Ep 4: Panic

Novel.

Before we begin, a content warning. The following episode contains difficult themes and violence. Mama, I called my mom back in the middle of lunch recently?

What you doing looking at YouTube videos?

I'd missed her earlier call, and she tends to worry if I take too long to call her back. So I thought I'd make use of the opportunity to ask her about a connection I have to Eunice Carter's story.

Let me ask you this.

Do you know anybody who ran numbers?

Play dumb?

Yes?

Yeah, uh huh.

Let me see what was his name? He was a big number man in Nashville, Girl. He long needed money to get the bath hom fixed.

My childhood in Nashville and Harlem nineteen twenties are quite different in lots of ways. But if the little slips of paper I sometimes saw in my uncle's pockets as a child, or anything to go by black folks playing the numbers is a shared history across America. My late great uncle was a hard working, respectable man. He was quiet, stern, kept his own private stash of Pepsi's no one else

You could claim the number and you put a nickel like just say on at a thirteen.

The winning digits are announced the next day by whoever runs the game. They're usually drawn from some random, publicly published, hard to predict number, like the last three digits of Federal Reserve Bank clearings for that day. A lot of people had a special system for figuring out which numbers to bet. My great uncle was one of them.

He would sit down to workout numbers certain times, so the years, certain numbers always fall.

I remember one time my uncle deviated from his system by asking my cousin, who was studying to become a preacher at the time, to look in the Bible for some divine help.

And she wouldn't do it.

She wouldn't do it.

Yeah, the numbers game is a game of chance.

My aunt and her husband would host our extended family for almost all the major holidays and family events. My uncle's friends would come over, and after all the greeting formalities were out of the way, they'd ask what it hit for, and the jargon would fly too quickly for my child's mind to follow. I still wasn't really sure

One time. Maybe. When I was around six years.

Old, the house was full of people and music and food. All the big elders were sitting at the kitchen table reminiscing and laughing. There was a gallon jug of what I thought was great fruit punch sitting there between the ash trays and discarded dessert plates. I decided to help myself to a cup. But I remember I'm thinking that it was great creature cooler because it was just in a one of them regular old classic gallon jumps. I

Yeah it to you, so whatever you know.

As fuzzy as this memory is, it's one of my favorites, especially now that forty years later, so much has changed. Granddaddy's been gone a long time. We can't trust my great aunt, once famous for her hot water corn bread and potato salad, to cook anymore, and my great uncle, her husband, passed away several years ago as well. By the time I was a teenager, my great aunt and uncle had stopped drinking and smoking, but I think my uncle maintained.

At least that one little vice.

As Unice Hunting Carter walked through the streets of Harlem, perhaps on her way to and from law school, the numbers game would have been going on all around her too, not necessarily out in the open. Playing the numbers is a secretive business. That's why some of my mom's answers are a bit frustratingly vague.

People that were running the numbers, they looked like your average person. You could go to the barber shops, the beauty shops, the worst store.

To who though like it had to be somebody on the side. It wasn't actually going to Kroger and placing a bit with crogh.

The Tennessee has a state.

Lottery, right, but I'm not talking about the lottery. I'm talking about numbers like that's nothing different.

Numbers were supposed to be illegal.

It was a shared, open secret between friends. Lucrative but illegal.

Well, but your contact was they would tell you who you need to see in.

The grocery store. Agana could have worked there. It could have been the butcher, could have been anybody in Nick. The reason why it was illegal is because it was an underground thing and it was mostly in the black neighborhoods, just like up in Harlem.

So in Harlem, as the twenties turned to the thirties and Eunice was learning the letter of the law, she passes many of her neighbors who are surviving by breaking it. Not that many play the numbers because they thought it was going to make them rich.

The odds of winning are six hundred to one.

The more money you put on it to bi of your return. So they would put.

A penny on the number, they put a.

Niffle, they put a quarter. People didn't make a whole lot.

Of money in it as ordinary to my childhood as a cabbage patch kid or the sounds of MTV playing in the background. For a long time. It's also been a way to establish hope and agency and black communities, especially when times got hard. But where does all the money go?

Nobody win, but people like the people all at what all that money adds up?

Seems like in Unice's days, just as in my childhood, the people running the game are the ones making the profits. And in Harlem in the nineteen twenties and into the early thirties, one of those people was called Stephanie Saint Clair, as glamorous and as ambitious as Unice. But just as we saw in Atlanta in nineteen oh six during the violent riots that shaped the trajectory of Unus's life, black wealth attracts a lot of white attention.

Black folks said that then white folks won it.

They could from the teams at iHeartRadio and novel. I'm Nicole Perkins and this is the God Episode four Panic, New York City, Wednesday morning, November twentieth, nineteen twenty nine, and unus hunting. Carter has just started her break from Fordham Law School. This morning, she's getting ready for a day of political campaigning for Republican mayorial candidate Fiorella LaGuardia. But right now, in this moment, she's taking time for herself to read the newspaper. She opens the New York

To the members of my race.

I have received letters and telephone messages from men who 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. Eunice recognizes the woman in the ad immediately, so.

Stephanie Sinclair is very, very flamboyant.

One of Harlem's wealthiest and more notorious residents. And maybe the two of them have more in common than at first glance.

Their backgrounds are different, but these two women are the same. They want the same things. Then they see themselves as leaders.

By this point, at the end of the twenties, Stephanie Saint Clair is in the paper all the time, in her own ads like this one and in news articles. By today's standards, she'd be a millionaire, and she is not coy about it.

She's one of those people who would definitely be famous in twenty twenty three. Stephanie Sinclair knew how to use the press. She knew how to use word of mouth. She knew how to use gossip.

Stephanie Saint Clair lives at an address that many of the other movers and shakers of Harlem's Renaissance also call home. Up on sugar Hill four to oh nine Edgecombe Avenue, the Grand thirteen story complex, my Harlem tour guide had told me about during my visit to the neighborhood. It sits on a raised section of Harlem with sweeping views to the east. It's home to the likes of W. E. B. Du Boyce, Aaron Douglas, and, of course, later in her life, Eunice.

When Stephanie Saint Clair lived in that building during the twenties and the early nineteen thirties, everyone who lived in that building knew who she was, and they knew what she did for a living.

Stephanie Saint Clair is an illegal gambling racketeer, and a successful one at that. She's known as Harlem's policy Queen. That means she hed runs the neighborhood numbers game being played all over Harlem. Saint Clair employs at least fifty runners who spill out across Harlem, collecting slips and bets and salons, grocers and living rooms. She is arrogant, fashionable, glamorous, and smart. She has a reputation for profanity.

All of this led an air to mystery to her. That was a part of her mystique.

She's kagy about the details of her past, but we know she arrived in New York City from the Caribbean just prior to the Great Migration, and she's said to have led a local gang called the Forty Thieves in her youth until she found her niche in.

The numbers game.

Here you have a woman who's able to really build a small empire in a short amount of time.

Soon, Eunice Hunting Carter and Stephanie Saint Clair will share a common enemy, but it's Stephanie who will learn his name first.

So Dutch Schultz is this bootlegger. He's a roofless gangster.

Dutch was a major figure in organized crime from the nineteen twenties. His family had owned a trucking company, which came in handy for the transportation of illegal alcohol. But in nineteen thirty three, with prohibition coming to an end, his prospects look less profitable. So, just like his associate Lucky Luciano, he's searching for new opportunities to exploit. Unlike Lucky, he doesn't have the same kind of charisma about him, or forethought for that matter.

Every time he has a run in with someone, he sort of doubles down, like I gotta kill more people. I gotta be more aggressive next time. He sort of consistently learns the wrong lessons.

So as Lucky's Mott Street boys are moving into sex work, Dutch Schultz's idea for a new revenue stream is the neighborhood numbers games, particularly one neighborhood where it appears to be flourishing.

This is someone who wants to really control Harlem's numbers racket. He had been pretty successful in forcing black numbers bankers out of their businesses by force by violence.

But just like Eunice, Harlem's policy queen is no pushover.

Stephanie Sainclair is not going to let someone like a Dutch Shultz come in and take the business.

So in the early thirties, just as Unice is holding her ground, trying to find a path forward in the male dominated world of law and preventing her career from stagnating, Stephanie Saint Clair is holding her ground too. She's engaged in a game of cat and mouse with Schultz. Rumor has it she's taken to walking across Harlem's rooftops to avoid being spotted by Dutch or his cronies on the street.

It's not just the occasional bandit that would stick up a liquor store. It was very well organized and very violent coming out of prohibition.

And the press are jumping on this emerging story. Suddenly, these mobsters are no longer the friendly facilitators of your boozy party are putting the wine on your table with dinner.

They're coming for you.

They want a thumb in every pie, and they don't care if that pie is baked with your blood. It's a story that's salacious, it's got drama. It's perfect for crime reporters to fill their columns.

All of a sudden, we began to see more panic.

And readers are told this crime wave isn't just in the underworld. It's seeping into everyday life. The rise of the criminal underworld. Every mobster is a direct threat to the American way of life. Imagine opening up your morning paper and reading that while you do your god given duty as an American husband and father, going to work

This market economy crazy. Everything's for sale. The leading hoodlums of the day as well as Luciano, talked about everything being for sale. This is the ultimate market. So cops are for sale, prosecutors are for sale, judges are for sale. Sex is for sale. Women are for sale. Everything's for sale. And whether it's the cop on a beat, then you give them five bucks to look the other way, or whether it's somebody higher up in the system or wherever they were ineffective.

Those who have been quietly operating on just the other side of the law until recently, whether it's numbers like Stephanie Saint Clair or in sex work like Coochie Flow, are now labeled as complicit with the ones trying to take over their businesses. Suddenly they're the culprit. It's in a much bigger scandal.

New York was practically a failed city. The ability of the state and the police to maintain law and order in a democratic way was largely failing, and that there were all these people. All these gangsters of all kinds, who operated as virtually independent warlords were practically taking or the city.

Are things really as bad as they seem? Is the very fabric of society falling apart. By the time the Guardia is elected as mayor on January first, nineteen thirty four, it doesn't seem to matter.

Every politician in New York promised to do something about this. Certainly a Fiorella or the Guardia promised that he would be the one who would find some way to deal with completely out of control of crime. There was a push by all sorts of people to do something.

The story of how New York came to a point is mob Crusader is a little convoluted. For the detail oriented, it's a story Unis might enjoy herself, but for others it was essentially on the one hand, a problem.

In New York was, how do you take this random mayhem of violence and bring it under the law. How do you do that? That's very difficult.

And on the other a seemingly unlikely solution.

Let's have a democratic process that is competent, that is transparent, but is also strong enough to repress all of this terrible violence. That was the great challenge that LaGuardia faced in the thirties.

The stars needed to somehow align for someone to be given actual power to go after the mob But who, who, in the corrupt world of nineteen thirties politics, would be given that kind of authority, and who would even want to take on such a dangerous task.

Well, the answer.

Came from something called a runaway grand jury. They're basically a group of citizens chosen to investigate specific allegations of corruption and vice. But the New York d who appointed them had underestimated how impatient.

They were for change.

They've had enough of the state of politics and corruption in New York.

And there was a big stink.

And so the grand jury ran away all the way to the Governor of New York up in Albany.

Grand juries can do lots of stuff, and once they're impaneled, they not only can call in witnesses and so on, but they can complain about attorneys.

Their runaway grand jury demands the governor appoint someone strong enough to rid the city of mobsters once and for all.

All right, all right, all right, I'll appoint a special prosecutor to basically replace the sitting district attorney.

But the still raises the question of who would want to do this. It's not like there's a long list of bipartisan people with the necessary experience who are going to raise their hands to make matters worse. All of the governor's initial candidates for the job are rejected by the grand Jury members. They want someone's an energetic.

Efficient, confident, hardworking, not camera.

Shy, focused and ambitious, someone with an extremely striking mustache.

Thomas Dewey enters the picture on that platform.

Just a few years after Addie and William Hunton welcomed their sugar into the world and named her Unice. Thomas Dewey was born to a middle class family in a Wassaw, Michigan. Like Eunice, his education was marked by academic excellence. Also, like Eunice, Dewey's parents were committed Republicans. His dad was a newspaper man who owned and published a Michigan paper.

It was an abolitionist newspaper, a pro Lincoln newspaper, and Dewey himself was very attentive to the media of the day. As a child, he grew up with this realization that the printed paper that was important.

Ever since his early days, Dewey had been something of a ham. He loves putting on a good show, despite what some consider an unremarkable appearance. Always well groomed, He's average height with slick backed hair, part it carefully on the left side. You could practically count the teeth marks from his comb. But that facial hair he.

Insisted on having his little mustache that irritated people. I can remember my dad, who grew up in New York State, saying he'd never vote for that Dewey guy because of that badgum mustache. And I would think, Dad, what's the mustache got to do with it?

And Dewey's demeanor yloof, cocky, conceded, condescending, He rubbed a lot of people the wrong way.

But he was also ambitious.

Dewey has one powerful tool for success.

As a very young man growing up in Michigan, he was blessed with this remarkable voice, this great baritone voice. He thought he was going to be a singer, and he always had a kind of theatrical side to him.

In college, he'd actually traveled down to North Carolina for a singing competition.

And young Tom Dewey sang his way around in the mountains.

Singing was how Dewey met his future wife.

Of course, in the end he doesn't pursue a singing career, but he'd continued to use that voice.

You witnessed the tragic effect of crime on its victims, the unbelievable viciousness of the underworld.

This is from a radio show dow We had on WNYC. Somehow hypnotic yet energizing at the same time.

The hardships under which the police another law enforcement agencies labor, and the schemes and tricks to which criminals resort to get around the law.

As Eunice was starting her writing and social career during the nineteen twenties Harlem Renaissance, Dewey had moved to New York and launched his legal career, initially in private practice as a lawyer on Wall Street.

But that was just the start. Thomas E.

Dewey decided at one point to have political aspiration along with his law enforcement aspirations.

For Dewey, the law is just a wrong on a ladder.

The problem is that as a politician he lived in an age of basically very charming and lovable politicians. Franklin Roosevelt had enough charm for about twelve different people. Fiorella LaGuardia also a very charming kind of character. So Dewey had great strengths, but on the charm scale he was a little challenged.

But as the son of a newspaper man, do we know some things the other want to be politicians don't.

He was friendly with the press because he understood that to get attention to him, which he craved, it was important to be involved with the.

Media, and that irritating little mustache doesn't have quite the same impact over the airwaves six.

Pm Naval Observatory Time, New York City's own station WNYC.

As far as cutting edge mass media tech goes in the nineteen thirties, audio is it.

Ladies and gentlemen of the radio audiuce.

And Dewey is learning how to use it for his own purposes.

Station WNYC occupies a prominent place among the radio stations of our country in the presentation and discussion of the many, complex and multiple problems which confront all people.

Radio is his specialty, but as his career progresses, he keeps all the media close, making sure he's making the right kind of news.

I don't think he ever felt that he couldn't manipulate the press. He knew exactly how to deal with reporters and with journalists. Did he get that from his family, from his father?

Maybe he did.

He knew how to manipulate people, he knew how to talk to people.

By the time Eunice was finishing law school, Dewey had left Wall Street behind for new opportunities, and around the time she's failing her first law exams in nineteen thirty one, he's being appointed as a prosecutor and chief Assistant US Attorney. As Dewey looks around him at the career trajectory of other lawyers in his new role, it.

Seems obvious.

The higher the profile of the defendant in the dock, the more pressed attention the prosecutor gets, and the faster they move up the career ladder. So in nineteen thirty three, just as Eunice was about to set up her own law practice down the street from the Tree of Hope, Dewey gets his shot in the crosshairs. Was a notorious former bootlegger.

Waxy Gordon was one of his first.

Targets, and Dewey is soon making headlines for convicting this wanted gangster on tax evasion.

And that's how he first got involved with prosecuting organized crime.

Next, Dewey turns his eye toward another gangster with another great name, a colleague of Lucky Luciano's.

And that was Irish American gangster Jack Legg's diamond.

Dewey helps put Leg's diamond away too. And so when nineteen thirty five comes around and the Governor of New York is looking to appoint his mob busting special prosecutor, there was the man with the mustache.

Thomas E.

Dewey came up like the boys Scout prosecutor.

Someone not yet tainted by corruption by partisan white male do.

We had a reputation among both Republicans and Democrats.

Honestly, the governor doesn't have many other options.

Thomas Dewey was an idealist. Thomas Dewey was a crusader who grabbed on to the general public's disenchantment with gangsterism as a whole.

It has to be Dewey.

He totally fit the bill for a guy to take down the mob.

Dewey is officially appointed to the role in the spring of nineteen thirty five He's thirty three years old with about a decade of law experience. Dewey knows he needs to strike strategically. A high profile blow was the answer, like Waxy and Legs, but this time he needs someone even bigger, someone with an even more violent reputation. One of these gangsters had gotten rich during Prohibition and is now spreading out his operations across New York. A huge,

As she makes this.

Speech for myself, I make no please. I live here, I have lived here, I am going to continue to live here. I am one of you, and I want things for Harlem. I have an eight year old son whom I hope will live and who I expect to work here. You have known me for the better part of half of my life that I have lived right here with you. I need say no more as to my interest in this community than the fact that I will put the community first.

Despite her socialized status, Unice could not have failed to see the way many in Harlem had suffered during the Great Depression.

So if you were already poor during the Harlem Renaissance, than you were extremely poor during the nineteen thirties. Now, people who were already subjected to low wage household work have to compete with white people who in normal times would not take those low paying jobs.

Unice's commitment to the community wins her the endorsement of the Amsterdam News and the New York Age. She opens a campaign headquarters just a few blocks north of her law practice on the Boulevard of Dreams, even closer to the Tree of Hope this time, so she might have seen with her own eyes the day workmen arrived to cut it down. It's a Monday in late August. That hottest of summer is drawing to a close. Seventh Avenue is set to be widened, and so the tree has

She lost by an extremely narrow margin. She almost beat somebody very popular and incumbent.

Unice doesn't win the Assembly seat, but she does win herself. Some powerful political allies. Fiorello LaGuardia, who's now won his second run at mayor, is among them, and soon she'll have the opportunity to put her commitment to community to the test.

Shortly after that election, there was this terrible race riot in Harlem.

March nineteen thirty five is the day the Harlem race riot began. Art when a teenage boy gets arrested at a local store.

After being accused of shoplifting and a store, a white store in Harlem.

The police beat him up a little bit, But there's this room that spreads in Harlem that he's killed.

He's not killed, he was whisked away by the police.

This kid, Lino Rivera, is assumed to have been beaten to death. An agitated crowd descends on the store. A nearby ambulance speeding away from the scene heightens their confusion. Suddenly frustrations reached the surface.

Black people were angry, not only because of the arrest of that young black man. This is during the depression when everybody was suffering, but African Americans suffered even more. All of Black Harlem was not wealthy or elite, lack of jobs, lack of adequate housing, just determed of getting a meal, getting something.

To eat, being surveiled by police, subject to verbal violence by the police, physical violence by the police, intense policing of black bodies, and also black spaces to any type of public space becomes criminalized because there's this perception about black people and who they are.

Within hours, hundreds have gathered in protest. Then someone throws a rock through the store window.

That was the spark that really ignited.

Rioting begins throughout the neighborhood. Even though the teenager originally accused of theft had already been arrested and released. Misinformation, confusion, and long held grievances take over.

The revolt against the conditions in which the majority of black people were living during that time.

When the rioting subsides, three people have died. There is an estimated two million dollars in property damage across the community.

The Mayor, Firella LaGuardia immediately said we have to do something. Within days, he appointed a commission to look into what are the causes of this riot and how do we stop this from happening again.

Mayor LaGuardia staffs up his commission with more black members than white, and he.

Knew Unus just because she had run for office.

She was the only woman on the commission.

And as secretary she kept the books. She was kind of you in charge of what was going on and keeping the minutes. So this group met and they came up with some really great suggestions.

And their report pointed out the reasons for the revolt and what needed to be done to ensure that African Americans' concerns were addressed.

They did a great job, and this was partially because of Unis.

If you look at that final version of that report and was for the time radical in its own right, because it clearly pinpointed the issues that black people were dealing with and noted that there were specific kinds of changes that needed to occur to address the concerns of the black community.

The significance of this movement is probably not in what the Commission would go on to achieve. Many of their final report recommendations are seen as too progressive, and it will not surprise you to learn that police brutality, inequality, and economic disparity all continue in Harlem despite the work Units and her peers put into the Commission. The Commission may have been window dressing, but it also marks another key moment in Unice's ambition. Units had been chosen by

To call on.

Maybe not across all of New York, but definitely in Harlem. While Eunice is working on this committee, she's also spending some of her time volunteering as a kind of law clerk in a women's court.

Sounds outrageously sexist today, but there actually was a women's court.

In New York City. The women's court is in a building that still stands, called the Jefferson Market Courthouse.

It is a.

Beautiful old Gothic brick building with a big bell tower. Now actually not far from where the Mott Street Gang began and had their headquarters. A court that was devoted entirely to females cremitting crimes like shoplifting or prostitution, or whatever kinds of vagrancy, whatever sorts of things that women could be accused of, came out of that same period

In the summer of nineteen thirty five, Unice's volunteering pays off. The New York DA appoints Unice as an assistant prosecutor in the court.

So when Eunice was hired at the Prosecutor's office in thirty five, she was the first black woman in the New York Prosecutor's Office.

I'm fascinated by Unice's decision to become a prosecutor and not a public defender. For someone looking to uplift the black community, it seems an unusual choice.

I wonder if she saw it as a challenge as one of the few women and African Americans going into being a prosecutor. Anyone who is a prosecutor, they were all pretty feisty and self confident, and I really admire that. At the same time, I think there are African Americans who go into becoming prosecutors because it is a traditional route to power.

A route to power. Maybe that's it. It's certainly not.

The glamour of the women's court.

It was dingy and dirty. There weren't even electric lights for much of the early twentieth century. It was jammed with lawyers and dirty cops and judges. It was no place that anybody wanted to be, but many women were there of dozens and dozens of times.

The drama of the court has to get Unice's blood pumping more than the wills and contracts he was leaving behind in her private practice. Plus Unice excels and research like going through court documents, so there's plenty of work, booking forms, evidence sheets, courtroom transcripts. Detail heaven for someone like Unice, she looks through every piece of paper she can. I can picture Unis at a table in the courtroom with poor lighting, in a room that smells like smoke.

Does she talk.

About this pattern with her colleagues? Someone as detail focused ash she is probably begins taking her own notes, just in case they'll be useful later. Unice doesn't strike me as a woman who would notice these things and shrug them.

Off, files that knowledge away.

Unice keeps her nose to the grindstone. But soon someone from city Hall calls looking for her. Because while Unice has been learning the ropes at the Women's Court, Thomas Dewey has been appointed new York's Special Prosecutor, and now he's assembling a team.

Thomas Dewey said, I am looking for the twenty best attorneys in New York.

Hey receives a huge number of applications from lawyers who all believe they're worthy.

Because everybody wanted this glamorous, kind of sexy case.

But Dewey doesn't just want the best. He's looking for people with very specific skills.

I don't care their race, I don't care their religion, I don't care their gender. I want the best people. He also named Jewish attorneys at the time there were such a strong streak of anti Semitism.

Who first suggested the name Eunice Hunting Carter, one.

Of Dewey's assistants, described her was, Oh, she's a real go getter. Dewey said, let me interview her. She looks like she might be a candidate for this.

Now.

What made it even harder for Unice was, you can imagine all these people are white. They're all men. You know, how on earth would a black woman be on this team. It was the mid thirties.

This doesn't seem to put Dewey off.

He knows he needs to assemble a strong team, but he also has to assemble a kind of diverse and also kind of unknown team. And that's because he has to assemble people who if they're going out into the community, if they're questioning witnesses, if they're questioning anyone, they don't necessarily want immediately for someone like dut Schultz to be like, I know that cop, I know that prosecutor. I've seen

Like Unice Carter.

She knows Harlem. Dewey talk to her and he said, yes, I want her on my team.

On July first, nineteen thirty five, Special Prosecutor Thomas A. Dewey appoints Unice Hunting Carter as a deputy Assistant prosecutor and the largest investigation of organized crime in US history. Unice Carter is just thirty six years old, the only woman and the only person of color on Dewey's team, the.

Only black woman.

Her hiring instantly makes national news, but that's nothing compared to the headlines she's about to generate that's coming up in episode five of The Godmother. In this episode of The Godmother, you heard.

I'm Debbie Applegate. I'm a historian and biographer, and I am the author of Madam, The Biography of Polyadler Icon of the Jazz Age.

My name is Christian Sippolini and I am an organized crime historian and author.

I'm Marilyn Greenwald. I'm a professor Emerita of Journalism at Ohio University, and I'm the author of five biographies, including one of Eunice Hunt and Carter.

My name is Leshawn Harris.

I am an Associate professor of history at Michigan State University in the Department of History.

My name is doctor Clarissa Myrik Harris, and I am a tenured professor of Africana Studies at Moorhouse College in Atlanta, Georgia.

HI.

My name is Ellen Paulson. My research and I write books about criminal acts and davis that took place during the nineteen thirties in the United States, and my focus so far has been women who were involved with notworious gangsters and desperadoes.

My name is Robert Whalan and I'm an Amerithus Professor of History at Queen's University of Charlotte here in Charlotte, North Carolina.

I am Claire White, and I am the director of Education at the Mob Museum in downtown Las Vegas.

I'm Gatherine Powell, the Unis Hunt and Carter Research Professor of Law at Port of Law School.

My name is Chuck Greeves.

Becoming a writer, I spent twenty five years as a Los Angeles trial lawyer. My fourth novel was basically a fictionalization of the famous nineteen thirty six vice trial.

The Godmother is produced by Novel for iHeartRadio. For more from novel, visit novel dot Audio. The Godmother is hosted and written by me Nicole Perkins. Our producer is Leona Hamid. Additional production from Ajuajima Broumpong, Ronald Young Junior and Zianna Yusuf. Our editor is Ajua Jima Broumpong. Additional story editing from Max O'Brien and Mitha Lee Raw and our researcher is Ziana Yusuf. Additional research from Mohammed Ahmed. David Waters is

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