School of Humans. Let's start this episode with a man's dying words.
Why don't we here? They are.
A boy has never wept nor dashed a thousand kim. You can play jacks and girls do that with a softball and do tricks with it.
Oh oh, dog, biscuit.
And when he is happy, he doesn't get snappy. You might hear those and be like, what the fuck does that mean? And that is a great question, because we don't know. This was the dying utterance of New York Jewish mafia kingpen Dutch Schultz in nineteen thirty five. These famous last words were recorded by a stenographer working for the police. They've been immortalized in books and movies, and some people think they are a coded message or a clue that will help you locate some hidden in money.
But I don't know.
Maybe maybe he was just delirious because he was dying. He had just been shot while he was on the toilet. But we'll get to that. What is often less shared about this fatal moment in the life of Schultz is a telegram he received on his deathbed, presumably moments before these words left his lips. The telegram was from a woman and it read as ye sow, so shall ye reap? A Bible verse, A creepy but not so cryptic note from one of his most formidable foes and the first female mob boss seen.
By New York City.
Her name was Stephanie Saint Clair. So let's see how was she involved getting this mob boss to his deathbed?
Cue the theme music.
This is American filth and I'm your host, Gabby Watts. Each week I tell you a filthy story from American history. This week's episode, girl Boss, My Boss. So let's go back to the beginning. Whomst is Stephanie Saint Clair. That is a question that many historians are trying to answer because what it's not exactly clear. You know, on the one side, maybe her early years are lost to history because she was a Caribbean immigrant, people didn't.
Keep the records.
But it's also possible that she kept herself, her origins, and her exact movements throughout her life a mystery because she wanted to.
It was on purpose, just to further.
Shroud her in mystery, to heighten her status as a crime boss in New York City. So let's look at some of the hypotheses of where she's from. Some people think that she was from France, like some people who knew her swore that she grew up in Paris, was the daughter of an aristocrat. She was, after all, fluent
in French and extremely well educated. And then when she was probably in her thirties or forties, she vehemently denied being from the Caribbean, claiming that she was from France one hundred percent more likely, though her early life was spent in Guadaloupe or Martinique, and she was either born on Christmas or Christmas Eve in the mid eighteen eighties
or eighteen nineties. But what we do know, or what we are pretty sure we know, is that on July twenty second, nineteen eleven, she left the Caribbean and headed to New York City. However, at the time that wasn't her final destination. She then went to Quebec, where some historians think she was part of a program that recruited women from Guadalupe to be domestic workers for white households.
And what would happen is basically the employer would pay your way there, but then you'd have to work for them for two years to pay it off, So kind of like a messed up, indentured servitude sort of thing. But it does seem that Saint Clair left Canada before she paid that off, because it looks like in nineteen twelve she finally ended up in New York City in Harlem. And Saint Clair reached Harlem in a very pivotal moment. She moved there in the nineteen tens, which was the
beginning of the Harlem Renaissance. During this time, black people were moving into cities in what was called the Great Migration. Thousands and thousands of people moved into Harlem, black thinkers, intellectuals, artists, so many people made Harlem their home and Stephanie Saint Clair was right in the middle of it.
And again, can you believe this?
It's not exactly clear what she was doing when she first arrived in Harlem. We do know from a marriage certificate that she got married in nineteen fifteen to a guy named George Gaschett.
He was from Dominica and an elevator operator. And while they were.
Technically married and through their marriage she was eventually able to get citizenship, it doesn't seem that their actual relationship lasted that long. Most likely when she first arrived in New York City. Like a lot of other Afro Caribbean women, she was probably either working as a housekeeper or a seamstress.
But what we do know is at some time in the early nineteen twenties she was like, hey, I can probably do better for myself than this shit, and that's when she started getting in with Harlem's drug lords, pimps, and big time gangsters.
So apparently there was this long standing gang called the Forty Thieves.
They had roots tracing back to the eighteen twenties in New York and it was these guys who showed her the ropes to the illegal gambling world and becoming the queen of gambling that would make Stephanie Saint Clair infamous. So in the nineteen twenties, there was a lot of different people playing these games of chance, because you know, you had all the rich people on Wall Street making
their money by speculating. So it was like, hey, in the underground, in the underbelly of these cities, we're also going to start our own operations where you could pay into a pool and maybe win some money, maybe win a shit ton of money, also maybe lose a lot of money. But this was very popular at the time around the world. In New York City, specifically, black people
weren't allowed to participate in Wall Street. So these games, also called the numbers game or the numbers racket, or policy banking, they were a way to circumvent this ban, allowing Black Americans to speculate, to scheme to maybe win some money, but then also by keeping that money inside of Harlem. And yeah, of course these numbers games they weren't legal, but it also seemed to become a fun
pastime and a very ubiquitous experience in Harlem. Like one newspaper wrote, numbers was a people's game, a community pastime in which old and young, literate and illiterate, the neediest folk, and well to do all participate. All of Harlem played the humble laundry woman, the disrespectful pool player, as well
as the respectable teacher. And the thing is, if you were the numbers game's game runner, or basically what they would call the banker, you had a lot going for you because not only would you control the game, you also would get a lot of money because they got to pay you to play the game. And that's where Stephanie Saint Clair came in. She established her own numbers operation sometime in the early to mid nineteen twenties, and her numbers game became very, very successful, and so Saint
Clair began to build her enterprise. And the thing about this is that a numbers operation comes with a whole hierarchy. So you have Saint Claire at the top, and then she's hiring a bunch of people who are like numbers collectors, clerks, messengers. She's basically starting this whole ecosystem of illegal gambling. And with her game, Stephanie Saint Clair quickly rose to the
tippy top of New York's underworld. She became known across Manhattan as Queenie, and up in Harlem people referred to her as Madame Saint Clair, Queen Madame, or simply Madame. And as she was becoming more and more wealthy, as she was having an even more successful enterprise, of course, she started getting noticed outside of Harlem by the other people who run illegal enterprises. Yes, I mean people in the mob for example, and her fellow compatriots in the underworld.
A lot of people described her as extremely well educated, arrogant, confident, and that she also had an intense temper that you didn't want directed at you. By nineteen thirty, one journalist estimated that Saint Clair had about half a million dollars, which would be about ten million dollars in today's money. She also had a huge flamboyant personality when she was in public. She wore big hats for diamonds, the finest dresses cut in the latest styles, and she also owned
apartments and houses in Harlem. She lived in the Esteemed Building four h nine Edgecombe Avenue, where her neighbors were led wev du Bois, their Good Marshall Duke Ellington cab Callaway baseball Great Willie May's. She was becoming a celebrity. One neighbor wrote about her that Madame Stephanie Saint Clair breezes through the lobby with her fur coach dramatically flowing behind her. She has a mystical aura about her and she wears exotic dresses with a colorful turbine wrapped around her head.
And the thing is Saint Clair.
She seemed to pour a lot of her wealth back into Harlem and also used her renown to support black causes. You know, she created jobs, She donated money to organizations that supported progress towards equality for black Americans. She wrote so many articles and newspapers that discussed black rights. She wrote letters to the presidents, congressmen, senators. She also spoke a lot about police brutality against black people. And of course, Stephanie Saint Clair she had a lot of run ins
with the law. You know, she was a prominent banker of a numbers game with a flamboyant personality, so she for sure on the police's radar. But at the same time, like a lot of other mob bosses at the time, people suspected that she had police officers on her payroll. But at the same time, it does seem that the police did surveil most of her staff. For example, in nineteen twenty eight, the police arrested her housekeeper. They were like, you have gambling materials on you and she's like, no,
I don't. They're like, give it to us, and she's like no. She was also like, you're only arresting me because you think I'm Stephanie Saint Clair, which I am not.
I am her housekeeper. You guys are stupid.
But unfortunately for the housekeeper, she did end up spending time in prison, and then Stephanie Saint Clair was arrested on December thirtieth, nineteen twenty nine.
Obviously, she was pissed.
She put an editorial in the newspaper talking about how she was arrested. She was like, yeah, I was arrested, but I was framed. She was like, these police are cowards who wear civilian clothes boo. In court, she ended up representing herself and she admitted to being a banker, and she gave a three hour court testimony basically shitting on the police, saying that the police arrested her because they were jealous that they were not on her payroll.
They wanted her money, and she said that when they went to her apartment, they also took four hundred dollars of her money, and the officer who took it wasn't getting punished, and she was like, I'm going to expose who did it. But when I said I was going to do that, they threatened me. Unfortunately, her very vivacious testimony didn't work and she was sentenced to eight months and twenty days in a workhouse. This arrest led to
two things. One, she lost her stronghold as the Queen of Numbers in Harlem, but also it made her even more pissed off at the police. Once she was out of the workhouse, Saint Clair went on a rampage. She was determined to prove how corrupt the police were. She testified before this commission quote Elee avishly dressed in her mink coat. She mounted the witness stand and hurled a series of charges. She's like, yeah, here are the people I paid off.
That's corruption.
But also even though I paid them off, they still surveil me, and that's rude. This testimony led to a lieutenant and thirteen other people who worked with the New York Police Department.
It got them suspended. Amazing.
So after this, Stephanie Saint Clair was back on top. You know, she was organizing numbers games. She was telling the police that they were dumb. But there's another threat on the horizon. Because we're in the nineteen thirties, baby, and what's happening. It's the end of prohibition, It's the Great Depression. People are losing money, people are sad, including all those white mobsters who had been keeping an eye on Saint Clair, people who had previously ignored Harlem.
They're like, I don't care about their schemes. Over there.
But the thing is now they're like, shit, we're losing all of our income streams. Maybe we should see what's up with Harlem. So Saint Clair's about to come up against her nastiest enemy, the crime boss of the Bronx, Dutch Schultz. We'll be right back after these soothing advertisements. Now, before we get to all of those white mob bosses, we got to go on a little side quest here, because while Stephanie Saint Clair was a girl boss mob boss, she also had a bunch of other shit to deal with,
you know, as I was saying. She wrote editorials in the newspapers constantly about legal rights for black people, police brutality, voting rights, other issues, and a lot of people obviously had their opinions on what she wrote, but there was one group of people who she didn't want to hear back from ever again.
Here's what she wrote in nineteen twenty nine.
She said, to whom it may concern, I have received letters and telephone messages from men which have annoyed me very much, and I take this occasion to ask them publicly to please not annoy me. I, Madame Saint Clair, am not looking for a husband or a sweetheart. If they do not stop annoying me, I shall publish their names and letters in the newspaper.
That's right.
One of her biggest enemies were dudes constantly hitting on her. Now, while Saint Clair was technically married to George Gaschett, it doesn't seem their actual relationship lasted very long. You know, that was the man she married in nineteen fifteen, but it seems that around the same time she had several other relationships, and based on the rumors of how they went, it might be obvious why she wasn't really into having
a boyfriend. Like at some point she was with this guy, Duke, but it turned sour when he tried to what prostitute her. She was like, fuck, no, I'm not doing that. And after that he ended up being shot in a gang fight and dying.
Is that a coincidence? Perhaps? Perhaps not.
She then had another lover named Ed and they had started selling drugs together and made a ton of money very fast. But then when she said she wanted to leave him, he tried to strangle her, and when he was coming towards her, she pushed him away, and apparently she pushed him so hard that he fell back and cracked his skull on a table and died.
Whoops.
So boo men in her romantic life. But now it's boo men and her professional life. Let's get to Dutch Shultz. So Steffie Saint Clair was officially known as the Queen of Harlem, just in time for the Great Depression, and obviously her reign didn't go on threatened for long. She got arrested, but now she had another enemy to contend with.
The mob bosses that dominated New York City, specifically the Jewish and Italian mafias, and up until that point in the nineteen thirties, they had left the Harlem numbers games alone because for most of the white crime bosses, they didn't have any interest in Harlem. They're like these numbers games, they're not profitable. Also, it's only poor people doing it. There's not enough money. But throughout the nineteen twenties there were more and more articles talking about how rich people
were getting off of these games. So the white crime bosses were like, hmm, let's keep an eye on this. And then when the Volstad Act was repealed, the white crime bosses started losing a lot of money because they had made money and selling illegal alcohol.
But now people could drink because they're sad. It's the depression. Let them drink.
So at this point they're like, Harlem's getting more and more interesting. Perhaps we should get involved, and by that I mean violently take it over. The head of the Bronx faction of the Jewish mobsters at the time was Dutch Schultz Duchy. He was very well known for his bootlegging operations during Prohibition, and he also ran numbers rackets similar to ones that Stephanie Saint Clair was running, but in the Bronx. But Schultz was also known for being
very brutal. He loved his gun, he was very trigger happy and spared no one. He was such a bad boy that FBI director j Edgar Hoover called him Public Enemy number one, listing him as one of the most dangerous criminals of the time.
So around nineteen thirty, Schultz starts moving into Harlem, and he had a strategy.
He was like, basically, I'm going to tell these black and Latino numbers bankers that they can either give me their operation, or they can give me a big share of the profits, or I kill them.
What a deal.
So, yeah, he was ruthless, and eventually he got to Saint Clair. Apparently he started making threatening phone calls to her, and then he escalated it to kidnapping and murdering her men. Then he paid off police, who normally turned a blind eye to her operation, which then landed her in jail. In fact, she said quote, fighting Schultz from nineteen thirty one to nineteen thirty five cost me a total of eight hundred and twenty days in jail and three fourths
to one million dollars. No surprise based on what we know of Saint Clair, she and her right hand man, Bumpy Johnson reacted immediately, making moves towards a swift and severe revenge. As payback, she started vandalizing his property. She herself would go to white store owners who were affront for Schultz and would destroy all of their products, smashing play glasses and destroying all of their gaming slips, and then she would order the small timers to get out
of Harlem. Another time, when Schultz had sent an underlin to intimidate her, she pushed that dude into a closet, locked him in, and then got her four massive bodyguards.
To take care of him.
Saint Clair also tipped the police off to a bunch of his people in operations that led to them raiding his properties and finding two million dollars. But the thing is, Saint Clair was also frustrated that her fellow black bankers weren't putting up more of a fight. She said in a newspaper on January fifth, nineteen thirty five, I'm not afraid of Dutch Schultz or any other living man. He'll never touch me. I will kill Schultz if he sets foot in Harlem. He is a rat. The policy game
is my game. He took it away from me and is swindling the colored people. And I'm the only one who's after him.
She's p.
And the thing is, Schultz hated that it was Saint Clair who was standing up to him because not only was she an enemy, but also she was a black woman and an immigrant who was fighting against him.
He hated that.
He hated it so much that he had a hit put out on her in nineteen thirty five. At that point, Saint Clair went into hiding. She said she quote hid in a cellar while the super, a friend of mine, covered me with coal. You know, a normal hiding spot under some coal, But lucky for her.
Other people were also pissed at Schultz.
So if you go down the rabbit hole of like mobster in mafia history in New York, it's very complicated and it's just like men being mad about shit. I'm just like, could you guys just calm down. But basically, there is this group called the Commission, and this is where the heads of the mafia families would gather and
discuss mob mafia stuff. And so the Commission was met at Schultz because Schultz had tried to kill this senator even though the Commission was like, hey, don't kill that senator, but he had tried to and he had failed, so they were pissed at him.
They were also pissed at him.
That they were like, actually, we should just kill him. So on October twenty third, nineteen thirty five, they get some guys to go shoot Schultz while he's on the toilet, no less, And not only was he shot on the toilet, which is embarrassing, Oh no, it's worse than that. He was shot on a toilet that was in New Jersey. The place was called the Palace Chop House in Newark, New Jersey. And basically he was ambushed on the toilet, got shot. Then a bunch of other people were shooting
his men. But I guess getting shot in the toilet didn't kill him, because then he was rushed to the hospital and he didn't die until three days later, which was long enough for Saint Clair to send him that creepy fucking telegram and then he uttered those last words of total nonsense. I'm sure this might be kind of an anticlimactic ending because Saint Clair didn't actually get to kill him or kind of.
Be involved with that, it seems.
But I think with this death at this point she was like, ah, maybe I should start retiring out of the Number's business.
It's getting a bit crazy.
So she handed her assets over to that guy, Bumpy Johnson, and they all seem to negotiate with the Commission that the other New York mafia gangs would stay out of Harlem, and eventually Bumpy became known as the Godfather of Harlem, and.
Then Saint Clair. It seems she stopped doing the.
Number stuff, but she continued to fight for political reform. The thing, though, is, even as her reign as the Queen of Numbers came to an end, she was still in the newspapers, and that's because she decided to let another man into her life. His name was Sufi Hamid. Now, based on her previous relationships aka she dated men who then she beat the shit out of or killed or they died by coincidence, you might imagine this relationship isn't
going to end. Well, let's see, Saint Clair got to know Sufi Hammad because they both did advocacy work.
But his was a little bit extreme.
Uh.
It seemed that starting.
In the nineteen thirties, he was very anti Semitic, and some people called him the black Hitler. He was also a proponent of black separatism. He organized a campaign to boycott businesses that didn't employ black people. He ran a mosque, he wore a turban and a cape, and he also claimed that he was born in Egypt in the shadow of the Pyramids.
When really he was from Massachusetts.
But you guys know what they say Massachusetts, it's basically the Egypt of Massachuset sits. So technically, when Hamid and Saint Clair were together, she was probably still legally married to George Goschett from nineteen fifteen, but she and Hamid decided to create this non legal marriage contract. Basically that said, hey, we're gonna be together, but in a year, if we don't like being together still, we can break up and leave this contract. But if we still like each other,
then we can continue. Isn't that great and then we can be together for ninety nine years or something like that. But unfortunately, it seems soon after they signed this contract it did not work out because on January nineteenth, nineteen thirty eight, Saint Clair shot him three times.
Whoops.
Here's what came out that happened during the trial. So apparently Hamid had an appointment with his attorney, but then when he got there to the office, Saint Clair was there with a gun pointed at him, and she was accusing him of cheating on her with this fortune teller, and she said, give me all the clothing and money I've given you, you stupid bitch, and then she.
Fired at him.
The first bullet went through his mouth and broke a tooth, and then he grabbed at her hand, and then she stepped back and fired again, and the second bullet went through his jacket and then the third bullet went over his head. So unfortunately she did miss.
But during the.
Trial she was like, oh, I wasn't going to kill him. I was just trying to scare him, you know. Like if I had killed him, I would have died. I would have been so upset. But the thing is, in trial, her act didn't really work out, and so the judge, James G. Wallace said, this woman has been living by her wits all her life. She has a bad temper and muscleer and she can't go around shooting at other people.
So alas, even though Hamid's wounds were not fatal, Saint Clair was sentenced to another two to ten years in prison, and historians think she served about three of those at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in New York. After her release, it's unclear exactly what happened to her. At some point in the decades after, she might have gone back to the West Indies to visit her family and then came back.
Some accounts say that she and Bumpy Johnson retired to a Long Island mansion where they lived together and he started writing poetry. I mean, it's a good thing. It's a mansion. Otherwise, can you imagine just a man reading poetry to.
You for the rest of your life? God.
But then there's another historian, Alexis Co, who said that her last address was at a Long Island psychiatric facility and then she died there in nineteen sixty nine. But what we do know about her is that she was a crime boss.
She got rich. She might have died rich, or she might have died poor.
She was an advocate and she never stopped pushing for the black commune that she lived in. She established organizations to help immigrants get settled. She also advocated for voting rights. She got those police officers fired, and she fucked up a lot of dudes. And I think what Stephanie Saint Claire can really teach us, and what this episode can teach us today, because of course, American Filth comes with a lesson is that if you're not in touch with
your entrepreneurial spirit, get your shit together. There's so much you can do even when the world is stacked against you. Oh, I'm sorry, was that moral too positive to end the show with?
Whatever? Roll the credits.
American Filth is a production of School of Humans and iHeart Podcasts. This episode was written by Julia Chriscau and hosted by.
Me Gabby Watts.
Our theme song is by me and Jesse Niswanger. Our senior producer is Amelia Brock. Our executive producers are Virginia Prescott, Elsie Croley, and Brandon Barr. Please leave a review, leave a star, give us some feedback. Also follow the pod on Instagram at American Filth Pod. All Right, Catch you next time by
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