Speaker 1: Novel. Before we begin, a content warning the following episode
Speaker 1: contains difficult themes and violence.
Speaker 2: The young and able lawyer Thomas E. Dewey appointed special
Speaker 2: prosecutor to clean out the city's racketeers.
Speaker 3: That's the Dowey.
Speaker 4: You have been given the most difficult task, but the
Speaker 4: opportunity of helping the people of this city.
Speaker 1: In the late thirties, the Republican Party produces a promotional film.
Speaker 1: It opens on a man, dark slick hair and a
Speaker 1: carefully groomed and distinct mustache, talks into a heavy telephone.
Speaker 1: According to the no nonsense voiceover, this is Thomas E.
Speaker 5: Dewey.
Speaker 1: An office full of workers at their desks enters frame
Speaker 1: arranged in neat lines like a classroom. They're all white
Speaker 1: men in suits, their hair shiny with palmade. They're busy
Speaker 1: going through paperwork, hard at their respective tasks for the day.
Speaker 2: Dewey's small, hand picked staff began its attack on the
Speaker 2: underworld by perroting out secret records and getting the frightened
Speaker 2: victims of the rackets to talk.
Speaker 1: The back of a witness's head appears.
Speaker 4: The man at the next is the man who hit
Speaker 4: my husband on the head with a pipe. The man
Speaker 4: directly behind him is the man who's threatened to beat
Speaker 4: me and cut my hands off.
Speaker 1: This film is a re enactment of Dewey's investigation into
Speaker 1: organized crime. Watching these films, you clearly see Dewey as
Speaker 1: a man dedicated to showmanship, a man already deeply enamored
Speaker 1: with the creation of his own legacy. Unfortunately, Dewey's hypnotizing
Speaker 1: baritone can't cover his stilted acting.
Speaker 6: The cops who did that job work day.
Speaker 5: And night for a year.
Speaker 7: They're entitled to a promotion, and I think they ought
Speaker 7: to happen.
Speaker 1: Maybe it's a good thing he went into.
Speaker 2: Law a mistakenly accumulating evidence. Dewey and his men, working
Speaker 2: with city police, begin building up that cases.
Speaker 1: Only it wasn't just Dewey and his men responsible for
Speaker 1: the investigation. There was one person, one woman in particular,
Speaker 1: who was really the mastermind. And for just a moment
Speaker 1: so quick you may not even notice, I see her.
Speaker 1: While Dewey holds court, face always clear. She sits at
Speaker 1: a table with her back to the camera. Eunice hunting
Speaker 1: Carter Good is a seat at the table when no
Speaker 1: one acknowledges that you built the table from the teams
Speaker 1: at iHeartRadio and novel. I'm Nicole Perkins and this is
Speaker 1: the Godmother Episode five, Up all night to get Lucky.
Speaker 1: The daytime commute to the Woolworth Building must look familiar
Speaker 1: but strange to Unis. She's used to arriving there in
Speaker 1: the evening for her law school studies, but now she's
Speaker 1: walking into the elevators during the bustle of the day,
Speaker 1: and instead of the twenty eighth floor for classes, she
Speaker 1: steps out onto the fourteenth floor for work.
Speaker 7: When you just got off the elevator, I think she
Speaker 7: would have seen a buzz of activity, but it was
Speaker 7: pretty low key. There was this air of secrecy about it.
Speaker 7: I mean there had to be. Dewey did not want
Speaker 7: people to know where they were what they were doing.
Speaker 1: From the plain closed police officers patrolling the building's lobby
Speaker 1: to the telephone equipment secured against illegal tapping. There are
Speaker 1: tamper proof file cabinets tucked inside a bank vault. Venetian
Speaker 1: blinds keep people from spying. It's October nineteen thirty five
Speaker 1: and a special prosecution is underway. Dewey has a hand
Speaker 1: picked team of twenty attorneys plus investigators clerks, assistants, stenographers,
Speaker 1: and a select group of NYPD officers, and of course
Speaker 1: Eunice hunting Carter. As Unice walks toward her desk that day,
Speaker 1: does she worry about trying to prove herself or does
Speaker 1: she worry about appearing too confident? The news of her
Speaker 1: appointment to Dewey's team arrived with whispers that it was
Speaker 1: her connection to Harlem that earned her spot, and not
Speaker 1: her skills or experience. In other words, what she hired
Speaker 1: just because she's black. Maybe those whispers helped motivate her,
Speaker 1: and there's nothing wrong with using her Harlem background to
Speaker 1: move forward.
Speaker 8: There were a lot of people in Harlem who were like, no,
Speaker 8: I'm not going to talk to Thomas Dewey and his
Speaker 8: other nineteen white male prosecutors about this. Like I'm fine,
Speaker 8: we can handle this in our own community.
Speaker 1: Access to that community is crucial to Dewey in these
Speaker 1: first few months of his team's investigation, because they are
Speaker 1: targeting the numbers racket and at its head the wild,
Speaker 1: reckless mobster associate of Lucky Luciano's Dutch Schultz.
Speaker 8: Who would come in and take in control of the
Speaker 8: Harlem numbers racket. Essentially strong armed a number of black
Speaker 8: men and women in Harlem who'd run their own numbers games.
Speaker 1: Dutch is still battling with numbers running Queen Stephanie Saint Clair.
Speaker 1: Dutch is a figurehead of Dewey's crusade against organized crime.
Speaker 1: His plan use one high profile mobster as the focus,
Speaker 1: build him up in the press as the root of
Speaker 1: all evil, then quickly take him down. Of course, that
Speaker 1: only works if Dewey gets his target and fast. Dutch
Speaker 1: is all too aware of this renewed heat on him,
Speaker 1: so Dutch creates his own plan.
Speaker 3: Hey, we need to kill Tomus Dewey.
Speaker 1: But someone unexpected as watching Dewey's back.
Speaker 3: Dutch Schultz went to Lucky Luciano and said, hey, we
Speaker 3: need to get rid of him because he's trying to
Speaker 3: get rid of us.
Speaker 1: And Lucky gives Dutch a response that will alter the
Speaker 1: course of his life.
Speaker 3: Lucky Luciano said, no, we will not kill do it
Speaker 3: because if we do that, then they'll really be after us.
Speaker 3: Dutch Schultz did not listen. He hired a hitman.
Speaker 1: One morning, October twenty fourth, nineteen thirty five, As Eunice
Speaker 1: weaves her way across the bustling office to get to
Speaker 1: her desk. The clanging sounds of phones ringing is even
Speaker 1: more urgent and NonStop than ever before. There is a
Speaker 1: shocking development in the mob world.
Speaker 9: Unfortunately for dut Schultzer was Dutch Schultz who got assassinated.
Speaker 10: Schultz's death was a huge blow for Dewey, Eunice and
Speaker 10: Dewey's investigation into Dutch Schultz has hit a sudden dead end.
Speaker 11: Literally difficult to imagine just how much of a like,
Speaker 11: oh crap moment they had because they were building their
Speaker 11: whole case on taking down Schultz.
Speaker 1: Dewey needs a new public enemy number one, and it
Speaker 1: has to be someone even more high profile than Dutch.
Speaker 1: Because Dewey has wasted a lot of time and money
Speaker 1: on the Dutch false start. He needs results and soon.
Speaker 1: There is, of course, only one person who really fits
Speaker 1: the bill as Dutch's replacement.
Speaker 12: The new unofficial boss of bosses.
Speaker 1: There is a new muck shot from that heroin in
Speaker 1: a hat box drug dealing charge a few decades ago
Speaker 1: that Dewey pens on the courtboard in that fourteenth floor office.
Speaker 13: Dewey coughed out a prosecution against Charles Lucky Luciano. That
Speaker 13: would garner a great deal of publicity, even in a
Speaker 13: jaded city.
Speaker 1: Like New York. But what about Eunice, a rookie prosecutor
Speaker 1: who's been selected for her a special knowledge about Harlem
Speaker 1: and Dutch Schultz. What does she bring to the table now?
Speaker 8: Thomas Dewey needs to figure out something to do with her.
Speaker 8: He puts her on sort of this dead end project, a.
Speaker 1: Beat no one particularly wants.
Speaker 8: Carter is primarily tasked with talking to every member of
Speaker 8: the New York community who comes in and has a
Speaker 8: complete about prostitution.
Speaker 1: And it turns out one thing New Yorkers want to
Speaker 1: talk about is prostitution.
Speaker 8: It's really easy to say this is sexism or this
Speaker 8: is racism. But I also think that Dewey knew that
Speaker 8: they needed a woman to talk to people average regular
Speaker 8: New Yorkers who walk into the office every single day
Speaker 8: complaining about disorderly houses, as they're often referred to at
Speaker 8: the time period. I do think that Dewey respected her
Speaker 8: enough to know, Hey, you know this stuff, Let's see
Speaker 8: if you can make anything out of it. And she did.
Speaker 1: During the fall and into winter of nineteen thirty five,
Speaker 1: when citizens entered the Woolworth Building they received directions to.
Speaker 1: Unice is listening to these complaints and the resultant paperwork,
Speaker 1: supposed to be gruntwork for unis, something to keep her
Speaker 1: precious little black female mind occupied while the big boys
Speaker 1: did all the real work of the law. Whatever the
Speaker 1: motivation for pushing Units away from the action and into
Speaker 1: glorified secretarial work, people from all walks of life are
Speaker 1: landing at Unice's desk, businessmen, paroles, and perhaps most importantly,
Speaker 1: sex workers themselves. The info coming in is almost overwhelming.
Speaker 1: New York's sex work industry is thriving. Units needs to
Speaker 1: connect these low level vice complaints to these big shot mobsters,
Speaker 1: and she knows there's something and all those complaints she's
Speaker 1: receiving something crucial. She just hasn't quite put the jigsaw
Speaker 1: puzzle together yet. But Unice doesn't mind having so many small,
Speaker 1: seemingly innocuous pieces of info spread across her desk. She
Speaker 1: lives for the details, and as more and more tip
Speaker 1: offs pile up in front of her, a pattern begins
Speaker 1: to emerge.
Speaker 8: She hears about Louis Wiener. Everyone pretty much knew this
Speaker 8: guy was a booker for the Brothels.
Speaker 1: Eunice recognizes this name from her time at the Women's Court.
Speaker 1: Other familiar names keep appearing.
Speaker 8: People talk about Abe carp who is one of these
Speaker 8: attorneys who she remembers from her time on Women's Court.
Speaker 1: This is a lawyer whose name appeared to be all
Speaker 1: over the booking forms of the sex workers who managed
Speaker 1: to avoid successful prosecution.
Speaker 8: Carter starts piecing together all this information in.
Speaker 5: The women's courts where they prosecute prostitution cases, Eunice Carter
Speaker 5: had seen a pattern of corruption that led her to
Speaker 5: believe that the world of New York prostitution had been
Speaker 5: infiltrated by the mob.
Speaker 1: Uni suspects. She's onto something, but she needs more proof.
Speaker 1: The caared colleagues down the hall might be able to
Speaker 1: get away with hunches and wild goose chases, but she
Speaker 1: knows she needs irrefutable evidence. She heads to the Women's
Speaker 1: Court archives to try to tie together more threads.
Speaker 7: Her Forte was going through documents and patient so when
Speaker 7: she was in the Women's Court, in the prosecutor's office,
Speaker 7: many of the cases involved prostitution, and so she's going
Speaker 7: through these records, she's processing them.
Speaker 8: She's also reading through her old caseload when she was
Speaker 8: at the Women's court and trying to figure out how
Speaker 8: many times certain names come up, how many times certain
Speaker 8: alibis come up? How many times does she see the
Speaker 8: exact same monetary figures being discussed.
Speaker 7: She just starts every once in a while finding the
Speaker 7: name of an attorney that isn't expensive attorney. There's two
Speaker 7: or three of these. After going through hundreds of these,
Speaker 7: she must have gotten to the point where she's thinking,
Speaker 7: there's no way these prostitutes could afford these attorneys. She
Speaker 7: brings this up to another person on the team, What
Speaker 7: do you think of this? I think she was thinking,
Speaker 7: am I crazy? What do you think of this? And
Speaker 7: the other person on the team said, no, there's got
Speaker 7: to be something here.
Speaker 1: Unice keeps listening to the citizen complaints as they roll in.
Speaker 1: She keeps squinting through chicken scratch and blurring ink. Everything
Speaker 1: was handwritten or types on a typewriter then no pocket
Speaker 1: sized devices with screens you can double tap to zoom in.
Speaker 1: Unice is probably way down with file folders of complaints, pens,
Speaker 1: writing pads, copies of court documents. I wonder if she
Speaker 1: sometimes carries any of her work home before stopping at
Speaker 1: the grocery store or butcher, while her coworkers stop at
Speaker 1: a bar for a drink, or maybe even one of
Speaker 1: the disreputable houses she's cross referencing in all her paperwork.
Speaker 7: Painstaking, painstaking work.
Speaker 1: But slowly the beginnings of a promising case have begun
Speaker 1: to develop.
Speaker 5: She brought that suspicion to Thomas Dewey and said, this
Speaker 5: is an area where maybe we can focus our investigation.
Speaker 1: She probably knows every response Dewey's team could use to
Speaker 1: discredit her idea to focus on VIIs It's just a
Speaker 1: bunch of crazies, just a bunch of women. How can
Speaker 1: we trust these prostitutes who are probably just trying to
Speaker 1: get lesser charges. This is small time stuff compared to
Speaker 1: the big mob guys. But she knows differently. Some men
Speaker 1: need cameras and a spotlight to fail up in life,
Speaker 1: and some women need the trust of their fellow citizens
Speaker 1: and a quiet archive to succeed. And Yunis tells Dewey
Speaker 1: she is convinced this is how they can get to lucky.
Speaker 9: We're not going to charge you with murder, even though
Speaker 9: Luciano murdered a lot of people, not even tax evasion.
Speaker 9: We don't have the numbers, but we can go after prostitution.
Speaker 5: Dewey was initially very skeptical.
Speaker 7: Dewey says, no, come on, First of all, the mob's
Speaker 7: not involved in prostitution. And second, Dewey, very public relations minded,
Speaker 7: said I'm not going after a bunch of poor, penniless
Speaker 7: prostitutes in a mob case.
Speaker 8: Forget it.
Speaker 1: Eunice does not forget it. This is not the first
Speaker 1: time her hard work has been dismissed. If she accepted
Speaker 1: a no every time someone questioned her, she wouldn't have
Speaker 1: even made it to Dewey's team in the first place.
Speaker 1: Ambition doesn't believe in rejection. That's just a detour. Eunice
Speaker 1: knows she's onto something, so she keeps working the leads
Speaker 1: and keeps finding undeniable patterns.
Speaker 7: She goes back to her friend on the team and said,
Speaker 7: there's got to be something here. I just think there is.
Speaker 1: Murray Gerfine is one of Yunus's colleagues. Maybe he's a
Speaker 1: work friend. As a Jewish Man, he probably also knows
Speaker 1: what it's like to have to prove himself constantly, and
Speaker 1: maybe Eunice realizes she'll need the support of at least
Speaker 1: one man to get Dewey to listen to her. Two outsiders,
Speaker 1: one black woman, one Jewish man working together are better
Speaker 1: than one, and, as too many working women know, sometimes
Speaker 1: you have to get a man to repeat exactly what
Speaker 1: you've just said to get other men to listen.
Speaker 7: The two of them persuaded Dewey. I mean, they had
Speaker 7: to go back to Dewey a couple times, and Dewey
Speaker 7: finally said, Okay, maybe there's something here.
Speaker 1: But Dewey wants even more evidence, because even if sex
Speaker 1: work is connected to the mob, how does that help
Speaker 1: tie it to their specific high profile investigation. Well, Eunice
Speaker 1: has an answer for that too.
Speaker 8: She gets his permission to start wire tapping to piece
Speaker 8: together who these people are, what they know, who works
Speaker 8: for whom, and try to figure out who is.
Speaker 1: At the top.
Speaker 5: Because Luciano, unlike those more high profile flamboyant Irish and
Speaker 5: Jewish mobsters of that era, he was surrounded by this
Speaker 5: cone of silence.
Speaker 1: But this isn't a case of tapping a few phones
Speaker 1: of a few gangsters. This is going to require extensive
Speaker 1: wire tapping, and in nineteen thirties New York that means
Speaker 1: something a little more complicated than calling up a phone
Speaker 1: company with a warrant.
Speaker 8: Dewey ordered Eunice Carter and another man on the team,
Speaker 8: Murray Gurfind to essentially create a list of dozens of
Speaker 8: people that they wanted to wire tap, and.
Speaker 1: Then they have to physically get hardware onto all these
Speaker 1: people's phone lines across New York. Sometimes detectives pay or
Speaker 1: strong arm telephone repairman to go into buildings and play
Speaker 1: small microphones into mouthpieces, or replace old phones with newer
Speaker 1: ones with Mike's already installed.
Speaker 8: They wiretapped incredibly liberally.
Speaker 1: They kick off by wiretapping the bookers and bondsman's offices
Speaker 1: of New York, but soon they're intercepting calls from offices
Speaker 1: of mob members too. If there's a phone there, it's
Speaker 1: not safe.
Speaker 8: Wire tapping laws in the nineteen twenties and thirties were
Speaker 8: still very much up in the air, and in New
Speaker 8: York wiretapping laws are a lot looser than in most
Speaker 8: of the rest of the country. They took a lot
Speaker 8: of connections through these telephone conversations, thousands of hours of
Speaker 8: wiretaps that Unice Carter and the rest of the team
Speaker 8: had to sift through in order to do this.
Speaker 1: And as they do, Unice and the team discover more
Speaker 1: evidence that unice is suspicions might be correct.
Speaker 5: New York prostitution was in the process of being organized
Speaker 5: by organized crime.
Speaker 1: They're able to tie sex work to the.
Speaker 5: Mob one man named Little Baby Pattillo and one man
Speaker 5: named Tommy the Bull Pinocchio.
Speaker 1: You might recognize that last name as one of the
Speaker 1: Mott Street Boys.
Speaker 5: The suspicion was Little Davy and Tommy the Bull were
Speaker 5: working for Lucky Luciano, that there was a sole cadrey
Speaker 5: of middlemen who were running prostitution and victimizing the prostitutes
Speaker 5: and the madams in New York City.
Speaker 1: Unis may have felt like they were right on the
Speaker 1: edge of the big breakthrough. Here are direct links to
Speaker 1: the team's big target, Lucky Luciano.
Speaker 9: What she realized is that the gangsters were very vulnerable
Speaker 9: on this. Not only was prostitution illegal, but the whole
Speaker 9: story of prostitution was fairly brutal and it had such
Speaker 9: tabloid qualities to it.
Speaker 8: After months of building all of this up, they finally
Speaker 8: talk Dewey into a raid.
Speaker 1: The team begins planning in operation that will go down
Speaker 1: in history. This isn't going to be the usual kind
Speaker 1: of raid cops running into a single location and arresting
Speaker 1: a handful of people. No, this is something much bigger.
Speaker 8: There's so much going on. It is madness. It is chaos.
Speaker 1: On the night of February first, nineteen thirty six, Eunice
Speaker 1: Carter arrives yet again on the fourteenth floor of the
Speaker 1: Woolworth Building. She may have been used to all the
Speaker 1: commotion on the floor, but nothing could prepare her for
Speaker 1: the scene she sees that night.
Speaker 8: Literally, there would have been people just all over floors, benches,
Speaker 8: private rooms, not private rooms, everyone just sort of working feverishly.
Speaker 8: No one's got a laptop. In nineteen thirty six, twenty
Speaker 8: stenographers are working around the clock with their giant legal
Speaker 8: pads and their pencils, with their little notebooks. You've got
Speaker 8: people who've brought their typewriters in with them, feverishly taking
Speaker 8: notes of their statements through the night and the early morning.
Speaker 8: Keep in mind that this is February in New York,
Speaker 8: so it is snowy and disgusting and wet, and people
Speaker 8: are freezing cold. You've got cops in uniform, You've got
Speaker 8: plain clothes who were prepared to act as John's. There's
Speaker 8: so much going on. It is madness.
Speaker 1: It is chaos for once. The office is also full
Speaker 1: of other women, eighty eight of them in total, most
Speaker 1: of them sex work madams.
Speaker 8: And many of these women have been arrested in the
Speaker 8: middle of a transaction, and so some of them are
Speaker 8: wearing coats, and some of them are not wearing coats,
Speaker 8: and some of them have on thousand dollars furs.
Speaker 1: As Eunice stands in that room, absorbing the chaos, I
Speaker 1: wonder if she can tell that this case will be
Speaker 1: the one she'd be remembered for. I wonder if she
Speaker 1: felt proud of herself, if she thought she'd finally be
Speaker 1: recognized for her hard work. All of that night's madness
Speaker 1: starts at precisely eight fifty five PM.
Speaker 8: This is coordinated to the minute.
Speaker 1: One hundred and sixty plain clothes policemen from across New
Speaker 1: York gathered together in Manhattan. The cops are divided so
Speaker 1: that they're working with colleagues they've never worked with before.
Speaker 13: One would be on West fifty seventh Street, one would
Speaker 13: be on each It's thirty six. I mean they would
Speaker 13: just all over the place.
Speaker 1: They're split into teams of two and three. Each team
Speaker 1: is given an envelope.
Speaker 5: With their dress audit, and exactly five minutes of nine,
Speaker 5: they all opened their envelopes and read the instructions inside.
Speaker 1: These instructions dispatch the cops to top secret locations across
Speaker 1: the city, like something out of a modern day reality
Speaker 1: game show. None of them know what they're getting into
Speaker 1: until they open the envelope.
Speaker 5: The instructions said, go to this address and arrest everybody
Speaker 5: inside and bring them to the Woolworth Building.
Speaker 1: The police look at each other. This is clearly an
Speaker 1: operation like no other.
Speaker 8: They want to make sure that when they are arresting,
Speaker 8: they are not just taking women out of brothels. They
Speaker 8: want women across the city caught in the act.
Speaker 1: At nine pm, cops set off. Once they reach their locations,
Speaker 1: they start kicking down doors as they pour up stoops
Speaker 1: and staircases and into apartment buildings across New York. They
Speaker 1: emerge with men, but mostly women, in handcuffs. It's quickly
Speaker 1: apparent the element of surprise has been a success.
Speaker 8: Best we can tell, they do wind up arresting about
Speaker 8: one hundred and ten people. Those individuals are later detained.
Speaker 8: The other like twenty or so are mostly John's. They
Speaker 8: couldn't care less. These guys are not going to help
Speaker 8: them get to Luciano, so they let them go.
Speaker 13: Eighty eight arrests all together. It was a pretty wild night,
Speaker 13: even for a city like New York.
Speaker 1: And now back at the Woolworth Building, as Eunice and
Speaker 1: Dewey survey the scene before them, they're already contemplating the
Speaker 1: next mammoth task ahead.
Speaker 5: The idea was they were going to arrest the madams
Speaker 5: and the prostitutes and hold them as material witnesses and
Speaker 5: force them to give testimony against the middle management types
Speaker 5: Patio and Pinocchio, and ultimately force them to flip and
Speaker 5: implicate Lucky. Luciana was the head of prostitution in New York.
Speaker 1: Getting sex workers to snitch is no small feat because
Speaker 1: they've become used to a specific type of mob protection
Speaker 1: from law enforcement.
Speaker 5: The women were used to being arrested. They all had
Speaker 5: been arrested dozens of times, so they assumed it was
Speaker 5: business as usual. They weren't going to cooperate. They wouldn't
Speaker 5: give their real names. They were blowing the prosecutors off.
Speaker 1: A fair chunk of their earnings goes to the Mob
Speaker 1: for occasions just like this. That had been the promise
Speaker 1: of the mob's move into sex work. You pay us,
Speaker 1: we'll protect you, will bail you out, We'll set you
Speaker 1: up with some of the best representation the justice system
Speaker 1: has to offer. The women wait and wait and wait.
Speaker 1: No one seems to be coming.
Speaker 5: The men who normally got them out were no longer there,
Speaker 5: and they realized, oh, something difference going on.
Speaker 1: That's because the night before there had been another round
Speaker 1: of secret.
Speaker 5: Arrests sixteen men on January thirty first, nineteen thirty six.
Speaker 1: The operation had been very discreet, and now as minutes
Speaker 1: turned to hours in the holding cells, the mob guaranteed
Speaker 1: bookers and lawyers who usually come to bail out the
Speaker 1: women are a no show, and the women realize nobody
Speaker 1: is coming to help this time. So a new chapter
Speaker 1: of Unice's work begins, because now she and the rest
Speaker 1: of Dewey's team have to figure out how much these
Speaker 1: women know and how they might be connected to Lucky Luciano.
Speaker 8: The prostitution racket is so tricky because there's women who
Speaker 8: are both madams and prostitutes, and then also wives of bookers.
Speaker 8: Maybe they have a relationship with Luciano, but maybe they
Speaker 8: don't have a relationship with Luciano.
Speaker 1: The longer it takes to get their ducks in a row,
Speaker 1: the more time the mob has to regroup, reorganize, and hide.
Speaker 8: People like Unice Carter start personally interviewing these women almost immediately.
Speaker 8: She is working around the clock.
Speaker 1: Those in custody don't get any sleep that night either,
Speaker 1: which may have been a deliberate ploy.
Speaker 8: They were doing everything they can to just get as
Speaker 8: much information as quickly as possible.
Speaker 1: Intentional sleep deprivation is recognized as a form of torture today.
Speaker 1: Unis probably justifies this part of the operation as for
Speaker 1: the greater good or even just for a personal win.
Speaker 1: Could she have done anything about it anyway once the
Speaker 1: ball was rolling In the end, these considerations don't matter
Speaker 1: because none of the sex workers talk.
Speaker 5: So what happened was do we called a special judge
Speaker 5: to come down to the Woolworth Building on Sunday and
Speaker 5: he arranged all eighty seven prostitutes and madams as material
Speaker 5: witnesses on bonds ranging from ten thousand dollars to twenty
Speaker 5: five thousand dollars and today's dollars, ten thousand dollars is
Speaker 5: like one hundred and eighty thousand dollars. Okay, no way
Speaker 5: these women could have come up with what amounts to
Speaker 5: one hundred and eighty thousand dollars each to get out
Speaker 5: of jail. So basically, do we put these women in
Speaker 5: jail on a bomb they could never meet and held
Speaker 5: them in communicado in the women's house of detention.
Speaker 1: For months, for months without conviction are even a try.
Speaker 1: After the raids on the brothels, as the days stretch
Speaker 1: into weeks and into months, Unice essentially starts working her
Speaker 1: way into the minds of these women. She's now at
Speaker 1: the center of the investigation, talking constantly to the women
Speaker 1: and eventually establishing relationships with them. Some of these women
Speaker 1: become cooperating witnesses.
Speaker 12: She knew how smart women could be.
Speaker 6: She knew how much knowledge of their own that they
Speaker 6: had that other people wouldn't have, and that is really
Speaker 6: what made her so valuable both to starting the investigation
Speaker 6: and continuing the investigation.
Speaker 1: Unice knows from firsthand experience how often women are overlooked
Speaker 1: in rooms with men, how men will talk and share
Speaker 1: secrets as if women are just pieces of furniture, and
Speaker 1: yet she's exploiting that knowledge for her boss, a man
Speaker 1: who wouldn't take her seriously until she had another man
Speaker 1: to back up all the horror work she'd put into
Speaker 1: this case.
Speaker 13: Many of the women were in pretty bad shape when
Speaker 13: they were picked up. A lot of these girls were
Speaker 13: drug addicts.
Speaker 8: Certainly, in the first three or four hours, this is
Speaker 8: less of a concern.
Speaker 1: But as those hours stretch into day's the withdrawal symptoms
Speaker 1: become agonizing.
Speaker 12: They were strung out, they were addicts.
Speaker 13: They would have to suffer a cold turkey cure on
Speaker 13: the floor of a jail cell.
Speaker 12: They held that over their heads.
Speaker 13: All right, you want a hospital, sweetheart, or you want
Speaker 13: a jail cell.
Speaker 12: Which is it.
Speaker 13: If you want a hospital, we can do that for you,
Speaker 13: but you got to talk.
Speaker 1: Finally, the women start telling Yunis what she wants to hear,
Speaker 1: including a very specific name.
Speaker 12: So now it was.
Speaker 13: Time to find out how many times they had heard
Speaker 13: Charlie Lucky referred.
Speaker 12: To in conversation. That was what they built their casaw.
Speaker 13: So while these revelations were being recorded, a case was
Speaker 13: being built against Charles Lucky Luciano.
Speaker 1: But if Eunice and Dewey think they'll be seeing Lucky
Speaker 1: in handcuffs anytime soon. They're out of luck. Lucky is
Speaker 1: nowhere to be found. The train from New York to
Speaker 1: Hot Springs, Arkansas, takes thirty five hours at a minimum.
Speaker 1: As you arrive in town, one of the first things
Speaker 1: you notice, despite the lingering hold of winter nineteen thirty six,
Speaker 1: it's just how many people there are out in the streets.
Speaker 14: Just packed with people, constantly packed with people year round.
Speaker 14: You'd walk from the train station, which is about four
Speaker 14: blocks from here to the National Park, and you'd walk
Speaker 14: down Central Avenue, where there were twenty two hotels, a
Speaker 14: lot of casinos. All the bath houses are open, either
Speaker 14: doing baths or as bed and breakfasts. There's a brewery
Speaker 14: where they brew beer from the thermal water. Even during prohibition,
Speaker 14: because we had a hell of a moonshine industry.
Speaker 1: Here, this small town is booming.
Speaker 14: The New York Times called it America's first resort because
Speaker 14: people could come here. They could fish, they could swim,
Speaker 14: they could hike and drink, they could gamble. Prostitution industry
Speaker 14: grew here. It was a man's world back then.
Speaker 1: In nineteen thirty six. Hot Springs, Arkansas is a must
Speaker 1: see destination for a particular type of traveler.
Speaker 14: One hundred thousand people coming here to take bats. That
Speaker 14: was really the main attraction, even for the mob to
Speaker 14: begin with.
Speaker 1: That's right, Hot Springs isn't just a spa town. It's
Speaker 1: a mafia town.
Speaker 13: There were a lot of underworld characters that were cooling
Speaker 13: off in Hot Springs.
Speaker 1: What a brochure slogan that is. They're everywhere in the bars, brothels,
Speaker 1: and casinos or just casually strolling down main Street and
Speaker 1: their unmistakable wide pinstripes and double lapels. But the people
Speaker 1: of Hot Springs don't seem to mind them.
Speaker 14: If you need to take somemar and r off of
Speaker 14: what you've been doing and you don't want to get
Speaker 14: killed doing it, you come to Hot Springs. Nobody bothered them.
Speaker 14: Everybody talked to them. Hey, you're lucky at Luciano, how
Speaker 14: are you? I mean, they were gentlemen, they were dressed nice,
Speaker 14: they had a lot of money, they were super polite,
Speaker 14: big tippers. You know, who's going to start trouble with
Speaker 14: the mob? You know in the middle of Hot Springs, Arkansas.
Speaker 13: You know, the old Rolling Stones lyric every cop is
Speaker 13: a criminal. That was especially true in the nineteen thirties
Speaker 13: and in Hot Spring, Arkansas, because it was known as
Speaker 13: a cooling off area where if they paid enough money,
Speaker 13: they could be protected, and.
Speaker 1: The club of infamous gangsters taking advantage of this gets
Speaker 1: an update in March nineteen thirty six when Lucky Luciano
Speaker 1: also starts calling the town home. Ever since those February
Speaker 1: raids on brothels across Manhattan. Feeling the net closing in,
Speaker 1: he swaps the murky waters of New York for the
Speaker 1: healing waters of Hot Springs. During that spring of nineteen
Speaker 1: thirty six, two unfortunate New York burglars break the Hot
Speaker 1: Springs etiquette, and so.
Speaker 14: The Hot Springs police farmer called a couple of New
Speaker 14: York cops to come down and pick up a couple
Speaker 14: of New York burglars who they captured here.
Speaker 2: While they were here.
Speaker 14: They were walking around like everybody else, and they spotted
Speaker 14: Luciana walking on the promenade and they said, Lucky, the
Speaker 14: Holy East Coast is looking for you.
Speaker 5: He said what for?
Speaker 14: And he told him compulsory prostitution, and he just laughed.
Speaker 14: He said I can't believe that, but anyway, I appreciate
Speaker 14: you telling me.
Speaker 10: So.
Speaker 14: Of course, the policeman that spotted him here, when he
Speaker 14: got back to New York with his prisoner, he said,
Speaker 14: you know, I saw a Lucky Luciano down there. They
Speaker 14: said what he said, Yeah, he's walking down the promenade
Speaker 14: and he's fixing to go take a bath.
Speaker 1: So that up you know who Thomas Dewey back in
Speaker 1: New York, who was waiting to complete his mission.
Speaker 14: He got on the phones and he started calling and
Speaker 14: send the telegrams and raising hell, arrest Lucky and bring
Speaker 14: him back to New York.
Speaker 1: Unfortunately, for Dewey, it isn't quite that simple. He's paid
Speaker 1: his fees to the cops.
Speaker 5: They were more interested in protecting Luccello than they were
Speaker 5: in cooperating with Dewey.
Speaker 1: After several days, the governor of Arkansas calls Hot Springs
Speaker 1: and kicks the sheriff into action. The sheriff brings Lucky
Speaker 1: in on a traffic violation.
Speaker 14: They were forced to go pick him up. They spent
Speaker 14: a few hours over at the Garland County jail. He
Speaker 14: had an open door policy at the jail. You can
Speaker 14: come and go if you want to go get some
Speaker 14: sandwiches or something, that's fine.
Speaker 1: But his lawyers in Hot Springs get in touch with
Speaker 1: his lawyers up in New York, and before long Lucky
Speaker 1: gets a bailed out.
Speaker 14: Arkansas really wasn't going to make a mood take him anywhere.
Speaker 1: So the governor intervenes again, this time with a little
Speaker 1: more aggression.
Speaker 5: A governor in Arkansas sent twenty armed state troopers to
Speaker 5: Hot Springs to take Luciannol physically from Hot Springs to
Speaker 5: Little Rock.
Speaker 1: From there, he's extradited back to New York with an
Speaker 1: armed escort. After all the hullabaloo, no one wants to
Speaker 1: be the one accused of letting Lucky Luciano get away.
Speaker 1: The train line back to New York is uneventful. The
Speaker 1: cops keep Lucky handcuffed between them at all times. When
Speaker 1: he arrives in New.
Speaker 14: York, Junice Carter was there ready for him.
Speaker 1: On April eighth, nineteen thirty six, Lucky's indicted for ninety
Speaker 1: counts of compulsory prostitution. The judge sets his bond at
Speaker 1: three hundred and fifty thousand dollars. At the time, it's
Speaker 1: the largest bond in New York history.
Speaker 5: That's about almost eight million in today's dollars.
Speaker 1: Lucky doesn't pay it. So while sitting in his jail
Speaker 1: cell he has the chance to read his arrest warrant,
Speaker 1: he notices a significant detail. Lucky isn't going to be
Speaker 1: tried alone. Twelve of his associates are being indicted alongside him.
Speaker 13: Having everybody tried unto one indictment. That was called the
Speaker 13: joins Ohlua. That was pretty revolutionary for its time, and
Speaker 13: it was a sneaky trick that prosecutors used to lump
Speaker 13: all these defendants onto one category.
Speaker 1: Behind the scenes, Dewey has been lobbying for a new law.
Speaker 1: As they'd built the case against Lucky, he realized how
Speaker 1: hard it would be to link the mob's top bosses
Speaker 1: to the actions of their lieutenants and middlemen, and so
Speaker 1: he's been trying to find a way to get them
Speaker 1: all in court together back him up. They put the
Speaker 1: law into effect at breakneck speed.
Speaker 5: That law actually passed like days before the Luciano trial.
Speaker 1: The rules of the game have changed. Find one guilty,
Speaker 1: and you find them all guilty. This law is a
Speaker 1: big deal, a huge deal. In fact, it's a precursor
Speaker 1: to the Rico Law or Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act.
Speaker 1: The Rico Law is still in use today and has
Speaker 1: been used against all kinds of people and companies, from
Speaker 1: John Gottie to Donald Trump to Shean fashion company.
Speaker 13: The guilt of innocence of one was the same as
Speaker 13: the guilt or innocence of another.
Speaker 1: It becomes known as the Dewey Law. Dewey is determined
Speaker 1: not to let Lucky slip through the cracks of the
Speaker 1: judicial system, even if it means he has to seal
Speaker 1: them himself.
Speaker 12: At that point, he knew he was toast.
Speaker 1: After months of painstaking work of morally dubious evidence, collection,
Speaker 1: of office politics, and lobbying, Unice's master plan is about
Speaker 1: to bring New York's most powerful gangster into the courtroom.
Speaker 1: Will it pay off? Lucky and Eunice were set on
Speaker 1: different trajectories the minute they arrived in New York in
Speaker 1: nineteen oh six, and now, with Thomas Dewey between them.
Speaker 5: Their lives intersect in a courtroom for one month in
Speaker 5: nineteen thirty six.
Speaker 1: That's coming up on episode six of The Godmother. You've
Speaker 1: been listening to.
Speaker 7: I'm Marilyn Greenwald. I'm a professor Emerita of journalism at
Speaker 7: Ohio University, and I'm the author of five biographies, including
Speaker 7: one of Eunice Hunting Carter.
Speaker 8: I am Claire White, and I am the director of
Speaker 8: Education at the Mob Museum in downtown Las Vegas.
Speaker 3: My name is doctor Clarissa Myriek Harris, and I am
Speaker 3: a tenured professor of Africana Studies at Moorhouse College in Atlanta, Georgia.
Speaker 9: My name is Robert Whalan and I'm an emerathus Professor
Speaker 9: of History at Queen's University of Charlotte here in Charlotte,
Speaker 9: North Carolina.
Speaker 12: Why my name is Ellen Olson.
Speaker 13: I research and I write books about women who were
Speaker 13: involved with notorious gangsters and desperadoes.
Speaker 5: My name is Chuck Greeves. Before becoming a writer, I
Speaker 5: spent twenty five years as a Los Angeles trial lawyer.
Speaker 5: My fourth novel was basically a fictionalization of the famous
Speaker 5: nineteen thirty six vice trial, in which Luckily China was
Speaker 5: prosecuted by Thomas Dewey.
Speaker 12: I'm Debbie aple Gate.
Speaker 6: I'm a historian and biographer, and I am the author
Speaker 6: of Madam, The Biography of Polyadler, Icon of the jazz age.
Speaker 14: Robert Raines, author of Hot Springs from Capone to Costello,
Speaker 14: Executive director of the Gaigster Museum of America, located in
Speaker 14: Hot Springs National Park, Arkansas.
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