October 4, 2019
Hello ,
Mob Boss Charles "Lucky" Luciano's luck ran out the day Special Prosecutor Thomas Dewey hired Eunice Hunton Carter to help clean up "the foul stench of organized crime...suffocating New York."
In 1935, organized crime was the biggest business in the United States, making more profit than any legal corporation.
In less than six month, one woman pieced together the evidence and devised the strategy that would topple the kingpin of it all, the boss who ruled New York's five crime families, Lucky Luciano.
She Got the Goods on America's Most Powerful Mobster
Eunice was seven years old when white supremacist mobs attacked her black neighborhood in Atlanta.
More than ten-thousand white men and boys rampaged unchecked for two days, killing at least 25 African Americans, injuring nearly one hundred and destroying property, including Eunice's home.
Cover of the French "Le Petit Journal", 7 October, 1906. Depicting the race riots in Atlanta, Georgia. "The Lynchings in the United States: The Massacre of Negroes in Atlanta."
After the rioting, Eunice told another child she would grow up to be a lawyer and put bad people in jail. That's exactly what she did.
She graduated from Smith College in 1921. Employed as a social worker in New York City, she went to law school at night and became the first black woman to graduate from Fordham Law School.
Eunice went into private practice, jumped into local politics and was active in service organizations.
She volunteered at the city's "Women's Court' which prosecuted prostitutes, experience that would prove invaluable in her later strategy to turn the luck of Mobster Luciano.
At the age of ten, Salvatore Lucania immigrated from Sicily with his parents, and right off, took up a life of crime to survive New York City streets. Starting with mugging, shoplifting and extortion, he upped the ante as a teen,
selling drugs.
Though arrested once at 16, he earned his nickname "Lucky" for evading arrest and winning craps. He later changed his name to Charles Luciano, but the nickname stuck.
Prohibition offered choice opportunity, and the young mobster jumped on it, rising in the Sicilian Mafia's bootlegging operations. In 1931, he orchestrated the murders of the two most powerful mob bosses in New York.
Using loyal friends, plus the intimidation and murder of competitors, Luciano consolidated power and reorganized New York's crime gangs into one syndicate, including an army of politicians, police and judges willing to look the other way.
By general consensus, Lucky Luciano became capo di tutti capi, the boss of all bosses.
By 1935, the decent people of NYC had had enough.
Thomas Dewey was appointed
special prosecutor, charged with getting the evidence to bring Luciano to justice and crush organized crime.
He set up headquarters on the 14th floor of the Woolworth building in Manhattan, and hired a staff of twenty lawyers.
The office became "an impenetrable fortress with untappable phones, tamper proof filing cabinets, venetian blinds to prevent telescope equipped gangsters from spying on informants, while plainclothes detectives patrolled the lobby 24/7,” according to the blog Infamous New
York.
Nineteen of the prosecutors hired by Dewey were white men. One was a woman, Eunice Carter, making her the first African-American woman to work as a prosecutor in the New York County (Manhattan) District Attorney’s Office.
A flurry of underworld investigations began. Nineteen of the lawyers got busy looking into loansharking, kidnapping and murder. Eunice was sent away to the furthest desk to look into complaints of prostitution.
Dewey insisted he hired Eunice on her merits, but it seems he couldn't quite believe a woman could handle cases equal to men. He didn't pay her an equal salary either.
But as Eunice delved into this little segment of the underworld, she discovered that brothels seemed to be under the protection of local police. All the brothels. How could that be?
This reminded her of a pattern she'd noticed working at the Women's Court. One lawyer, Abe Karp, showed up repeatedly to represent women charged with prostitution. Karp was pricey. None of these women could likely to afford his fees.
Reviewing case records, the pattern became more vivid and suspicious. All of the women defended their innocence with the exact same story, almost word for word.
Eunice dug deeper. She learned that working girls payed a booker, payed the madam, and also gave over $10 every week as a bonding fee. The fee guaranteed if arrested, she would not go to jail. The system purred like the engine in a gangster's uptown automobile. That fancy lawyer never lost a case.
Eunice told Dewey it was clear the mob was running prostitution in the city and getting a cut of every working girl's income. But Dewey didn't believe it. Maybe he was blinded by his ego. He didn't see himself on the vice squad. He wanted to get
the mob on murder charges.
Only when a male prosecutor championed Eunice's theory, did Dewey allow her to deepen her investigation. She got a judge to allow wiretaps on suspected mob bail bondsmen. Then spent hours pouring over transcripts from the wiretaps.
One day she found what she needed, a mention of Abe Karp working for the "Combination." Continuing to follow bail bondsman's conversation over days and weeks, Eunice picked up name after name of men doing business with the Combination, names of men known to be connected to the mob.
Now Dewey listened. He orchestrated a raid on all the city's brothels in a single night, filling the jail with suspected prostitutes. Eunice believed if the bondsmen didn't arrive to get them out of jail as usual, the women would start talking. She had them held as material witnesses, with bail so high the "Combination" couldn't pay it.
The strategy worked. After several days of interviewing the jailed women, Eunice had the evidence she needed to connect Lucky Luciano with the city's prostitution syndicate.
Below: Lucky Luciano and his defense team in a New York courtroom.
Dewey dissed Eunice once again when it came to Luciano's trial, choosing a man who had not worked on the prostitution case to prosecute the mobster. Four other attorneys from Dewey's office were chosen to assist in the trial. Eunice was not
one of them.
Her evidence convicted Luciano and he was sentenced to 30 to 50 years in prison for prostitution racketeering. No other prosecutor ever connected Luciano with any crime.
Dewey did thank Eunice for helping with the case at his press conference after the guilty verdict. And her accomplishments as a woman, especially an African American woman decades before desegregation and the civil rights movement were extraordinary and impressive. She continued to work for Dewey in the District Attorney's office until 1945.
Below: Eunice Carter (second from the left) was friends with other high powered woman at the time, including Eleanor Roosevelt and Mary McLeod Bethune (far right).
Eunice Carter is finally getting some recognition for her achievements due to an autobiography written by her grandson, Yale law professor, Stephen L. Carter.
Eunice's work as a New York County District Attorney was so unusual for the 1930's that when a black woman was cast in such a position in HBO's popular drama series Boardwalk Empire, viewers didn't believe it.
Stephen says in his book that online comment threads quickly criticized
Stephen says his grandmother's story is exciting for our times
because we need "...to be reminded that against much bigger odds there are people who did manage to break through. I'm not suggesting there aren't barriers today that are real," he says, "but I think that the more we study about people who broke through the barriers of those days the more hope we have for today."
Sources:
Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance, by Aberjhani, Sandra L. West
https://stmuhistorymedia.org/eunice-carter-the-unlikely-hero-who-brought-down-the-mob/
https://themobmuseum.org/notable_names/eunice-carter/
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/eunice-carter-black-lawyer-who-took-down-one-of-americas-most-notorious-mob-bosses/
A warm thank you to the Ridge Readers for inviting me to visit your book group and talk about the research and writing of Standing up Against Hate.
This is a terrific group of readers who've been meeting every month for years to discuss books. I had a great time attending their meeting, answering questions and signing books. Plus, they had donuts. ;)
I took the opportunity to share how readers can help authors
by rating their books and posting reviews.
Shoppers used to read the front flap or a few pages as a way of deciding whether to buy a book.
Today, they look at stars and read reviews, which are right at their fingertips on Independent bookstore websites, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Goodreads, everywhere books are sold. Reviews really make a difference. Even one sentence and clicking that four or five stars is like gold to your favorite author.
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