Dutch Schultz kicked her off the Harlem numbers rackets, but as Schultz was dying from a gunshot wound, Stephanie St. Clair had the last laugh.
Stephanie St. Clair was born in 1886, in Marseille, an island in the Eastern Caribbean. At age 26, he emigrated to New York City and settled in Harlem. Almost immediately, he connected with the Forty Thieves, a white gang that had been around since the 1850s. There is no record of what St. Clair did for the next ten years, but it’s safe to say, considering his ties to the Forty Thieves. , a notorious repressed gang, what he did was anything but legal.
In 1922, St. Clair used $ 10,000 of his own money and started Harlem’s first number rackets. St. Clair was known to have a violent temper and would often curse her subordinates in various languages. When asked about her heritage by people, she replied that she was born in “European France” and spoke impeccable French, unlike the French-speaking rabble of the Caribbean. In Harlem they called her Madame St. Clair, but in the rest of the city she was known simply as “Queenie.”
In the mid-1920s, notorious stone smuggler and killer Dutch Schultz decided he wanted to take over all the political business in Harlem. Schultz didn’t ask Queenie to back off too nicely, resulting in the deaths of dozens of Queenie’s number runners. Queenie enlisted the help of Bumpy Johnson, an ex-con with an explosive temper, to take care of Schultz’s situation. Johnson went downtown and visited Italian mob boss Lucky Luciano. He asked Luciano to tell Schultz some common sense. But there wasn’t much that Luciano could do, as at the time he was one of Schultz’s associates. Luciano suggests that Queenie and Johnson join forces with Schultz, making them, in effect, a subdivision of Schultz’s numbers business. This did not sit well with Queenie, and although Johnson tried to convince her that it was a smart move, she declined Luciano’s offer.
Then, out of nowhere, Queenie started getting into trouble with the police, whom she was paying to look the other way. This was the work of Schultz, who through his connections to Tammany Hall, had several politicians in his back pocket, as well as half the police force in New York City. While Schultz’s number brokers worked the streets of Harlem with impunity, Queenie’s brokers, when not being killed by Schultz’s men, were arrested by the police.
Queenie decided to fight back with the power of the press. In December 1930, Queenie ran several advertisements in Harlem newspapers, accusing the police of bribery, persecution, and corruption. That was not to the liking of the local people, and Queenie was immediately arrested for illegal gambling. Upon his release, he appeared before the Seabury Committee, which was investigating corruption in the Magistrates Courts of the Bronx and Manhattan. Queenie testified that between 1923 and 1926, she had paid the police in Harlem $ 6000 to protect her brokers from arrest, and that the police had taken her money and arrested her number brokers anyway. Schultz must have laughed at that a lot, since $ 6,000 was less than what he paid monthly to keep the cops happy in New York City.
Nothing came of her testimony before the Seabury Committee, so Queenie decided to plead her case with New York City Mayor Jimmy Walker, who was almost as corrupt as Schultz. Queenie told Walker that Schultz was pressuring her to join his gang, or else. Walker, who was being investigated by the Seabury Committee itself, responded to Queenie by quitting her job as mayor and moving to Europe for the next several years.
Queenie then pleaded with the other black bankers with policy numbers in Harlem to join forces with her in a battle against Schultz. Knowing that Schultz had too much juice in the government and too many shooters in his gang, they rejected her outright.
Bumpy Johnson soon found out that Schultz had spread the word on the streets that Queenie would be shot as soon as they saw her. Queenie then hid, refusing to even come out to see the light of day. On one occasion, Johnson had to hide Queenie in a coal dump, under a pile of coal, to save her from Schultz’s men. That was the last straw for Queenie. He sent a message to Schultz that he would agree to their demands. Schultz replied that he could stay alive as long as he gave Schultz a majority stake in his number scams. Queenie reluctantly agreed.
Schultz had his own run of bad luck, when he demanded that Luciano and his friends agree to the murder of special counsel Thomas E. Dewey, who was breathing down Schultz’s neck. Schultz’s proposal was rejected, and when he said that he would kill Dewey himself, he was shot in the stomach in the bathroom of a New Jersey restaurant. Schultz remained in a delusional state in a hospital for a few days before dying. While he was there, muttering nonsense, a telegram arrived saying: “What you sow, so you will reap.”
The telegram was sent by the Queen of Harlem, Stephanie St. Clair.
Queenie eventually handed her rackets over to Bumpy Johnson. He faded into darkness and died in his sleep in 1969.
In the 1997 film “Hoodlum,” Lawrence Fishburne played Bumpy Johnson, Tim Roth played Dutch Schultz, Andy Garcia played Lucky Luciano, and Cicely Tyson played Stephanie “Queenie” St. Clair.