Mob forces move in. Harlem’s lucrative underworld is divided. One woman must fight for control of what’s hers.

Stephanie St. Clair and her bodyguards walked up 7th Avenue. Candy stores. Stationary stores. Cigar stores. The blunt object in her hand was clue enough for onlookers, and pedestrians stepped aside as the petite francophile and her men continued.

The white mafia had storefronts up and down 7th Avenue for 30 blocks, many of them used to front a Harlem lottery operation that competed with the local Black-run lottery. The mob had discovered that the small bets made by the neighborhood’s working class Black residents could add up to big money—a fact known to local king and queenpins for decades. The neighborhood’s illegal gambling enterprises, which once operated in harmony, had more recently turned on each other, and with the arrival of organized crime as a new threat, Harlem was embroiled in an all-out power struggle. Black kingpins and white mobsters, who were fronted by a bootlegger named Dutch Schulz, moved with heavy muscle, adding violence to the scramble for lucrative territory and control over the streets of Harlem. Stephanie St. Clair abhorred what was happening to her neighborhood and did not welcome the intrusion. With equal zealousness, she hated the thought of giving up her throne.

She chose a location, nestled among the many mom and pop shops marketing everything from candy to zoot suits with their painted awnings and signs. Her men followed her inside and she yelled at the customers to get out. The white employees froze as she swung her wooden stick into the product cases, shouting over the exploding glass for the betting slips. When the slips were surrendered, she destroyed them and cautioned the operators, which were the low-level workers in the mob’s employ, to pass on a message: Leave Harlem and never return.

This was her town, and she had worked too hard not to come out on top.

Martin Harris had a problem. A turf war had exploded, alliances were being drawn and the young man, an up-and-comer in the neighborhood’s illegal enterprise, had just been summoned by Harlem’s most powerful gambling boss. Everyone knew Stephanie St. Clair: she was a towering figure in the local underworld as well as an influential member of the Harlem Renaissance’s cultural elite. She was also Harris’ chief competitor at a time of increasing tension and shifting alliances.

Harris, like St. Clair, was a policy banker. He ran a gambling business that was illegal, but it was also generally non-violent, popular and a boon to Harlem’s fragile economy. Harris was successful for an upstart, although nowhere near as powerful or prolific as St. Clair. Some glared with envy as the young man, barely 30, cruised down 7th Avenue in his chauffeured, custom Cadillac. He passed the awning of Connie’s Inn and the bright lights of Small’s Paradise, stopping as he went to make collections and perhaps delay the uncomfortable appointment awaiting him. Harris was a young king in the policy banking game, but the woman who had summoned him, the undisputed queen, stood on another level entirely. The kings and queens of Harlem claimed their crowns not only because of their wealth but because of their extensive patronage in the Depression-era, Black-majority neighborhood. Stephanie St. Clair’s influence in the neighborhood was prolific; she supported Harlemites struggling to make rent, immigrants trying to find their way in America, local businesses and the arts. Her generosity bought her fierce loyalty. 

Harris was a product of the uplift provided by policy bankers. A five-dollar bet had won him $3,000. With his winnings, he bought a new Cadillac, suits, jewelry and opened up his own policy bank. He went from being an employee to an employer. Always fashion forward, he smelled of cologne and the elixirs that barbers ran along the back of necks and under chins after a fresh cut and shave. He held court on the “avenoo.” And even if you didn’t know Martin Harris’s name, or that he was an Elk and an usher at Abyssinian Baptist Church, if you saw him in one of his suits, his posture and the way people regarded him, you’d know he was a king. You’d know by the way his money clip reflected the light when he took it from his pocket.

The sun had likely already set when he went to meet St. Clair. Her apartment was at 409 Edgecombe Avenue which, at 13 stories, was Harlem’s tallest building. Martin walked through the neo-georgian styled lobby and headed for the elevator. After riding up to the fourth floor, Harris would enter her apartment, sidestep bodyguards and notice the gold coins embedded in his host’s glass-top table. 

There she was standing before him, looking up at him in the physical sense but in ways that were more important looking down. St. Clair was slim with big brown eyes and arresting features. She had a breezy style of movement and was typically adorned in jewelry, exotic dresses and colorful turbans. She could charm anyone with a quick joke or a story about how her last trip to the opera had moved her, but she could snap just as quickly. 

Right now she was all business.

Harlem’s landscape was changing. What was once simple had now become a matter of life and death. Policy bankers had worked in relative harmony, respecting a code of territories and understanding that the pie was big enough for everyone to have a slice. But the game had changed. Harlem’s policy bankers were picking sides. To cap it off, the Schultz gang, eager to expand its revenue streams at a time when Prohibition was ending and the Great Depression was spreading, was making their move. St. Clair wanted to fight back, as was her way. Her plan was simple, and she carried a peace offering in one hand and a sword in the other. She needed allies, local policy bankers who would stand together in a sort of loose confederation against the mob and those that had already joined it. By the same token, she needed to eradicate the influence of police and politicians who were using the growing fault lines for personal gain and becoming too corrupt to honor the bribes she paid them. She would take the war to whoever stood in her way, and she was extending Harris an olive branch. She wanted him to join her in defending the neighborhood. His reward would be a continued place in Harlem—fancy car and all.

Sitting in the opulent apartment, Harris weighed his options. He had expected this. The game was heating up, and it was no longer the sole domain of enterprising entrepreneurs. To play and survive now you needed guts, needed to do whatever it took. Perhaps for this reason, he declined St. Clair’s offer. Most likely he did so in a polite manner—very polite. He would go his own way, he told her. Neither the looming mob threat nor any other policy banker, not even Stephanie St. Clair, would have a hand in what he was building.

St. Clair’s reaction is lost to history, but the polyglot immigrant, who claimed variously to come from Martinique, Guadeloupe, or “European France,” could have cursed him out just as easily in French or Spanish as she could in English. It wasn’t often that people refused her.

Harris departed and St. Clair stewed. Her bid to form an allied front against the mob was failing. She had a keener sense of the future than most of the neighborhood’s ambitious young men. Things were about to get a whole lot worse.

The mobsters held a meeting in an Upper East Side apartment. The topic: Harlem. Among those in attendance were Dutch Schultz, a bootlegger who was small in stature and had a habit of wearing oversized suits like body armor, and Jimmy Hines, a tall, corrupt Tammany Hall politician with a receding hairline and authority over West Harlem.

Richard “Dixie” Davis, the well-dressed son of a tailor and reputed mob lawyer, first exposed Schultz and others to the surprising value of Harlem’s numbers game. Before opening his own practice, Davis learned about Harlem’s policy banks as a public defender at the magistrates’ court, discovering that “nearly all the people brought into court were Negroes arrested in connection with the daily lottery called policy, or the numbers game, which had seized Harlem like a form of madness.” His experience along with some recent high profile testimony from an unlikely Harlem insider made Davis realize how much policy bankers were willing to pay to secure participation in fixed cases. He explained to Schultz that “the policy bankers were not mobsters… They were merely gamblers running an illegal business, on a very peaceful, non-violent basis.” In other words: Suckers.

The game plan was simple. In addition to opening up new lottery operations, the mob would exert pressure by means of extortion and intimidation to bring the Black policy bankers into line and extract lucrative cuts. It was a tried and true strategy; those who played ball would get protection from violence and from the cops. Those who didn’t would pay the price in blood. 

The fallout of the intimidation campaign, which brought broken glass and unprecedented levels of gangland violence to Harlem, was swift. Several long standing Harlem policy kings decided the game was getting too hot and looked for an exit. Wifred Brunder and Henry Miro, both successful kings, surrendered their banks to Joe Ison,  a former elevator operator. Ison was promptly approached by several mobsters who demanded a cut of his new business. Nervous in disposition, Ison was nicknamed “Spasm” because he was likely to have one when holding a bad poker hand. The new money had introduced new problems, and he was getting no help from his lawyer—the very same “Dixie” Davis who represented Dutch Schultz.

“Joe, I’ve been thinking something like this might happen,” Davis told him.. “Policy has been making lots of money, and so far it has not been bothered, but some mob is likely to move in.” Shortly after their talk, Davis introduced Ison to a mob enforcer. After a brief negotiation, Ison eagerly agreed to pay $500 a week. A few weeks later, the mob raised the price for Ison’s protection to $1,000 a week. He had been played, and what could the former elevator operator do except pay?

The syndicate’s foot was now in Harlem’s door, and a stroke of luck allowed the outsiders to kick it completely off the hinges. On Thanksgiving, local policy players made a wave of bets heeding a common superstition among Black Harlemites at the time that two, five and seven were lucky numbers. Incredibly, the numbers hit: 257 came up by chance and broke almost every bank in Harlem. Suddenly facing the prospect of financial ruin, all but the most stable bankers went looking for help anywhere they could find it. Ison pulled together all the money he had and was still $12,000 short of what he owed. Schultz, with a smile that looked like it was the hardest part of his day, agreed to cover Ison’s debt. He took two-thirds of Ison’s bank and did the same with every other banker who came to him, whether willingly or at the end of a pistol. 

Not everyone played ball. Martin Harris, the headstrong young policy banker who had resisted St. Clair’s offer, maintained his fierce independence and kept running his bank on his own terms. On a Tuesday morning, three men entered his apartment carrying guns. They pistol whipped his girlfriend before shooting Harris to death and absconding with $5,000.

In the aftermath of the shooting, the New York Age newspaper predicted that “Harlem will be the scene of a long, drawn out gang war waged on the one side by white racketeers who are determined to continue their domination of the rich takings of the game and on the other side by the Negro bankers who are working hard to exist and to win back for themselves the game which they once controlled.”

It was widely believed that St. Clair was the next target.

Henry Lee Moon, a bespectacled civil rights activist, sat in St. Clair’s plush apartment shortly after Harris’ death, wide-eyed at the scene. Two armed bodyguards and a young woman vying to be St. Clair’s new secretary were present while the queen paced the room, her accented voice thick with rage. “And put me on the spot? Me? Me? Don’t everybody know I ain’t scared of nothing! Run me out of business? Me?”

She turned to the young woman who wanted to be her new secretary and demanded that she take a letter. When she realized her anger was frightening the woman, St. Clair laughed. Moon volunteered. St. Clair began to dictate but much of what she said would be unprintable. “Never mind,” Moon said, “I know what you want to say and how it should be said. I’ll write it. You sign it.” St. Clair was an accomplished and prolific writer. But, considering her state of mind, she relented.

In the letter, which ran in the Amsterdam News, St. Clair addressed the rumor that Harris was killed because he had accepted her offer, writing, “I assure you that had he been affiliated with me in any way, he would never have come to such an untimely and ill-fated end. The gang which killed Harris knows better than to molest me or my associates.”

But the truth was that St. Clair was running out of allies, options and power. Her employees were being threatened, her customers poached or harassed. 

Worse yet was the private certainty, which stung her daily, that she more than anyone else was to blame for the invasion of the outsiders and the rift they had opened in Harlem. St. Clair lived by bold action and believed in shows of force when attacked, but a strategic mistake a few years earlier was now proving her undoing. In Stephanie St. Clair’s eyes, she had unintentionally opened the door for the white mob. 

It had started a few years earlier as an attempt to address injustices. St. Clair’s policy bank, which at its height was earning $250,000 annually, had put her in the crosshairs of the police, but her standing and outsized personality also made her a fixture in the company of the Harlem Renaissance elite and a beloved figure among the public. Before her war with outsiders, the only consistent opponents St. Clair faced over her policy bank were Harlem newspapers and the corrupt police and politicians who saw Harlem’s enterprising entrepreneurs as easy prey.

The gambling pastime stood in opposition to what some Black papers understood to be the Harlem Renaissance’s greatest product: the sophisticated New Negro. The New York Age published several pieces deriding policy bankers as scam artists. But policy banking was part of the community fabric, as much fodder for barbershop gossip as an opportunity to feed one’s family. The young, old, literate, illiterate, poor and well-to-do all participated. St. Clair, alone, employed up to 50 runners, who crisscrossed Harlem taking bets and paying winners; 10 controllers, who reconciled the betting slips with the runners’ collected cash; and a support staff.

St. Clair vociferously fought the newspapers and was well known for her frequent editorials. The police and local judges, however, were a serious impediment to her business and a constant threat to her safety. St. Clair paid off a small army to keep her and her employees out of jail. She hired bodyguards, including a young, booksmart and street-smart violent offender named Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson, who would soon play a pivotal role in her war with the mob.

But if there was honor among policy bankers, there was little among the police and public servants who gladly took her money. Many of the police she paid off persisted in snatching up her runners, only some of whom were lucky enough to eat their policy slips before any evidence could be found. There were also the police whom she hadn’t paid off. They broke into her apartment and robbed her. She was stirred in the middle of the night by phone calls, a voice on the other end whispering threats of her inevitable demise.

Never one to take abuse lying down, she called out the police in her bold editorials that argued not just for herself but for all of Harlem’s residents, particularly for the neighborhood’s women. She had published a letter about a woman who had been beaten to a pulp by drunk policemen. “Her eyes were black and bloody and her hand was bandaged,” she had written. “If colored people would stick together, these bad mistreatments would never happen.” The impassioned letters made her even more of a target for law enforcement.

It cost her dearly. When she was finally arrested in December 1929 on the contrived charge of being caught with policy slips—St. Clair would no more handle slips than a kingpin would tote around bags of drugs—her next publication opened with, “To the members of my race: Well, folks, I have been arrested. Yes, arrested and framed by three of the bravest and noblest cowards who wear civilian clothes.”

She was escorted from her luxurious apartment to a large, stone building with iron doors and bars on Welfare Island, a nickname for New York’s Roosevelt Island which housed prisons and asylums. For eight months, she languished in a workhouse where dingy rats prevailed. Some inmates in the overcrowded prison suffered from tuberculosis and heroin withdrawal. Others were forced to work as orderlies in the mental health wing where unsavory experiments were conducted on patients. French perfumes and the waft of Swing Street’s marijuana and barbecue were replaced with mildewy blankets and inconsistent plumbing. Strip searches were routine. She likely had no idea that a 15-year-old Billie Holiday was struggling somewhere in the same workhouse at the time. And from her small cell, along with the coughing and screaming of inmates, she could hear the boats riding down the frigid East River while she braced against the winter’s cold and anticipated her return to Harlem.

Her business suffered during her imprisonment. But if her enemies thought being locked up would silence her she had something else in store for them. Five days after leaving the workhouse, St. Clair left her new apartment, impeccably dressed, for a courtroom, where she aimed to strike a blow against the very police, judges and political lackies who had done her in. The Seabury Investigations, a probe into New York City corruption conducted by former Judge of the Court of Appeals Samuel Seabury, were in full swing, and St. Clair decided she would participate to shut down the crooked men who had crossed her. With testimony validated by the business records she’d kept, St. Clair confessed to formerly being a policy banker—stressing formerly—who had paid thousands of dollars to police and judges over the years. It was a daring move, and in the short term it paid off. Her testimony, and those of others, led to the subsequent firing of Mayor Jimmy Walker and several other corrupt officials and police who were targeting the policy bankers of Harlem.

But St. Clair’s bold act, though a blow against her enemies, was public record and fodder for the news media, and they exposed Harlem’s policy banks to new threats. Protection dried up and suspicions abounded. In that environment, the unspoken agreements that had kept Harlem’s policy racket competitive but nonetheless cooperative began to crack. What’s more, by opening up in court about the inner workings of her own operation, including how she’d successfully paid off law enforcement, St. Clair exposed just how lucrative the policy banks could be, a fact that mob lawyer Dixie Davis no doubt reconciled with his own observations working in the courts before bringing to the attention of his underworld bosses. In effect, St. Clair’s counterpunch had shattered the neighborhood’s bulwark of alliances while also inadvertently laying out a kind of blueprint for a powerful syndicate to move in.

If the invading groups succeeded, the community would no longer be represented in the policy racket by their neighbors and relatives. Instead, one of the neighborhood’s financial engines would fall into the hands of predatory outsiders, and local influence and long held standards of community and culture would be eroded from the inside out.

And now the mob had done just that and she was on her heels. With the war in full swing and her business still suffering from her recent incarceration and the now-constant pressure from the outsiders, she was outgunned and alone. The Great Depression raged. The bread lines stretched. Most of Harlem’s policy banks belonged to Schultz, and he was introducing the game to other New York boroughs where white players could take a chance at lifting themselves up out of America’s quicksand economy. St. Clair needed friends, and she needed them badly.

Isolated and increasingly cautious with her enemies on her doorstep, St. Clair received a visit from William “Bub” Hewlett. The two had enjoyed an uneasy alliance in the past. Hewlett was a Harlem extortionist and bodyguard who had been running the streets for most of his life and was always armed. At six feet and one inch with broad shoulders, he towered over St. Clair. She had reason to expect that here, at last, was an ally. Hewlett had built a reputation as the man who threw white mobsters out of Harlem. But he, too, disappointed her. He was there on behalf of Dutch Schultz with a simple offer: Submit to the mob and keep her life. 

The silence between Hewlett’s offer and St. Clair’s response was tense. There would be no violence during the meeting, but there was an understanding. Her accent grew thick as she shouted him down. She’d never surrender her bank—the Dutchman could kiss her ass. Hewlitt was a traitor to Harlem and she would drive him out as well.

Hewlett’s smile was replaced with a snarl. While leaving, he mentioned that Schultz’ offer may not be as polite the next time. A few days later mobsters began shooting up St. Clair’s policy spots and beating her runners. The queen had to hide under a bed of coal in a musty cellar to evade the hitmen sent to her door, an ignominious predicament for one of Harlem’s most stylish bosses. She looked for help among former allies but found none. When she ventured out of hiding, she harangued crowds of Harlemites for betting with Schultz and raged at her men when they thought of giving up, saying, “I will stand up to the goddamn Dutchman and I am a lady. You are men and you will desert me now? What kind of men would desert a lady in a fight?”

St. Clair’s insistence on holding her ground seemed reckless and foolhardy to just about everyone around her, and the attrition of her people seemed to spell the end of her empire. But her instinct to stay in the fight, however low the odds, proved on the mark. 

What the policy bankers and the number runners and the newspapers and even St. Clair herself didn’t know was that Dutch Schultz, the man leading the invasion of Harlem for the mob, was running out of time, and St. Clair was providing just the right element of pressure and resistance to break his grip on Harlem.

The mobster stewed. 

Schultz had survived two New York state tax evasion trials, which incensed Mayor Fiorello La Guardia and led to a new warrant for his arrest. J. Edgar Hoover had named Schultz “Public Enemy #1.” New York Prosecutor Thomas Dewey was closing in with new charges, and with Prohibition over and many of Schultz’s other streams of income taken away, policy banks had become his most valuable commodity. Meanwhile his rackets were being damaged by organizational infighting and overtaken by the Italian mafia, which had also realized how lucrative the numbers game was and wanted in. Where the mafia’s Charles “Lucky” Luciano liked to run a smooth and quiet operation, Schultz was openly violent and unpredictable, which won him grudging respect but little genuine loyalty. That was fine when he was able to dole out quick punishment, but now he was on the run from the law.

To top it all off, Stephanie St. Clair kept evading his hit men and popping up to disrupt the most important business in his portfolio at a time of uncommon vulnerability. She got a crucial ally in “Bumpy” Johnson, a former protégé of the enforcer Hewlett and a loyal friend to St. Clair. After his release from prison, Johnson sided with the queen, admiring her fearlessness. She, in turn, appreciated his intelligence and ambition. On her orders, and utilizing her dwindling fortune, Johnson began hiring men for hit-and-hide operations against the mob’s much larger army. The bodies of stabbed, beaten and shot white men began appearing in Harlem’s Mount Morris Park. The Amsterdam News reported that independent “Negro operators are girding for open and violent warfare against the representative of the white syndicate.”

In a bid to silence St. Clair for good, Schultz commissioned enforcer Max Rene to approach a friend of the queen, Catherine Odlum, who might lure her out of hiding. First Rene would attempt to bribe Odlum with $500. If that didn’t work, he would threaten her. Odlum was to arrange a meeting with St. Clair where Rene would lie in wait and stab her to death.

Odlum, a lawyer, knew she had little time to act. She contacted St. Clair and divulged the whole plan at once, then signed an affidavit swearing that she had been approached by Rene to coordinate St. Clair’s murder. Knowing of Schultz’ tax evasion charges, St. Clair and Odlum coordinated a public counter strike, taking their account to the papers and the court. Instead of St. Clair’s death, Schultz received bad publicity and Thomas Dewey received more material for his mounting case. Local newspapers reported St. Clair and Odlum storming Washington Heights Court and beseeching Judge Louis Brodsky for an arrest warrant for Max Rene. The story linked Rene to the mob. Judge Brodsky denied the request, and St. Clair, in typical headline-grabbing fashion, showed open disdain as she walked away from the bench, saying, “That’s why there’s so much crime in these United States.”

Schultz was a man who’d built his reputation and fortune on fear, and he was locked in conflict with a woman who did not fear him. St. Clair should have been easy to dismiss. More importantly, she needed to be dismissed so Schultz could focus on the tax investigation that could be his undoing. Thomas Dewey pursued Schultz like he hated him, which kept the mob boss trapped and calling the shots over his teetering empire while in hiding.

When enforcer Bub Hewlett was sent to prison, Schultz scrambled to find new muscle to do his dirty work. He chose a henchman out of Chicago named Ulysses Rollins and set him to the perilous task of handling the wildcard, “Bumpy” Johnson.

In the summer of 1935, Johnson was on a date with a senior editor and film critic at Vanity Fair at the Alhambra Bar and Theatre on 126th Street and Seventh Avenue. He glanced around the room and saw that Ulysses Rollins was also at the restaurant. Johnson rose from his seat, retrieved his knife, and with famously quick hands slashed at Rollins, who fell bleeding to the floor. Johnson stepped over him, returned to his table, and told his date he had a craving for spaghetti and meatballs.

A short time later, Rollins tracked down Johnson at Frank’s restaurant on 125th Street and shot at him but missed and killed a woman standing nearby. An off duty officer arrested Rollins and he was never seen in Harlem again, depriving the mob of another key enforcer.

Taking the offensive, calling on every ounce of loyalty she had carefully built in Harlem over the years, St. Clair figured out the location of one of Schultz’s clearing houses, and she directed that information to the few remaining cops who weren’t on his payroll. The police had spent weeks looking for it, and the information allowed them to spring into action.

Five plain-clothes officers slipped into the window of Schultz’ six-room apartment on the top floor of 550 West 146th Street. More police waited in the streets below. Canvas bags, paper bags, and unopened boxes revealed up to ten million policy slips, accounting for millions of dollars in bets. Six tin boxes held $2,164 in petty cash. Fourteen of Schultz’ workers were arrested. The raid resulted in the clearing house being moved outside city limits, driving the Dutchman out of Harlem—physically, at least.

Understandably, St. Clair might have felt deserted, but her incremental victories and refusal to accept defeat soon acted as a clarion call to others. In an Amsterdam News interview, an unnamed Black policy banker revealed that, after an eight week recruitment campaign, Harlem’s small number of holdout Black bankers, employing roughly 1,100 people, had unionized. The banker added that 75,000 pamphlets would be circulated, upholding the union’s view that numbers gambling “is a Negro game in a Negro neighborhood.”

“Bumpy” Johnson, true to his ambitious nature and perhaps sensing the deep cracks that he and St. Clair had caused in the mob’s Harlem infrastructure, began negotiating with the Italian mafia’s “Lucky” Luciano for a suitable arrangement. St. Clair felt deeply betrayed, but she could take some solace in knowing that, with Schultz on the run from new charges levied by Thomas Dewey, he was also surrounded. The Italian mafia was no more welcome than the white mob, but at least it was an effective bulwark against total domination of Harlem by one outside syndicate.

During a moment of reflection on the policy bank war, St. Clair remarked, “There were at least 30-odd banks doing a good business when the mob moved in. I doubt there are a half dozen now.” Realizing her tough talk and tireless fighting was galvanizing others, she told a Pittsburgh Courier reporter that if she finds Schultz in Harlem she’ll “blast him out … The policy game is my game. He took it away from me and is swindling the colored people.”

Schultz’s luck soon ran out, and fittingly it was his closest allies who turned against him. The New York mob had strictly forbidden Schultz from touching prosecutor Thomas Dewey, aware the heat a high profile assassination would bring. Penned in by the case against him, unable to control the violent rage that had made him so feared in the past, Schultz openly avowed to kill the prosecutor. A New York mob hit squad gunned him down at the Palace Chop House, on 12 E. Park Street. Schultz survived the initial shooting and was rushed away by his men but teetered on the edge of death.

“Dixie” Davis and other allies of Schultz were prosecuted by Thomas Dewey for numbers racketeering and convicted. According to the Amsterdam News, it was “believed that St. Clair turned over … valuable information” which assisted Dewey. In a 1960 New York Post article, St. Clair, “slender and fashionably dressed,” the owner of a four-story apartment building on Sugar Hill and a “prosperous businesswoman,” said the conflict she fought with Dutch Schultz from 1931 to 1935 cost her “jail and three-quarters of a million dollars. And not one bit of help did I get from my own people.”

But she survived. With the shakeup of the years-long war, the organizing of the policy workers, and new pressures from the Italian mafia, Harlem’s numbers game was changing. But Stephanie St. Clair was still on top, and Harlem loved her for it.

Langston Hughes said, “You might almost say the numbers is the salvation of Harlem, its Medicare, and its Black Draught, its 666, its little liver pills, its vitamins, its aspirins and its analgesic balm combined.” As the “Queen of Policy Banking,” St. Clair “fought back when others cringed.” As a New Negro of the Harlem Renaissance—whom Alain Locke describes as one who “wishes to be known for what [she] is … and scorns a craven and precarious survival at the price of seeming to be what [she] is not”—St. Clair might have felt like fighting back was the only choice she had. It was the just thing to do in a world that for so long had denied justice to her people.

Just before he died from the gunshot wounds, Dutch Schultz received a telegram from his old adversary. Signed by Madame Stephanie St. Clair, it read: “As ye sow, so shall you reap.”

QUENTIN LUCAS is a 2022 graduate from Emerson College with an MFA in Creative Writing. He’s a copywriter by day, runs oneminutestorytelling.com by night, and, in the fall of 2022, published his first novel, How to Lose a Planet.

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