Woman dubbed ‘unique crime queenpin’ beat mob – however ‘ardour’ ousted operation
Stephanie St. Clair was a crime boss in the 1920s and 30s who was known as the Queen of Numbers because of her control of the illegal numbers game in New York. Her story has now been dramatized on Sky History
The Roaring Twenties in New York was a hotbed of crime, with mobsters like Lucky Luciano reigning supreme, profiting from prohibition through bootleg alcohol. Then there was the numbers game – and there was Stephanie St. Clair.
The numbers game, akin to a people’s lottery, was illegal. Players would jot down a lucky three-digit number on slips of paper, and runners would transport these slips and the bets between the gamblers and their bankers.
The winning numbers were selected from the last three digits of the daily trading totals of the New York Stock Exchange, which crucially made the game impossible to rig or fix.
In an era when Black people were denied bank accounts, St Clair, a Black woman born in Guadeloupe – who fled to the US from the French West Indies at the age of 13 – sought her share of the wealth, reports the Mirror.
Anyone with the cash to pay winners, or the audacity to gamble until they amassed a large enough pot, could become a numbers banker. It provided a gateway for Black people into the banking system.
In 1922, St Clair, who had been working as a cleaner, managed to accumulate $30K – equivalent to $547,292 (£416,000) in today’s money – and launched her own numbers operation, breaking both gender and racial barriers.
Interestingly, she employed others – particularly men – to keep her hands clean while she orchestrated the racket. One such enforcer was Bumpy Johnson, who earned the title of the Godfather of Harlem where they were based.
Bumpy would discipline individuals with beatings – or by taking lives.
Featured in the new Sky History series, Original Gangsters, which kicks off on Tuesday (November 4) and is narrated by Sean Bean. St Clair, despite her criminal activities, liked to present herself as a ‘lady.’
Sean Bean said: “Although very few photos of her survived, we can see that that image was incredibly important to Stephanie. She never allowed herself to be photographed without her hair, her makeup, her clothes all perfectly styled.”
In addition to being a ruthless gangster, St Clair was a dedicated activist for the Black community. When she was arrested, she testified about the involvement of the NYPD in vice rackets – leading to over a dozen police officers being suspended from the force.
However, when another formidable gangster, Dutch Shultz, tried to encroach on her territory, her resistance led to Harlem turning into a warzone – with him resorting to bombings, beatings and murders to muscle in on her turf.
When Shultz was eventually shot down by a group known as Murder IN, she sent him a message on his death bed saying, ‘As you sew, so shall you reap. ‘ The same could be said of her, when she ended up behind bars in the 1930s after shooting her ex and being sentenced to two to 10 years.
Released in the early 1940s, little is known about her life post-release.
Serena Simmons speaks of the lesser-known crime boss, who passed away in 1969 at around 72 years old: “She was an outlier. She was someone who may have been able to go down a different path – a good path – if circumstances had been different. She was a very strong character. Underneath it all she was thoughtful, sensitive and a deep thinker.
“She was intelligent, self educated and widely read. Her clothes were her costume – she needed to be taken seriously – and she was functioning in a man’s world.
“Don’t get me wrong, she did do bad things, but she had a strong moral code; she was aware of injustice because she herself had experienced so much. I think her intention was bizarrely a good one. She had to be self-serving to help others. She had a lot of trauma when she was younger – so this is someone for me who was in survival mode and psychologically could compartmentalise her actions.
“She was motivated to achieve something and constructed her own path outside of any institutional support. I’m not sure we have any understanding about how hard that would have been. Is there a little bit of me that admires her?
“Yes, there is.”
Original Gangsters starts on Tuesday 4th November at 9pm on Sky History and History Play. The series will also be available to stream on NOW.
