whoever had replaced him as the top mob boss
in New York. Then she showed Dewey her list of
(30:42):
brothels and explained her plan. Dewey still wasn't enthusiastic, but
he listened, and he had to admit Unice had a
lot of compelling evidence. He warned her he was not
going to give her much help. The rest of his
(31:04):
lawyers would still be looking into other angles, but he
did give her the go ahead to put her plan
in motion, which first things first meant wire taps, wire taps, y'all,
Like in the wire These wire taps were on both
the bookers and the bondsmen, and as transcripts of their
(31:27):
calls started to pour in, Eunice was left, as ever
to read through them by herself. It was tedious work
with long hours, but it did confirm a lot of
what she'd surmised already from her interviews and tips about
how this business worked. It also showed her that the
city's bookers were less individual players and more a coordinated
(31:52):
group that worked together to phil brothels. They even traded
workers between them. This was more centralized than Eunice had
even dared to hope. Still, she wasn't hearing much about
a boss, and certainly nothing about a specific mafiosa. That
(32:13):
is until January nineteen thirty six, when finally a few
bookers and bondsmen started to get careless. They mentioned calls
to check in with Tommy Bull, a known insider in
the circle of a certain prominent mob leader, Lucky Luciana.
(32:36):
If you've ever heard any mob stories, the name Lucky
Luciano probably rings a bell. And Okay, so this is
a silly little aside. But when I took a tour
of New York City and all the gangsters' locations, the guide,
whom I was obsessed with, I Love You Gary, pointed
out both the tenement that was one of Luciano's brothels
(32:59):
and his parents' house, which functioned as his permanent address
because he was one always on the lamb, and two
a punk ass little kid that was adult years old
and who still wanted to piss off his dad. I
actually have a picture of me posing in his dad's doorway,
so there's a link to that in the show notes.
As always, anyway, in these wiretaps, it wasn't just Tommy
(33:22):
Bull that came up. Other members of Luciano's inner circle
started coming up too. Meanwhile, somewhere on Dewey's team. There
was a leak because certain details of Unice's investigation, specifically
the nitty gritty of how the sex work industry worked
(33:43):
with organized crime running the show, showed up in the
New York Evening Journal. Their journal also announced Dewey's team
was preparing to make an arrest of the head of
the mafia. Obviously, you never want a leak in an investigation,
and that last bit about an arrest wasn't exactly true anyway,
(34:05):
But all that aside in this case, the article had
a powerful side effect. As soon as it was published,
Lucky Luciano fled New York City for Dewey and his team.
This was major. It meant the article had scared Luciano.
(34:28):
It meant that he was scared by the news that
the Dewey investigation was closing in on their target, and
all that told Dewey's team something very important. Luciano was
indeed the new boss, why else would he run. It
also suggested that the focus on sex work was threatening
(34:50):
enough that Luciano took the article's claims seriously. He knew
that there was a way Dewey and his team could
do use sex work to get to him. Of course,
this wasn't the kind of proof that lawyers could use
in a courtroom, and moments like this, it's so frustrating
to me that the bad guys can use every device
(35:12):
they can think of to get out of trouble, but
to serve justice you have to go by the book,
just one more way in which it's easier to be
bad than good, which makes goodness all the more special. Anyway,
Lucky Luciano's flight of terror was exactly what the task
Force needed to focus their investigation. Once again, Unice and
(35:34):
her work were the one thing moving Dewey's whole operation forward,
and how vindicating this busy work they saddled Unis with
was the actual thing that would matter. It was working
better than anything else Dewey and his team were looking into.
(35:54):
She must have been elated. Obviously, they didn't have Luciano yet,
and it's notoriously difficult to prosecute to mafia boss, even
if you know exactly who you're looking for, because they
almost always have soldiers actually executing the crimes they're responsible for.
They rarely ever get their own hands dirty. But Unice
(36:14):
was circling the target, and finally that January in nineteen
thirty six, Dewey had to admit he was impressed. He
had to admit that Unice's lead was their best bet
for taking down the mob boss. He finally assigned more
manpower to her lead.
Speaker 1 (36:35):
This was it.
Speaker 2 (36:37):
Unice's angle was the team's angle, which meant that now
it was time for phase two of Unice's plan.
Speaker 1 (36:47):
The raid.
Speaker 2 (37:08):
Eunice thought the best way to get the girls, Madam's bookers,
and bondsmen to talk was to arrest all of them
at the same time. With everyone locked up and no
prospect of bondsmen to come bail them out, people were
bound to start talking. So that's what Dewey's team did.
(37:32):
On the thirty first of January nineteen thirty six, as
quietly as they could, they rounded up all the bookers
and bondsmen. Then on the following night, they had policemen
wait on street corners around New York. No vice policemen.
At this point, Dewey and Eunice assumed they were all
corrupt unless proven otherwise, even without the vice squad present.
(37:53):
Though the police were given as little information as possible
before the raid to avoid another leak, they had no
idea what their orders were as they waded out in
the cold winter streets. Not until they received hand delivered
envelopes in the wee hours. They ripped the envelopes open,
(38:17):
and then they followed the orders to raid every single brothel.
Speaker 1 (38:23):
In New York.
Speaker 2 (38:26):
By the end of the night, Dewey's offices were overflowing
with silk evening gowns and cheap perfume. I mean imagine
it would have been hard for me to leave that office.
Nineteen thirty's glamour is my shit. The raids had brought
in more than one hundred sex workers in Madam's. As
one madam would later put it, it seemed quote as
(38:49):
though all the racket people in New York were in
and with no bondsmen to bail them out, they weren't
going anywhere, not until they talked. It took time, It
took patience and interrogation. Although ever mindful of avoiding the
image of vice warrior do we insisted interrogations stay polite. Finally,
(39:14):
some of the women started to talk, and some of
the bondsmen and fixers talked too. Because on a long
enough timeline, no matter what anyone tells you, everybody snitches
Some connected their business to men who were known associates
of Lucky Luciano. Others said they'd heard rumors that Luciano
(39:36):
was the big boss. But there were three women who
provided the important direct connection between Luciano and the sex
work racket that Eunice and Dewey had been looking for.
Mildred Harris, Nancy Presser, and Kochi flow Brown up with
(40:00):
that name.
Speaker 1 (40:01):
I know.
Speaker 2 (40:02):
Each of these women had dated a man in Luciano's
inner circle, and each of them had been around when
Luciano mentioned the sex work industry and his involvement in
the racket that ran it. None of these women was
the kind of witness a prosecution team likes to rely on.
(40:23):
As sex workers, lots of jurors would consider their statements suspect.
On top of that, one was an alcoholic and another
was a cocaine addict, but you can't guess which one
Kokie flow Brown. But with the mountain of other evidence
linking Luciano in the racket, Dewey and his team made
(40:45):
the decision. They arrested Luciano on April first, nineteen thirty six,
in Hot Springs, New York, where he'd fled in anticipation
of the arrest. The next day, he was indicted in
New York City. Unice must have expected that she'd be
on the team leading preparation for the legal case against Luciano.
(41:08):
She wasn't. While she and all the lawyers participated, Dewey
chose other members of his team to lead. Then, when
the trial began in May, Dewey didn't let any of
his assistants aid in the prosecution at the trial, He
(41:30):
did it all himself, Ugh said Eunice. I imagine she
basically single handedly made this whole case happen. She'd been
in the trenches collecting evidence all by herself, without even
the encouragement of her boss's faith in what she was doing,
(41:53):
and her hard work had led to the arrest of
Lucky Luciano. Who wasn't just the new mob by the way,
It would eventually become clear that he had completely changed
how the mafia worked. As the new boss, he eliminated
the system where there was a single head of all
the mafia families and instead created the council of multiple
(42:15):
mob bosses who worked together to share and balance the power. Basically,
he's the guy who created the modern mafia and Eunice
Carter led the investigation that resulted in his arrest. That
(42:35):
is an insane accomplishment. In the end, her work led
to Luciano's conviction as well. Dewey's job in the courtroom
was a success. Lucky Luciano was convicted on sixty two
counts of compulsory prostitution, which basically means coercing people into
(42:57):
sex work, managing, maintaining, and profiting off their labor. It
was the first time a major organized crime figure had
ever been successfully prosecuted on anything other than tax evasion.
And if we read between the lines, a little Unice
(43:20):
got him brought down for exploiting women. I mean, that
wasn't on his rap sheet or anything, but we fucking know.
With Lucky Luciano behind bars, that didn't mean Thomas Dewey
and his team were done. Unice kept working at his
office orchestrating raids against mafiosi. When Dewey ran for governor
(43:43):
of New York, Unice campaigned for him in Harlem. Dewey
never once appeared in Harlem without Unis by his side.
When he won, he appointed Unice a deputy assistant district attorney.
She was the first woman, much less a black woman,
(44:04):
to ever hold that post. In that role, she helped
Dewey take down Jimmy Hines, the head of New York's
corrupt Tammany Hall. That to me is so dope. They
weren't just going after the corruption in the streets, but
also the government corruption that allowed organized crime to flourish. Unfortunately,
(44:29):
once again, prejudice eventually prevailed. Unice couldn't seem to get
a promotion in the DA's office, so eventually she left
the job. But even then, she refused to sit back
and take some well deserved rest as a Harlem society wife. Instead,
she got involved with international policy or worked for international
(44:50):
nonprofits and organizations like the UN for basically the rest
of her life. Bringing down Lucky Luciano might have been
the huge success that put her name in the big league,
but Eunice did amazing work throughout her entire career. If
you want to learn more about all of these other
incredible accomplishments, please read Stephen L. Carter's biography Invisible. There's
(45:13):
a link to it again in the show notes. When
it comes to this story, though, the story of taking
down Lucky Luciano, I want to end by highlighting what's
for me one of the most extraordinary elements of this case.
Unice was the only woman on a task force that
set out to bring down organized crime, and not only
(45:36):
did they pretty much accomplish that seemingly impossible goal, but
also she did it by listening to other women, by
taking them seriously when no one else would.
Speaker 1 (45:48):
That is badass.
Speaker 2 (45:50):
That is an example for us all, even today, almost
a century later. Join me next week on the greatest
(46:24):
true crime stories ever told for a case with a
very different woman at its center. Marjorie Orbin, a woman
with a complicated past and a very strange story about how, where,
and why her husband went missing. I'd also like to
shout out again Stephen L. Carter's book Invisible, which made
(46:45):
it possible to tell this week's story. It's incredibly thorough
and well researched. Anne brings in his unique personal perspective
as Eunice's grandson. For more information about this case and
others we cover on the show, visit Diversion Audio dot com.
Sign up for Diversion's newsletter and be among the first
(47:06):
to hear about special behind the scenes features with the
hosts and actors. From Diversion's podcasts, more shows you'll love
from Diversion and our partners, and other exclusive tidbits you
can't get anywhere else. That's Diversionaudio dot com to sign
up for the newsletter The Greatest True Crime Stories Ever
(47:28):
Told is a production of Diversion Audio. Your host is
me Mary Kay mcbraer. This episode was written by our
editorial director, Nora Battel. Our show is produced and directed
by Mark Francis. Our development team is Emma Dumouth and
Jacob Bronstein. Theme music by Tyler Cash. Executive producers Jacob Bronstein,
(47:56):
Mark Francis, and Scott Waxman.
Speaker 1 (48:18):
Diversion Audio
Diversion audio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
A note this episode contains mature content that may be
disturbing for some listeners. Please take care and listening. Eunice
(00:33):
Hunting Carter sat in her little coby of an office
at the Manhattan DA scribbling down notes. She couldn't count
the number of people she'd interviewed at this point, sex workers,
concerned citizens who happened to live next door to brothels,
paroles like this one Francis Kleinman, who were seeing very
(00:54):
alarming things happening at the edges of the law. Francis
said there was a gang in her neighborhood. They sold
drugs and roped women into sex work. She might have
gone to the police, but she was worried that if
she informed, the police wouldn't do anything to help. They
just put her in jail again and nothing would change.
(01:17):
Unice saw the real fear in frances eyes. She heard
it in her voice. It was fear of the gang,
but also fear of the police, fear that the police
weren't on her side, but on the side of the criminals.
(01:38):
Unice wrote down every word. She never took sloppy notes
because no one else was listening to these people and
What she was learning from listening all by herself was
that their stories were important. Their stories were her key
(01:58):
to taking down the biggest boss in the city, Lucky Luciano.
(02:20):
Welcome to the greatest true crime stories ever told. I'm
Mary Kay mcbraer. I'm a writer of true crime, which
means I live inside the research wormhole. I'm constantly reading
about every aspect of crime, from the blood baths to
the forensics to the justice system. But whatever I'm exploring,
(02:41):
the thing that keeps me hooked is always the people
behind these stories and what we can learn about society
by looking at their experiences. That's what I explore here
every week when I dig into crimes where a woman
is not just a victim. She might be the detective,
(03:02):
the lawyer, the witness, the coroner, the criminal, or a
combination of these roles. As you probably already know, women
can do anything. Today's episode is called sex Worker's Tip Line.
It's Eunice Hunting Carter's story. She was one of the
(03:24):
first black female lawyers in America. She also single handedly
figured out how to take down one of history's most notorious,
powerful and feared mafiosi, the man who was widely considered
to be the father of organized crime in America. Lucky Luciana.
(04:21):
All right, I feel like I should start with an
apology because I love mob shit. I really do. There's
no excuse. I am a total sucker. I'm a total
civilian sucker. I've seen every episode of The Wire and
The Sopranos. I can quote from Goodfellas verbatim, and I
(04:42):
tend to think that Frank Sinatra is a big old
baby from how he tried to get the production of
The Godfather shut down, at least that's how they showed
it going down in the offer. I've even read all
of Selwyn Rob's Tome, The Five Families and Gay Talisa's
Honor Thy Father, and I clock it every time jay
(05:02):
Z calls himself ill Padrino or somebody's wearing a scarfaced
tea in their music video. It fucking fascinates me. But
a lot of us, and I'm definitely including myself here,
we didn't grow up around complex criminal organizations that could
go rogue whenever they wanted and were icing cops and
fellow criminals left and right. If people I knew were
(05:26):
getting laid out on the corner, and that was just
how I grew up. There would be no romanticizing that,
there would be no equivocating for a different set of
morals that allowed murder. In the nineteen thirties, New York
City was run by organized crime. There were the gangsters
(05:48):
out on the street, controlling every illegal business like gambling
and the sale of stolen goods, and lots of ostensibly
legal endeavors as well, like bakeries and labor unions. The
stories I love paint mobsters as honorable guys in their
own way. They had their own code of ethics, even
if those ethics weren't the same as yours or mine.
(06:12):
For a lot of us, and I think it's fair
to include myself in this too, even though I do
know better. The mob represents the underdog. The running narrative
is the government didn't serve and protect me, so now
I have to go make a new government that protects
you from this corrupt system. Now kiss the ring or else.
(06:35):
In Americans, we love an underdog. It's in our culture.
It's one of the principles our country was founded on.
But in reality, these guys were not underdogs. They were
just mean, power hungry bullies with no moral compass at all.
In reality, the mob controlled its business by taking from
(06:57):
those that didn't have the power to stop them, and
they used violence to do it, sometimes even murder. But
it gets worse. In the nineteen thirties New York, the
mobsters weren't just on the streets. They also ran the government.
(07:17):
Back then, a lot of New York's politics were controlled
by the men collectively known as Tammany Hall, Tammany Hall
being the place where they all gathered to make the
backroom deals, take bribes, and generally ignore the crimes of
mobsters in exchange for payoffs. Their corruption trickled down into
all the cities agencies, including the police. I don't really
(07:40):
see a better term for them than organized criminals. They
were mostly committing white collar crimes, sure, but their willingness
to turn to blind eye in exchange for cash was
a big part of why violent mafioso's were so powerful.
New Yorkers at the time were getting tired of these
two connected problems streets run by mobsters and corrupt politicians
(08:05):
who turned a blind eye. When Franklin Roosevelt took office
as New York State governor in nineteen twenty nine, he
read the room and committed to rooting out corruption. In
nineteen thirty two, he actually helped force the mayor of
New York City out of office for taking bribes, and
(08:27):
in nineteen thirty four, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, an anti Tammany candidate,
took office. So things were starting to look better on
the political end, but the corruption ran deep, so deep
that to address this problem, Mayor LaGuardia knew he couldn't
(08:52):
turn to anyone in the rank and file of the
city government, anyone could be taking bribes. Instead, he asked
Thomas Dewey, a celebrated lawyer currently in private practice, to
join the administration as a special prosecutor with the explicit
task of taking down both the mob and political corruption.
(09:18):
By the way, I'm going to call him Dewey instead
of Thomas, just because it's such a recognizable name that
I can't help but think of him that way. So
Dewey had exactly the same thought as LaGuardia. He couldn't
trust anyone in the city government. He knew that there
were plenty of officials who would see him as an
inconvenience to be thwarted. The minute he took the job.
(09:41):
They'd try to make his investigation as difficult as they could,
and they'd do everything in their power to make sure
he failed. He also knew that going after the mob
might lead to real personal danger for him. These were
the kinds of criminals who might actually consider murdering a
New York City prosecutor. But Dewey also knew this was
(10:08):
the opportunity of a lifetime. If he could bypass the
Tammany politicians and root out the leaders of the mob,
he'd make a real name for himself. So he took
the position with one condition. He needed total independence from
the existing city government, so he needed the power to
(10:31):
appoint every single member of his staff lawyers, investigators, stenographers,
and clerks. Everyone LaGuardia agreed this was officially happening. Dewey
was going to find the most upstanding lawyers in town,
(10:51):
the best investigators to go out and collect evidence, the
best clerks to keep the investigation going, the best of everything,
and together they were going to bring down the leaders
of New York's underground. The process started immediately with Dewey's
(11:24):
soliciting applications for lawyers, and he got a lot of them.
Three thousand lawyers applied that was one sixth of all
lawyers in New York. These professionals, many of them young
and ambitious, had the same thought as Dewey. While the
odds were stacked against the task force and the dangers
(11:44):
to their actual lives were very real, if they succeeded,
the glory would be enormous. Dewey conducted each interview himself.
In the end, he landed on his dream team twenty
young lawyers, Nineteen of them were white men, although it's
(12:05):
worth noting that ninety percent of his team was actually Jewish,
which at the time made them a fairly diverse bunch
compared to the overwhelmingly Protestant major law firms of the city.
From what I could find, this appears to have been coincidence.
These were just the lawyers that Dewey found the most
talented among his applicants, although it seems likely that ambitious,
(12:29):
talented Jewish lawyers may have been more likely to apply
than Protestants, considering they had a tougher time being hired elsewhere.
And then there was the twentieth member of the team,
Unice Hunt and Carter, a thirty four year old black
woman lawyer living in Harlem to put Unice and this
(12:51):
time period in some context. Three of Eunice's grandparents were slaves,
the fourth was a free black woman. Her parents both
managed to acquire an education against enormous odds, and they
built the Hunt and family into a notable clan of
black intellectuals, eventually settling in New York. Unice had a
(13:17):
burning ambition to make a name for herself. It took
her just four years to graduate from Smith College with
both a bachelor's in government and a master's in social work.
She did some of the things expected of a daughter
of black New York's prominent families, and married a wealthy
Harlem dentist, one of the first black dentists in New York.
(13:39):
But Unice wasn't satisfied with the life of a society wife.
In the nineteen twenties, she started writing short stories for
local magazines, finding herself at the heart of the Harlem Renaissance.
Speaker 1 (13:54):
And then she.
Speaker 2 (13:56):
Decided that, despite her success, writing wasn't her calling. She
decided to fulfill a childhood promise she'd made to a
little friend on the beach one summer a long time ago,
to go to law school. In nineteen thirty two, Unice
(14:16):
became the first black woman to graduate from New York's
Fordham School of Law. Now that is all incredible period
For anyone, these would be amazing accomplishments, but Unice was
doing this all the time when both women and black
people were considered second class citizens. She had privilege within
(14:40):
Harlem's high society considering her family name, but don't let
that minimize her accomplishments. A lot of these institutions she
was moving through were predominantly white, predominantly male, or both
as in like close to one hundred percent white and male.
In twenty eighteen, Unice's grandson, Stephen L. Carter, wrote a
(15:03):
biography of his grandmother called Invisible. A lot of the
details of Unice's life that I'm sharing in this episode
come from Stephen's book, which is full of both family
lore and super thorough research. I want to shout it out,
especially because there's so much I won't have time to
(15:24):
share here. So just know, if you want all the
details of Unice's amazing accomplishments, check out the book Invisible.
There's a link in our show notes. But in the meantime,
after Unice graduated from law school, Unsurprisingly, her story was
not smooth sailing. Uni struggled to find enough work. She
(15:46):
split her time between what law jobs she could get
and social work, and topped it off with political campaigning,
not to mention having a child. She was busy, but
she really wanted to have a career as a lawyer,
and it was frustrating that she couldn't make it a
full time thing. That is until Thomas Dewey put out
(16:11):
his call for lawyers uncorrupted by Tammany Hall, looking to
make a name for themselves by taking down New York's
worst organized criminals, and picked Unice. She didn't know why
he picked her, and I don't know exactly why he
picked her. I mean, I'd hope it was because Dewey
(16:32):
was just above the rampant prejudice. And actually, in later
years Dewey commented on his choice and basically said that
it was exactly that he could tell Unice was brilliant
and talented and would be an asset to the team,
so of course he hired her. At the time, though
some people and some newspapers thought she was more of
a token. They said that Dewey wanted a black lawyer
(16:55):
on his staff. To satisfy Harlem, or a woman to
satisfy women, or he wanted a black lawyer because he'd
be targeting the numbers racket, which was especially popular in Harlem.
The white press seemed to think that a black person
would automatically know about all of that, you know, all
the old iterations of the undermining we still hear with
(17:18):
diversity hires. The reality was that Eunice wasn't a numbers
player and didn't know much about it, and Dewey Witten
in the end put her on the number side of
the investigation anyway. Regardless, Unis didn't waste time worrying about
whispers or even Dewey's motives. She was here and this
(17:40):
was her moment to prove herself to a bigoted society
and to change the history of crime in New York forever.
All she had to do now was figure out how
to prosecute one of the slipperiest men in New York's underworld.
(18:13):
Eunice Hunting Carter was assigned one of the smallest offices
at the far end of the busy hall, occupied by
Dewey's little lawyer army. That was her first annoyance, But
what was more galling was her assignment. Dewey split up
his army to look into different areas where organized crime
(18:33):
was running things like supermarkets, bakeries, and the numbers racket.
They were tasked with looking for any clues that could
tie those industries to organized crime, and, most importantly, the
organized crime to the mob bosses that ran things. Dewey
wasn't interested in the fixers and the heavies. He wanted
(18:56):
to take down the king of the underworld. If you
cut off the head, the body dies too, they say,
and at the time, it was common knowledge that the
king was mobster Dutch Schultz. Dewey's lawyers got to work
trying to prove Schultz was running half the businesses.
Speaker 1 (19:14):
In New York.
Speaker 2 (19:16):
Eunice, meanwhile, was assigned the sex work angle. If you're
like me, your immediate reaction to that assignment is, oh,
fuck him. So is that why he hired her then?
But the answer is actually no. Dewey didn't want to
(19:38):
explore that angle at all. He was adamant that his
task force not be seen as a morality police. This
was about serious crime. Sex work was not the kind
of thing he wanted his name attached to. There was
something petty about going after it as far as Dewey
was concerned, And I have to agree. If he's not
(20:00):
bothering with the fixers and the heavies, why focus on
the sex workers. Plus, he shared the common understanding of
brothels as something that just kind of sprung up wherever
people were. That old line. Prostitution is the oldest profession.
(20:20):
I probably don't even have to point out to you,
dear listener, that people usually fall into this type of
sex work out of necessity or force. Dewey thought there
was no way this organic manifestation of human vice could
be any key part of organized crime. There were just
too many houses and too many women for a syndicate
(20:40):
to control. But Dewey's office had put out a call
for tips from the public, and a lot of those
tips seemed to be about brothels and other sex work
related issues. So Dewey had to put someone on the job.
(21:01):
That someone was, of course, the woman in the office,
the black woman in the office. Whatever noble intentions do
we had or did not have when he hired Unice,
the white man was popping out. Now Unice had made
it onto the project, but still she found herself shunted
(21:23):
to the sidelines once again, though, Unice was determined to
do the best with the job she'd been assigned, and
what incredible resolve. She took interviews with everyone who came
to the office ready to spill about anything related to
sex work. She read through written tips diligently, and what
(21:52):
she found was interesting. Many of the complaints from non
sex workers were about the way the sex work industry
seemed to have changed in the last few years. Brothels
were raided by police, but then seemed to immediately open
back up, with all the women and their madams magically
(22:14):
out of jail. One Harlem woman had observed that the
police collected payoffs from the building next to hers twice
a week, like clockwork, in exchange for ignoring what went
on there. Meanwhile, there were stories about the law instantly
squashing new competition with existing houses. Eunice wrote up reports
(22:38):
about these stories and sent them up to Dewey. She
didn't hear back. She collected more tips, she wrote more reports.
She still didn't hear back. Dewey just wasn't interested in
this angle, even with all the tips coming in, which
meant Unice was left to look at her reports at
(23:00):
day after day. But the thing is in the quiet
of her little office, she was starting to put the
pieces together. Okay, at first I was pissed that she'd
been relegated to this little side office, but now I'm thinking,
you know what, that's exactly where I'd want to be,
off the beaten path, alone with my thoughts and this
(23:21):
tip line. And yeah, Dewey seems to have dismissed her,
but Eunice knew better. She knew that if anyone other
than her was manning this line pun very much intended,
they wouldn't be getting the information she was getting and
no one would be recognizing it for the serious evidence.
It was either if some brothels were left alone by
(23:45):
the law and others were targeted, that supported the idea
that the syndicate was icing whole police departments. Eunice looked
into the records of the so called women's courts where
the sex workers were tried, and yes, that was a thing.
The courts also sometimes tried cases related to adultery or
(24:06):
child support there. Originally, they were founded during the progressive
era with the intention of giving women a clean, safe
courthouse environment, but by the nineteen thirties. Of course, they
were crowded, dirty, and basically the opposite of those already
questionable intentions. Anyway, Unice was absolutely right to look into
(24:29):
their records because she found that in the past few
years there was one lawyer who started representing a huge
number of these women, women who surely couldn't afford his services,
and he was getting them off every time. That suggested
organized crime too to pay for the lawyer, and a
(24:53):
corrupt judicial system to ensure the women always got off.
Units started talking to sex workers about their working conditions,
and as the months went on, their collective picture of
life in the industry was becoming more and more clear
to her. One thing that stuck out were the points
(25:16):
all the sex workers had taken out of their earnings
before they ever saw any money. There was the madam's cut,
then a fee that went to someone called a booker,
who told the women which brothels to report to on
any given day. Essentially, they were freelance workers, with someone
booking them at a variety of houses depending on whether
it was demand. These bookers sometimes appeared to manage as
(25:41):
many as one hundred women. They were basically pimps, but
as of the summer of nineteen thirty three, the bookers
also started taking an additional cut, which the women called
their quote bonding fee. This was the fee that got
(26:02):
women that lawyer, the fee that got their bail paid
and kept them out of jail. One might think that
perk should have been included in the other taxes, but
maybe that's just me. That was the fee that went
to someone they just knew as the Boss and the
(26:24):
so called bondsman that worked for him. With that, Eunice
had no doubt in her mind. These signs all pointed
to one indisputable fact. The entire sex work industry in
(26:45):
New York was run by a single point person, someone
with powerful influence over the police and even the courts.
Whoever was running this racket was surely running others. It
was the Boss that Dewey's task force was created to destroy,
(27:07):
and if they put real resources behind this lead, they
could get him. Unice just had to somehow convince Dewey
that her lead was worth pursuing, and for that she
needed to show him she had a plan, a plan
(27:28):
to connect all this illegal activity with one central player,
the Boss. But there was a problem with finding the
Boss because Dewey's team didn't know who he was anymore.
On October twenty third, nineteen thirty five, Dutch Schultz, whom
(27:53):
they'd been pursuing as their primary target, was shot while
eating at an Italian restaurant in New Jersey by his
own guys because he had openly threatened to kill Thomas
Dewey and frankly, they didn't need that kind of heat
from a loose cannon with the law already hot on
their heels. Schultz was embarrassingly sloppy, so he had to go.
(28:20):
Schultz died in the hospital the next day, and now
he was beyond the judgment of the courts.
Speaker 1 (28:30):
Dewey did not.
Speaker 2 (28:31):
See the death of Dutch Schultz as a major blow
to his investigation, just to set back. Now they had
to identify the new mafia boss, adjust their target, and
keep on looking for ways to prosecute that boss for
his crimes. Still, the office was in something of an
(28:53):
uproar because of the Schultz assassination, and perhaps because of
all this chaos, perhaps because he knew his strategy had
to shift, Dewey was finally willing to sit down with
Unice and have a conversation with her. For Unice, it
(29:13):
was perfect timing. She just started examining a new set
of records sent her way by the rest of Dewey's
uninterested staff. It was a list of brothels in New
York City, compiled by exactly the kind of moral crusaders
that Dewey did not want to be. But as Unice
(29:33):
looked through these documents and compared them to the notes
on brothels she'd been putting together for months, she had
a realization. She now had the most comprehensive list of
brothel locations in New York City in existence, which meant
(29:54):
she knew exactly how this task force could weed out
the man at the center of the sex work racket.
It would take some time and some help from the
rest of the Dewey brigade, but she had a plan.
All she had to do now was use this meeting
with Dewey wisely and get him on board. Unice was
(30:19):
careful and thorough as she laid out her evidence that
New York's sex work was indeed organized and run by
a central criminal. If it wasn't Dutch Schultz anymore, it
was whoever had replaced him as the top mob boss
in New York. Then she showed Dewey her list of
(30:42):
brothels and explained her plan. Dewey still wasn't enthusiastic, but
he listened, and he had to admit Unice had a
lot of compelling evidence. He warned her he was not
going to give her much help. The rest of his
(31:04):
lawyers would still be looking into other angles, but he
did give her the go ahead to put her plan
in motion, which first things first meant wire taps, wire taps, y'all,
Like in the wire These wire taps were on both
the bookers and the bondsmen, and as transcripts of their
(31:27):
calls started to pour in, Eunice was left, as ever
to read through them by herself. It was tedious work
with long hours, but it did confirm a lot of
what she'd surmised already from her interviews and tips about
how this business worked. It also showed her that the
city's bookers were less individual players and more a coordinated
(31:52):
group that worked together to phil brothels. They even traded
workers between them. This was more centralized than Eunice had
even dared to hope. Still, she wasn't hearing much about
a boss, and certainly nothing about a specific mafiosa. That
(32:13):
is until January nineteen thirty six, when finally a few
bookers and bondsmen started to get careless. They mentioned calls
to check in with Tommy Bull, a known insider in
the circle of a certain prominent mob leader, Lucky Luciana.
(32:36):
If you've ever heard any mob stories, the name Lucky
Luciano probably rings a bell. And Okay, so this is
a silly little aside. But when I took a tour
of New York City and all the gangsters' locations, the guide,
whom I was obsessed with, I Love You Gary, pointed
out both the tenement that was one of Luciano's brothels
(32:59):
and his parents' house, which functioned as his permanent address
because he was one always on the lamb, and two
a punk ass little kid that was adult years old
and who still wanted to piss off his dad. I
actually have a picture of me posing in his dad's doorway,
so there's a link to that in the show notes.
As always, anyway, in these wiretaps, it wasn't just Tommy
(33:22):
Bull that came up. Other members of Luciano's inner circle
started coming up too. Meanwhile, somewhere on Dewey's team. There
was a leak because certain details of Unice's investigation, specifically
the nitty gritty of how the sex work industry worked
(33:43):
with organized crime running the show, showed up in the
New York Evening Journal. Their journal also announced Dewey's team
was preparing to make an arrest of the head of
the mafia. Obviously, you never want a leak in an investigation,
and that last bit about an arrest wasn't exactly true anyway,
(34:05):
But all that aside in this case, the article had
a powerful side effect. As soon as it was published,
Lucky Luciano fled New York City for Dewey and his team.
This was major. It meant the article had scared Luciano.
(34:28):
It meant that he was scared by the news that
the Dewey investigation was closing in on their target, and
all that told Dewey's team something very important. Luciano was
indeed the new boss, why else would he run. It
also suggested that the focus on sex work was threatening
(34:50):
enough that Luciano took the article's claims seriously. He knew
that there was a way Dewey and his team could
do use sex work to get to him. Of course,
this wasn't the kind of proof that lawyers could use
in a courtroom, and moments like this, it's so frustrating
to me that the bad guys can use every device
(35:12):
they can think of to get out of trouble, but
to serve justice you have to go by the book,
just one more way in which it's easier to be
bad than good, which makes goodness all the more special. Anyway,
Lucky Luciano's flight of terror was exactly what the task
Force needed to focus their investigation. Once again, Unice and
(35:34):
her work were the one thing moving Dewey's whole operation forward,
and how vindicating this busy work they saddled Unis with
was the actual thing that would matter. It was working
better than anything else Dewey and his team were looking into.
(35:54):
She must have been elated. Obviously, they didn't have Luciano yet,
and it's notoriously difficult to prosecute to mafia boss, even
if you know exactly who you're looking for, because they
almost always have soldiers actually executing the crimes they're responsible for.
They rarely ever get their own hands dirty. But Unice
(36:14):
was circling the target, and finally that January in nineteen
thirty six, Dewey had to admit he was impressed. He
had to admit that Unice's lead was their best bet
for taking down the mob boss. He finally assigned more
manpower to her lead.
Speaker 1 (36:35):
This was it.
Speaker 2 (36:37):
Unice's angle was the team's angle, which meant that now
it was time for phase two of Unice's plan.
Speaker 1 (36:47):
The raid.
Speaker 2 (37:08):
Eunice thought the best way to get the girls, Madam's bookers,
and bondsmen to talk was to arrest all of them
at the same time. With everyone locked up and no
prospect of bondsmen to come bail them out, people were
bound to start talking. So that's what Dewey's team did.
(37:32):
On the thirty first of January nineteen thirty six, as
quietly as they could, they rounded up all the bookers
and bondsmen. Then on the following night, they had policemen
wait on street corners around New York. No vice policemen.
At this point, Dewey and Eunice assumed they were all
corrupt unless proven otherwise, even without the vice squad present.
(37:53):
Though the police were given as little information as possible
before the raid to avoid another leak, they had no
idea what their orders were as they waded out in
the cold winter streets. Not until they received hand delivered
envelopes in the wee hours. They ripped the envelopes open,
(38:17):
and then they followed the orders to raid every single brothel.
Speaker 1 (38:23):
In New York.
Speaker 2 (38:26):
By the end of the night, Dewey's offices were overflowing
with silk evening gowns and cheap perfume. I mean imagine
it would have been hard for me to leave that office.
Nineteen thirty's glamour is my shit. The raids had brought
in more than one hundred sex workers in Madam's. As
one madam would later put it, it seemed quote as
(38:49):
though all the racket people in New York were in
and with no bondsmen to bail them out, they weren't
going anywhere, not until they talked. It took time, It
took patience and interrogation. Although ever mindful of avoiding the
image of vice warrior do we insisted interrogations stay polite. Finally,
(39:14):
some of the women started to talk, and some of
the bondsmen and fixers talked too. Because on a long
enough timeline, no matter what anyone tells you, everybody snitches
Some connected their business to men who were known associates
of Lucky Luciano. Others said they'd heard rumors that Luciano
(39:36):
was the big boss. But there were three women who
provided the important direct connection between Luciano and the sex
work racket that Eunice and Dewey had been looking for.
Mildred Harris, Nancy Presser, and Kochi flow Brown up with
(40:00):
that name.
Speaker 1 (40:01):
I know.
Speaker 2 (40:02):
Each of these women had dated a man in Luciano's
inner circle, and each of them had been around when
Luciano mentioned the sex work industry and his involvement in
the racket that ran it. None of these women was
the kind of witness a prosecution team likes to rely on.
(40:23):
As sex workers, lots of jurors would consider their statements suspect.
On top of that, one was an alcoholic and another
was a cocaine addict, but you can't guess which one
Kokie flow Brown. But with the mountain of other evidence
linking Luciano in the racket, Dewey and his team made
(40:45):
the decision. They arrested Luciano on April first, nineteen thirty six,
in Hot Springs, New York, where he'd fled in anticipation
of the arrest. The next day, he was indicted in
New York City. Unice must have expected that she'd be
on the team leading preparation for the legal case against Luciano.
(41:08):
She wasn't. While she and all the lawyers participated, Dewey
chose other members of his team to lead. Then, when
the trial began in May, Dewey didn't let any of
his assistants aid in the prosecution at the trial, He
(41:30):
did it all himself, Ugh said Eunice. I imagine she
basically single handedly made this whole case happen. She'd been
in the trenches collecting evidence all by herself, without even
the encouragement of her boss's faith in what she was doing,
(41:53):
and her hard work had led to the arrest of
Lucky Luciano. Who wasn't just the new mob by the way,
It would eventually become clear that he had completely changed
how the mafia worked. As the new boss, he eliminated
the system where there was a single head of all
the mafia families and instead created the council of multiple
(42:15):
mob bosses who worked together to share and balance the power. Basically,
he's the guy who created the modern mafia and Eunice
Carter led the investigation that resulted in his arrest. That
(42:35):
is an insane accomplishment. In the end, her work led
to Luciano's conviction as well. Dewey's job in the courtroom
was a success. Lucky Luciano was convicted on sixty two
counts of compulsory prostitution, which basically means coercing people into
(42:57):
sex work, managing, maintaining, and profiting off their labor. It
was the first time a major organized crime figure had
ever been successfully prosecuted on anything other than tax evasion.
And if we read between the lines, a little Unice
(43:20):
got him brought down for exploiting women. I mean, that
wasn't on his rap sheet or anything, but we fucking know.
With Lucky Luciano behind bars, that didn't mean Thomas Dewey
and his team were done. Unice kept working at his
office orchestrating raids against mafiosi. When Dewey ran for governor
(43:43):
of New York, Unice campaigned for him in Harlem. Dewey
never once appeared in Harlem without Unis by his side.
When he won, he appointed Unice a deputy assistant district attorney.
She was the first woman, much less a black woman,
(44:04):
to ever hold that post. In that role, she helped
Dewey take down Jimmy Hines, the head of New York's
corrupt Tammany Hall. That to me is so dope. They
weren't just going after the corruption in the streets, but
also the government corruption that allowed organized crime to flourish. Unfortunately,
(44:29):
once again, prejudice eventually prevailed. Unice couldn't seem to get
a promotion in the DA's office, so eventually she left
the job. But even then, she refused to sit back
and take some well deserved rest as a Harlem society wife. Instead,
she got involved with international policy or worked for international
(44:50):
nonprofits and organizations like the UN for basically the rest
of her life. Bringing down Lucky Luciano might have been
the huge success that put her name in the big league,
but Eunice did amazing work throughout her entire career. If
you want to learn more about all of these other
incredible accomplishments, please read Stephen L. Carter's biography Invisible. There's
(45:13):
a link to it again in the show notes. When
it comes to this story, though, the story of taking
down Lucky Luciano, I want to end by highlighting what's
for me one of the most extraordinary elements of this case.
Unice was the only woman on a task force that
set out to bring down organized crime, and not only
(45:36):
did they pretty much accomplish that seemingly impossible goal, but
also she did it by listening to other women, by
taking them seriously when no one else would.
Speaker 1 (45:48):
That is badass.
Speaker 2 (45:50):
That is an example for us all, even today, almost
a century later. Join me next week on the greatest
(46:24):
true crime stories ever told for a case with a
very different woman at its center. Marjorie Orbin, a woman
with a complicated past and a very strange story about how, where,
and why her husband went missing. I'd also like to
shout out again Stephen L. Carter's book Invisible, which made
(46:45):
it possible to tell this week's story. It's incredibly thorough
and well researched. Anne brings in his unique personal perspective
as Eunice's grandson. For more information about this case and
others we cover on the show, visit Diversion Audio dot com.
Sign up for Diversion's newsletter and be among the first
(47:06):
to hear about special behind the scenes features with the
hosts and actors. From Diversion's podcasts, more shows you'll love
from Diversion and our partners, and other exclusive tidbits you
can't get anywhere else. That's Diversionaudio dot com to sign
up for the newsletter The Greatest True Crime Stories Ever
(47:28):
Told is a production of Diversion Audio. Your host is
me Mary Kay mcbraer. This episode was written by our
editorial director, Nora Battel. Our show is produced and directed
by Mark Francis. Our development team is Emma Dumouth and
Jacob Bronstein. Theme music by Tyler Cash. Executive producers Jacob Bronstein,
(47:56):
Mark Francis, and Scott Waxman.
Speaker 1 (48:18):
Diversion Audio
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