Episode 3 – Stephanie St. Clair: Harlem Gangster
Episode Summary
This episode is about Stephanie St. Clair, a controversial early 20th century Harlem businesswoman and activist who fought back against bullying cops, mobsters, and politicians. Some ended up behind bars and the worst of them, ended up dead.
Original Air Date: October 13, 2021
Episode Notes
Some call it the numbers racket but true believers call it policy banking because the numbers games provide much needed cash flow for economic life in 1920s Harlem. Numbers kings abound, but there is only one Queen, Madame Stephanie St. Clair, a French Caribbean-born self-made black woman.
In the fall of in 1929, New York City police who’ve long taken a cut from the numbers queen, raid her house, rob, and arrest her to send a message. With the police pummeling her on one side and mobster Dutch Schultz, who has been eyeing St. Clair’s rising power and wealth pouncing on the other, most people assume Stephanie St. Clair will wave the white flag and bow out. But Madame St. Clair always fights back.
Episode Transcript
Opening
Pay what you can. A nickel, 50 cents, whatever you have. Pick three numbers and pray to God your numbers hit; that is published in the daily paper. That’s how you win.
Some call it the numbers racket, but true believers call it policy banking because the numbers games provide much needed cash flow for economic life in 1920s Harlem.
Numbers kings rule the neighborhoods, but there is only one Queen, Madame Stephanie St. Clair, a resilient French Caribbean-born self-made black woman. She’s suffered more than most people can even imagine, but each “set back” morphs into a “fight back” and then a “come back.” At 41 years old, she doesn’t take crap from anyone, especially not from any man, not even a police man.
In the fall of in 1929, New York City police officers who had for years taken payoffs from St. Clair and other policy bankers, raid her house. The officers had heard rumors of St. Clair’s plan to retire and wanted to send her a message.
Instead of cowtowing to the corrupt cops, St. Clair publicly vows revenge and publishes her side of the story in a newspaper column. She implicates police, judges, and city leaders involved in Harlem’s informal economy, who steal money from black numbers runners and receive bribes from St. Clair and other black bankers in exchange for protection.
The police take her campaign as a declaration of war and arrest her.
As the conflict between St. Clair and NYPD officers continues to ramp up, droopy eyed New York mobster Dutch Schultz, who’s been eyeing St. Clair’s rising power and wealth, sees his opportunity and moves in. He wreaks havoc on established numbers games, destroying businesses in Harlem, and forcing policy bankers to pay up or die.
St. Clair’s longtime protector Bumpy Johnson advises her to pay up. He tells her a cautionary tale about how Dutch Schultz cornered bootlegging in the Bronx— by kidnapping his competitor, hanging him by his thumbs on meat hooks and wrapping a length of medical gauze soaked in gonorrhea discharge on his eyes. The poor man went blind shortly after Dutch released him and eventually chose to partner with Dutch rather than die.
With the police pummeling her on one side and Dutch pouncing on the other, most people assume Stephanie St. Clair will wave the white flag and bow out. But Madame St. Clair always fights back.
Introduction
I’m Rahaleh. And This is Violent Femme.
History is filled with hellbent heroines whose stories have yet to be told. We’re going to resurrect them, one brutally brave woman, one episode at a time.
This episode is about Stephanie St. Clair, a controversial early 20th century Harlem businesswoman and activist who fought back against bullying cops, mobsters, and politicians. Some ended up behind bars and the worst of them, ended up dead.
Story
In the northeast wing of the butterfly shaped Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, Stéphanie St. Clair sits on the cracked stoop of her mother’s small house in Le Moule, Grandpierre, or (Le Moule, Grandpierre). Her back is to the dirty pink door that leads into a narrow two story cottage as she stares up at the feathered Syagrus palm trees above and plays her counting game. She picks a palm, softens her focus, and guesses the number of pinnate leaves based on the size and density of the palm, and her instincts of course. Then she squints and actually counts each leaf from what must be at least 25 feet away. She always comes remarkably close, usually only off by two or three.
Un deux trois, quatre, cinq. Quatre cent soixante-six, quatre cent soixante-sept, quatre cent soixante-huit! For the first time ever, she’s spot on! She double checks— Un deux trois, quatre. Quatre cent soixante-six, quatre cent soixante-sept, quatre cent soixante-huit. Stephanie stands up and pumps her fists in the air, and shimmies around in a celebratory dance.
Stephanieeeee, que-ce que tu f__ dehors. Her mother Felicienne doesn’t like to come home from work to find her daughter outside. Stephanie hangs her head, grabs her books, and marches indoors, but throws back a look at her mother that’s tinged with defiance and disapproval. She hates it when her mother uses bad language.
Felicienne is a black single mother in the French overseas department of Guadeloupe. Thanks to her tenacity, and a little help from her current employers, she has secured Stephanie a top notch education in a private school. For a black girl child in Guadeloupe at the turn of the 20th century, Stephanie has unusual advantages, and might even be a bit spoiled.
To her mother’s consternation, every now and then Stephanie drops a question designed to elicit information about her absent father.
Do you see a father here? Have you ever seen a man here?
Stephanie’s rum-soaked uncle Felix perks up, Et moi?
Men don’t count if they are not here. Sometimes they don’t even count when they are here.
Even if she only has one child, Felicienne is a true matriarch, just like her mother before her and just like their ancestors from Africa. The women in her family never reduce themselves to the role of victim-woman abandoned by a man.
One February afternoon Felicienne, coughing incessantly from a lingering illness, comes home early. She hands Stephanie a gorgeous teal dress with a cinched waist and square neck line, passed onto her by the kind white woman she works for. As Stephanie models the Parisian hand-me-down, Felicienne spits out a littany of phrases she likes to regularly pound into her daughter. You are a French citizen. Carry yourself with dignity. Don’t let anyone treat you, or even look at you like you’re anything less than them.
Then she coughs for what seems like a minute, and finally manages to say: If they do, make them regret it. This was new. Stephanie had not heard her mother say this before. If they do make them regret it?
But she likes it.
How? Stephanie asks.
However you can.
One week later Stephanie’s mother dies from what is no doubt tuberculosis, and her life is turned upside. Felix takes care of her, if you can call it that, for a short period but is an ill-equipped drunk and certainly can’t afford her school. The best he can do is secure Stephanie a job as a housekeeper in the mansion of very wealthy sugar plantation owners, the Rimbaud family.
At the plantation residence Stephanie starts work at 4am and stops when her superiors decide the day is done. Her sleeping quarters are an 8by8 window-less room with dirty walls, only a mat to sleep on and a small chair. It’s in this tiny room where she is first visited by the repulsive eldest son Guillaume, only one week after her arrival. He visits her in this tiny room on countless occasions afterwards. He rapes Stephanie repeatedly throughout her employment at the plantation.
One September morning when the black population of Le Moule has taken to the streets to go on strike because in the 50 years since the abolition of slavery, the strikers have seen very few gains to accompany their so-called French citizenship. Work at the sugar plantation comes to a standstill and Guillaume has more time on his hands. He spends most of the day in Stephanie’s room, molesting her, and drinking rum.
When he’s passed out cold Stephanie makes a move. She rummages in his pockets and finds money and a knife.
Seething with rage, she wants desperately to sink that knife into his heart but resists. She runs straight to the docks, hops on the first boat out, and sails to the island of Martinique. She weeps the whole way for the immense relief that comes with freedom, but also for the loss of her mother. It’s been over a year since Felicienne’s death, but Stephanie hasn’t had a moment’s peace, no chance to mourn, until now.
With her impeccable French and uncommon math skills, she finds a job with a small time rum producer keeping his books. She rejects every marriage proposal, but takes a lover.
Emile is a shoemaker and local dreamer twice her age. He talks incessantly about leaving the island one day to go to New York City— Harlem to be exact. He tells Stephanie all about the fantastic culture and paints a vivid image of life in this Black Mecca.
The black renaissance in Harlem, nascent in the early 1900s, blooms by 1910 and inspires black people the world over.
And after a volcanic eruption on the nearby island Montserrat completely decimates life in that city, inhabitants on most of the Caribbean Islands begin to worry about their own islands, and future.
In the summer of 1911, Stephanie buys herself a ticket on the SS Guiana and makes the pilgrimage to Harlem. She is part of the early Great Migration of not only blacks from the Caribbean, but also African Americans traveling north from the American south, as well countless others who arrive from around all over the world. They are all headed to Harlem for a thriving artistic, intellectual, and social environment free from white oppression.
Stephanie St. Clair’s arrival in New York Harbor is registered on July 31, 1911.
Almost as soon as she arrives, a handsomely dressed man charms her with flattering remarks on her looks and uncommon elegance. He offers to help her secure a place to stay. Suddenly, Stephanie finds herself holed up in an apartment with several other girls and begins to understand the man, Duke, is a pimp. When Duke returns to the apartment to “take the girls out,” Stephanie coolly walks into the kitchen and says, It’s dinner time. Let me get you something to eat first, chérie.
In the cramped kitchen of the two-room apartment, she coolly picks up a fork, stabs Duke in the eye, and bolts out of the apartment. She runs to the bus station and gets on a bus headed to god knows where. Her English isn’t all that great yet and although there are other blacks onboard, which is why she chose that particular bus, en route the KKK intercepts the bus and removes the black passengers.
Stephanie had seen horrible things in Guadeloupe as a child: beatings, rape, even a killing once— she herself had been raped by a white man, but somehow the hate crime that took place that night was a strange new level of depravity even she hadn’t yet witnessed in the world. Much to her horror, Stephanie is forced to watch as several black passengers are hanged. Others are burnt alive. She is gang raped.
Once the murderers and rapists are gone and she’s left alone with her fellow survivors, survivors who are outnumber the dead bodies all around them, she lets out a deep, rage-filled cry as her muscles seem to turn to hard steel. She decides it’s time to take control.
Like her mother said: Don’t let anyone treat you, or even look at you like you’re anything less than them. If they do make them regret it.
Resistance is the only way forward.
She is educated. She is beautiful. She is driven. But it’s clear to her now that her intelligence and other assets seem to be an affront to whites, at best a thing to be exploited by men.
Stephanie has determined the only way a black person can actually get ahead in her place and time is crime. Back in New York she joins a gang of thieves and drug dealers, but it’s a means to another end. She wants to find a way into the lucrative numbers game that has swept through Harlem.
It’s simple. Players pick three numbers and hope those numbers hit, that is: the numbers are published in the papers. It can be the last three digits of the US Treasury’s daily balance, the number of shares traded on Wall Street, or some other regularly published number your numbers boss designates for their game. Your number hits and you get paid 600 to 1. It’s a racket because the odds are 1000 to 1, but it’s also a necessity because banks don’t operate in neighborhoods deemed too risky by their boards. Policy bankers, usually local residents with roots in the neighborhood step in to provide not just a fun pastime, but a means to invest, to draw loans, to win down-payments on homes, or start up cash for a new business. People who run numbers or those who hit on a number provide for their families, afford middle class homes, and in the case of Harry Belafonte, Lena Horne, and Colin Powell’s forbears, sometimes even leave behind generational wealth that puts them on a more level playing field with their white counterparts. In Harlem the numbers game is seen as a way to move into more legitimate, more respectable circles.
When Stephanie has made enough cash to start her own numbers business, she tells Ed, the gang leader, she wants out. His response is to strangle her. So Stephanie takes a razor to Ed’s cheek and pushes him so hard he cracks his skull on a table. He dies shortly thereafter and in April 1917 Stephanie St. Clair starts her numbers bank with her own money. Her mathematical acumen and determination propel her, after just a few years in the business, to the top. Madame St. Clair, they call her. The Queen of Policy Banking. She becomes a figure of significant influence in the community.
After many years as the reigning queen of numbers, St. Clair’s desire to retire draws the ire of corrupt NYPD officers who’ve been receiving bribes from her for years. The last thing they want is for the gravy train to stop. They raid her apartment, but St. Clair is not about buckle under pressure from these white police officers. She battles them by publishing countless newspaper editorials and ads, denouncing the cops.
In September of 1929 she writes, “sometimes detectives find policy slips in their searches, but if you pay them from $500 to $2,000, you are sure to come back home. If you pay them nothing, you are sure to get a sentence from 60 to 90 days in the work house”. She writes letters to high level city officials like Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt and Mayor Jimmy Walker and publishes copies in the paper.
She also helps her community by educating them about their rights. In the September 18, 1929 issue of New York Amsterdam News she writes: “TO THE MEMBERS OF MY RACE: If officers meet you on the street and suspect you of anything, do not let them search you on the street, or do not let them take you to any hallway to be searched. If the police should ring your doorbell and you open your door, refuse to let them search your house unless they show you a search warrant.”
Her columns and ads are always accompanied with a glamorous picture of St. Clair, in which she is draped in fur, an expensive hat atop her head.
Since she doesn’t buckle, on December 30, 1929, NYPD officers apprehend St. Clair at 117 West 141st Street, where she operates an alleged numbers bank. They book her for possession of numbers slips. Two days later on New Year’s Day 1930, St. Clair places an editorial announcing her arrest. “I have been arrested and framed by three of the bravest and the noblest cowards who wear civilian clothes.”
Madame St. Clair stands trial in March 1930 and represents herself. She admits to being a numbers banker and proudly testifies. “I was marked for a jail term because I fight for courtesy and freedom from annoyance of these police.” Despite nearly three hours of revealing court testimony, an unconvinced judge and jury convicts and sentences her to eight months and twenty days in the workhouse.
Still, Madame is not done. St. Clair knows downtown where the whites live, there is as much illegal activity and corruption as uptown in Harlem, the only difference is downtown criminal enterprises have far deeper political connections. And she wants her revenge. As soon as she leaves prison she makes the brave decision to testify before the Seabury-Kresel investigation on police corruption.
“When I started exposing the police and their doings I didn’t expect to receive any compliments from them. I knew just what I was doing, and to stop this terrible mistreatment of the Negro race. I don’t understand how these police, who are supposed to be the protection of the people, can make raids for so-called policy slips when these same men are participants of the game themselves.”
The Seabury-Kresel investigations, formally known as the Hofstadter Committee, leads to major changes in the method of arrest, bail and litigation of suspects in New York City. It also coincides with the decline of Tammany Hall's political influence in New York State politics.
At the same time St. Clair’s war with police and corrupt politicians is going on, the mobster Dutch Schultz notices that intake from numbers games are reaching well into the millions and wants to impress his boss by pilfering a piece of that pie. Dutch Schultz’ boss Lucky Luciano is not convinced they should move in on Harlem, but the flat-faced Dutch is hellbent on proving Lucky wrong. Dutch takes baseball bats to storefronts and to their owner’s heads. He sets fires to Harlem businesses that serve as fronts, and kills indiscriminately all to drive home his point: pay him protection or lose your livelihood, and your life. Because of Dutch’s reputation as one of the most brutal members of the New York mafia, most numbers dealers pay up. As the self-proclaimed “Queen of Policy,” St. Clair believes she is the guardian of and should be responsible for Harlem’s numbers game. She declares publicly: “I am not afraid of Dutch Schultz, or any other man living. He’ll never touch me.”
To make her point she makes a list of white policy bankers Dutch has set up in Harlem. Then she puts on her hat, a gold lame dress, her fur coat and goes down the list. One by one, she walks into each establishment with a big rock in hand and smashes glass windows and cases herself. She sets fire to stacks of policy slips and orders each petit player to get the hell out of her house or suffer the consequences. Her right hand man and bodyguard Bumpy Johnson is always right there to protect when owners get violent.
For interfering in his business, Dutch places a contract on St. Clair’s life.
“I had to hide in a cellar while the super, a friend of mine, covered me with coal,” St. Clair says after one harrowing incident when Schultz’ killers hunted her down. All told, Dutch’s henchmen leave a pile of 40 or so dead bodies in Harlem.
St. Clair retaliates by voluntarily providing information to New York City Special Prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey on the Schultz gang. In the end though, she just doesn’t have the police contacts that Dutch and his big-time mafia bosses do. Fortunately for the Queen, Dutch’s bosses are fed up with his methods, which have attracted more attention than they need and they take care of Dutch for St. Clair.
Late October 1935 Dutch Schultz is slain in a tavern. Newark police find a telegram among his effects in his room at the Robert Treat Hotel. The telegram says: “Don’t be yellow. As ye sow, so shall ye reap.” It’s signed Madame St. Clair, policy queen.
The irrepressible queen of numbers eventually retires, marries another eccentric Harlem figure, a flamboyant gold turban-wearing political activist slash “Islamic-Buddhist cult” leader named Sufi Hamid. He spends a lot of her money and their brief marriage ends because he cheats on her with a Jamaican-born fortune teller named Madame Fu Futtam. So she shoots him. At the trial St. Clair insists she never intended to kill him, only scare him. “If I wanted him dead. He would be dead.”
Commentary
Here’s the problem with vilifying every single minority who resists using violence or illegal means, it leads to further oppression of those who have had the most violence brought down on them. Because more often than not, it’s the only way left to be heard, to be seen, and to be safe. But only white men are allowed to resist oppression with violence and get away with it. Only white gangsters can be glorified on film. Hell, Robert Deniro alone has played more glorified gangsters than the sum of all films ever made about black gangsters, let alone a female one. Where is Stephanie St. Clair’s film? They made a film about her sidekick Bumpy Johnson.
Oh we don’t want to glorify violence, you’ll often hear. That’s a load of crap. They don’t want to glorify violence perpetrated by women because it scares men. It rattles them.
Outro
Violent Femme is a production of HaiBrau Entertainment. It is written and hosted by Rahaleh Nassri. Original Music by Ryan Rumery. Some characters depicted are fictional and some scenes and dialogue are invented for creative and storyline purposes. If you like this episode please leave us a review and rating.