Episode 28 Transcript- Madam Queen of Harlem Stephanie St. Clair

[Amanda] In 1920's Harlem, a young woman of color would make the fateful decision to take the world of organized crime by storm. She would build an empire that was unheard of for a woman, let alone a woman of color. This badass woman would rise to withstand not only the pressure from the corrupt New York City Police Department, but also would stand the pressure of Manhattan's white mafia bosses. I'm Amanda Morgan and this is New York's Dark Side.

[Intro Music]

[Amanda] Hey everyone, welcome back to the dark side. I'm gonna start off with an apology for my unexpected absence. I've had a terrible respiratory thing, and for a good bit of the last 2 1/2 weeks I have not had much of a voice, which made it basically impossible for me to put out an episode. But I'm excited to be back. My voice is still at times a little bit wonky, but I am ready to pump out more content. So today I'm covering Stephanie Saint Clair, a badass woman of color who took no shit from anyone. I came across her story when I was researching the Vivian Gordon episode and I was instantly intrigued. Depending on what source you get your information from, parts of the story vary, so I'm going to do my best to tell it as accurately as possible. All of my source material, as always, can be found on the web page for this episode. But what I want to highlight that I thought was pretty cool was a graphic novel inspired by Stephanie Saint Clair titled Queenie Godmother of Harlem and it's by Elizabeth Columbia and Aura Lee Levy and it's just beautifully put together. I recommend checking it out. I will link it in the episode description below. And with that, let's dive in. 

[Amanda] Stephanie Saint Clair's actual birth date is unknown. She is believed to have been born around 1897 in the French Caribbean town of Martinique. There are some sources that say she actually might have been born in 1887, a full decade earlier. Regardless, she chose to keep her true birthday a mystery. She was born to a single mother named Felicienne, who worked her ass off to put her through school. Her mother wanted her to work as a domestic servant of sorts, but Stephanie had other ideas. When her mother became ill, Stephanie had to leave school and she began to work in the kitchen of a wealthy family to help support herself and her mother. While working with the family things were not always great-- she would end up being sexually assaulted by a member of the family, but she would also take advantage of opportunities while the family was away to look through their vast library of books. She found photos in one of New York City and vowed that when the time came, she would go there. Unfortunately, her mother would come to pass from her illness. This is when she took that opportunity to leave. 

[Amanda] Stephanie is believed to have left the French Caribbean as part of a group of 100 women brought from Guadalupe to Quebec to work as domestic workers, a precursor to the West Indian domestic scheme that would occur from 1955 to 1967. You know me, I had to look more into this so here goes. Canada had labor issues. There was a shortage of Canadian born workers who wanted to work in domestic labor due to poor working conditions they often found in maintaining someone else's household. You know, doing the cooking, the cleaning, watching children and elders, you know the stuff that we hate doing day-to-day. So to address this, the Canadian government developed a few different labor schemes to gain workers from Britain, America, Europe and the Caribbean. After the first group of women was brought in from the Caribbean in 1911, the government cancelled bringing in more women "mostly due to the racist public outcry from the supposed physical and moral unsuitability of the women". After bringing them to Canada, the government would actually deport many of them during the recession of 1913 and 15 because they were concerned that they would become dependent on government. That's just a big fuck you in my opinion. They uprooted themselves to come for a better life, dealt with your shitty working conditions and low pay to try to earn it, and then get kicked out of the country that welcomed them in to meet their own needs. For the record, while this is kind of a dig at Canada, sorry Canada, there are a lot of countries that are guilty of this too. And I'm looking at America right here with that comment 

[Amanda] Anyway. Stephanie is believed to have arrived in New York City in 1912. She started off residing with an Irish immigrant couple in Five Points, and she helped to support them by paying rent and for groceries. She took up a job working with the 40 thieves gan where she did very well. Stephanie had a gift for picking up languages which made her very useful to them and she was assigned to be undercover at bars and nightclubs to help gain information on rival gang members and other people of interest to her bosses. One thing to know about Stephanie Saint Clair was she had a fierce temper. She was often described as being feisty and arrogant. She was able to spew scathing profanity in multiple languages when she was angry and she meant business. She did not tolerate incompetence or deception. These qualities would serve her well when she entered the numbers game, but caused her a bit of trouble before she made it big. She would end up leaving the 40 Thieves gang after her boss O'Reilly tried to force her into sex work. When she refused, he started to beat her and she fought back. She was able to get the advantage. She knocked him to the ground and she castrated him in the street. The 40 Thieves would put a bounty on her head after that and she took refuge with a woman that she had been helping for a few weeks until the heat was off her.

[Amanda] One of her first lovers that she took in Harlem was a small time gangster named Duke. Duke also tried to force her into sex work, which she again refused. After having an argument one night about his proposition for her, where he struck her across the face, she bided her time for a bit until he started to make advances on her and she responded by stabbing him in the right eye with a fork. She then fled the apartment with nothing more than what she had on her. After hiding out for a night in a motel, Stephanie decided to leave Harlem, boarding a bus she thought was heading for the South, with the plan to move to New Orleans where she thought she would fit in and be able to start a new life. However, that first night on the bus, they were swarmed by members of the Ku Klux Klan. All of the persons of color on the bus were forced off. The men were killed either by hanging or burning, and Stephanie, along with the other young women passengers were sexually assaulted by members of the Klan while the white passengers sat in the bus and watched everything unfold. When the Klansman finished torturing them, the women reboarded the bus, which ended up stopping in Ramsey, NJ, where all of the remaining passengers of color were forced off. Stephanie would end up at the local chapter of the NAACP where they spent the next four months taking care of her and she ultimately decided to return to New York City rather than going South. 

[Amanda] When Stephanie returned to the city, she rented a room in North Harlem and she lay low for a bit to not draw attention from Duke or any of his men. Duke could move from small time gangster to big time bootlegger. However, this came to bite him in the ass when he took some bullets to the head during a shootout with a rival gang. Now that Duke was gone, Stephanie decided this was prime time for her to make her move. She wanted to enter the world of organized crime and make a name for herself. She decided she needed to gain some capital and then planned to become a banker in the numbers game. She came up with a plan after being prescribed Jamaican ginger extract to help her quit smoking. She realized that the medicine had a large amount of alcohol in it and that this could be used in a scheme to make some money. She worked with a neighbor named Ed who had a thing for her to hatch the scheme. They would force doctors to write prescriptions for Jamaican ginger. Poor people that they chose. The people would pay for access to the prescriptions, and Stephanie and Ed would make a profit. The doctors would get a cut, and the consumers would be able to get alcohol during the prohibition. What could go wrong? The scheme worked. Stephanie and Ed made a killing. Stephanie knew, though, that prohibition wasn't going to last forever. And this was not going to be a sustainable gig. So she began to put money off to the side. She also took notice that many of the people who were taking the Jamaican ginger were suffering from paralysis. Jamaican ginger extract, commonly called Jake, had been a popular medicine through the 1800s and early 1900s without any ill effect. Jake Leg, a paralytic illness was caused because the company Boston Hub Products intentionally started adding an ingredient called Tri Ortho Cresyl Phosphate, TOCP. The ingredient not only avoided prohibition detection, it made the medicine taste better. The ingredient, however, ended up being a slow acting neurotoxin. That would cause numbness, weakness, foot drop and eventually paralysis in the legs weeks after consumption. This could also happen to the arms. Many patients prescribed the medication ended up with permanent neurological damage. Tens of thousands of Americans developed Jake Leg with the number of potentially as high as 100,000 people. The National Institute of Health would end up getting involved in trace the product back to Boston hub and the 1930s. However, there weren't the same losses there are now around medication ingredients, so the owners of the company couldn't be charged with literally poisoning their consumers. They were charged however, with violations of the Prohibition Act and both the president of the company, Harry Gross and his brother-in-law who was a part owner, Max Reisman, would end up each receiving a $1000 fine and a suspended two year prison sentence. And that really doesn't seem like enough of a punishment in my book. But they were probably rich white men. So after saving up $30,000, she decided that now was the time to pull out of the partnership with the end. Can we revel on that for a second though? She put aside $30,000 in a matter of months. Anyway, Ed did not take the news very well. He ended up attacking her first with a blow to the head, and then kicked her in the stomach. She gathered her strength to fight back, grabbed his leg with such strength that she caused him to fall, and on his way down, he struck his head against the table, breaking his neck and killing him. Stephanie left the apartment and Ed's body would be found three days later. She didn't face any charges with his death. I don't think she came forward. I mean he attacked her first so he's kind of  a shitty person. Does that warrant killing? No, but it was an accident so I don't think she put that table there. Ohh shut up Amanda. 

[Amanda] Anyway on April 12th, 1917. Stephanie Saint Clair would invest $10,000 to start her numbers game. She hired her own men to be her bookies and runners. She also hired a man named Ellsworth 'Bumpy' Johnson to be her bodyguard and he would also become a lover. Bumpy got his name from the large bump he had on the back of his head. Bumpy was arrogant and short tempered, not one to walk away from a fight. He had been in and out of prison most of his life and he started out his career in crime with burglary. But it was also known to pimp out women and run drugs. 

[Amanda] So let's talk about the numbers game for a second and what that is. The numbers game or the policy games, was a part of everyday life in Harlem for both the poor and more affluent people. Given the time period, it was pretty much guaranteed that if you were a person of color and tried to access additional funding from a bank, like through a bank loan or something, it was going to be denied to you. This was also true for better paying jobs, nice homes, obtaining political positions or a spot to advance your education. You know anything they could do to to keep you down, they did. The numbers game gave the players the slight possibility of gaining some financial relief, but the numbers were often fixed. So really it benefited the bankers the most. How it worked was the players could bet as little as a penny and they would select the three digit number to place their bet on. Numbers runners, the people who collected the bets were everywhere, churches, salons, department stores. They would even come to your house to collect your bet. The numbers runners would have a policy book and they would give the person betting a receipt from the book. And then the runner would take the money and the policy book to the bookies. The bookies would write everything out nice and then take that to the bankers. And the bankers were the people that funded the whole thing. The person making the bet would win if the numbers that they selected matched the predetermined numbers in the newspapers the following day. And this was usually something like a number reported from the New York Stock Exchange or a set of numbers being reported from the US Treasury Balance, or some numbers from results at a preselected race track. There were awards were high. If you won, the payout you were betting on was often 600 to 1. 

[Amanda] By 1925, there were 30 policy banks running numbers in Harlem. One of them was Stephanie Saint Clair. She was doing very, very well. She was making a profit of up to $2000 a month, which in 2024 would equate to over $35,000 a month. This was basically unheard of for a woman at this time, let alone a woman of color. Stephanie Saint Clair would move into an apartment at 409 Edgecombe in Harlem, a prestigious apartment complex on Sugar Hill with other affluent members of the Harlem community. W.E.B. Dubois, the sociologist and civil rights activist who helped found the NAACP, was her neighbor and friend. She was a promoter of the arts during the Harlem Renaissance, helping to promote the likes of Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, Charles Alston, and James Van Der Zee.

[Amanda] While she greatly benefited from the hard earned money of the people of Harlem in a rigged lottery game, she also did a lot to give and help the people of Harlem. She would pay people's medical expenses, she gave out free loans, she funded projects in the community and more to help spur the economy of Harlem. She would also use her power to help advocate for the people of Harlem, which we'll get into. For all her success of the numbers game, it was not without challenges as well. There were rival bankers, corrupt police and government officials, white mafia bosses who wanted to move in on the Harlem numbers game. It was going to take all of her fierce energy, wit, and ingenuity to continue to navigate through them. Like many of the other bankers, Stephanie paid her dues to the police for them to look the other way and leave her numbers runners alone. In 1928, a rival Harlem banker named Casper Holstein would end up being jumped by 4 white men while he was out on his way to visit a girlfriend. They demanded a $50,000 ransom for his release. The fact that this ransom was able to be paid for a man of color without much to do would catch the attention of Dutch Schultz, a white mob boss with a legendary temper and violent streak. Dutch Schultz was born Arthur Flegenheimer in the Bronx on August 6th, 1902, and he took his alias from another old time Bronx gangster, Schultz started out his career with burglaries, but soon got into bootlegging and racketeering. When he got wind of the numbers game in Harlem, he decided that he wanted it and this would end up being far more difficult than he expected because of the network of bankers already established and in retaliation of this he began to pressure his connections in the corrupt Police Department to start pushing on the Harlem bankers by targeting their runners, letting the white runners go free but the the runners of color, it was not good for them. Even though the bankers had been paying their dues to the police for their runners to be left alone, they started getting arrested. Schultz also had the power of Tammany Hall behind him he had a man named James J Hines, a Democratic Party boss. He had a strong ties with Tammany Hall on his payroll which basically gave him immunity from the crimes he was committing. Schultz would also recruit some of Harlem's gangsters to work for him and this would lead to a short but extremely violent gang war that left about 40 people dead and led to multiple kidnappings and basically destroyed the Harlem numbers game. Many of the bankers either caved, giving up their game to Dutch Schultz, or were killed. Stephanie Saint Clair, however, was not going to take this laying down. She refused to cave. She would end up organizing the remaining Harlem bankers to fight against the takeover. She organized confrontations with the white store owners who are collecting bets for the Dutchman, as she called him, and they would smash store cases, destroyed policy bets and ordered the white store owners to leave Harlem. Stephanie would also utilize the newspapers to help advocate for the Harlem bankers, encouraging the people of Harlem to only play the numbers game from organizers who are persons of color. She called out the police for ignoring the white numbers runners and targeting hers. She also used the newspaper platform to inform Harlem citizens of their rights. 

[Amanda] Things came further to head when on December 30th 1929 police raided Stephanies Edgecombe apartment they would steal over $40,000 in cash and arrested her she would receive an indefinite sentenced to a workhouse. If you've listened to some of my past episodes, you may know that the late 1920s into the 1930s was the time of the Seabury investigation, and this was an advantage for Stephanie Saint Clair. To give a quick overview of the Seabury Committee for anyone who doesn't know or needs a refresher, the Seabury committee came about due to some very serious and legitimate concerns about corruption in the government of New York City. Tammany Hall, one of the political powerhouses of the time, was being run largely by the mob. There were rumors flying around that high power positions were being handed out to friends of people in power. Bribes were being accepted like candy. Property was being transferred between people. It was a mess. On top of that, the police force and judicial system was corrupt. For example, they were framing women left and right for prostitution and charging them hundreds of dollars to get the charges dropped. The rumors caught the attention of New York's Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who tasked the New York legislature with launching an investigation into claims. They formed a joint legislative committee that was headed by Senator Samuel Hofstader to look into it and a Democratic anti Tammany judge named Samuel Seabury was elected to be the legal counsel on the investigation. Stephanie Saint Clair reached out to the Seabury committee and she cut a deal with them for her release from the workhouse. She agreed to testify and was released after eight months. Her testimony would send over a dozen people to prison. 

[Amanda] This only further pissed off Dutch Schultz and he decided it was time to end the Queen of Harlem's reign. He started calling Stephanies home with threats against her and her life. He started picking off her numbers runners. He placed a contract out on her. One day while out she had to take refuge in the friends cellar under a pile of coal because she was being pursued. Another day one of Schultz's men came into her home to try to strong arm her but she was able to get the upper hand and got him into a closet which she then locked and ordered her men to take care of him. In 1932 a white attorney friend of Stephanie would be approached by a man. Offering her $500 if she would get Stephanie to come to her apartment where he would be waiting to kill her. She refused and told Stephanie about this request and they of course went to the police. The police refused to intervene so they went to the courthouse where the judge also refused to offer her any protection and threw her out. She then went to the mayor. But the mayor's chief of staff turned her away without allowing her to see the mayor. So Stephanie literally got on a soapbox with a megaphone and started alerting the people of Harlem to the situation. 

[Amanda]Dutch Schultz's arrogance and violence would end up being his undoing. His actions have garnered the attention of the New York State Special Prosecutor, Thomas Dewey. We wanted to put an end to his corrupt campaign. Schultz and Retaliation wanted to put a hit on Thomas Dewey, and he began to organize this plan. Lucky Luciano found out about the plan to hit on Dewey and he took that information to the heads of the five families, the mob syndicates. I've seen it called a couple different things. They all thought that this was a terrible idea and decided that Dutch Schultz needed to be taken care of, so a hit was placed on Dutch Schultz. On October 25th, 1935, Dutch Schultz was gunned down while on the toilet of the Palace Chop House in Newark, NJ. He took a bullet to the abdomen and was taken to the hospital. I've seen conflicting stories on whether Stephanie Sinclair came to see him in the hospital or whether she sent a telegram, but either way he would receive a note from her stating as he so, so shall you reap, signed Madame Queen of Policy. Schultz would die the day following the shooting, effectively ending the standoff between Stephanie and the Dutchman. Made headlines around the nation anyway. Lucky Luciano. However, he wanted in on the action that Dutch Schultz had in Harlem. Bumpy, Stephanie's bodyguard saw this as an opportunity to further his own career. He negotiated a meeting with Luciano and negotiated position for himself. He would help run the Harlem numbers game, help get more of Harlem's bankers under Luciano, and in exchange he got a percentage of the games and Luciano. Reluctantly, he ended up agreeing to this because he knew that the continued violence was bad for his business. Without Bumpy as part of her enterprise, Stephanie finally had to bow to the pressure and give them a percentage of her empire. She was still considerably wealthy and doing well for herself, but things in Stephanie's life would take another turn when she met a man named Sufi Abdul Hamid. 

[Amanda] Hamid had approached her asking to fund a motion picture, which she refused. He would negotiate another meeting with her with the same request, which she again refused because she was selective in what she invested her money into. During the second meeting, Hamad would request be concerned to call on her personally and she accepted. Hamid was a strange and flamboyant character. He claimed to have been born in the shadows of Egyptian pyramids, a descendant of Pharaohs. He wore colorful outfits, had his head wrapped with turbans and topped off the look. With a lot of jewelry and wearing a gold line keep. I've posted pictures of the couple on the web page for this episode. In our social medias, Mead was known as the Black Hitler of Harlem. He was born Eugene Brown in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1903, not under the shadow of a pyramid. He lived in Chicago for a time where he portrayed himself as a Buddhist cleric by the name of Bishop Conshohocken before eventually moving to New York City in 1932. He would be one of the first African American converts to Islam and would change his persona to His Holiness Bishop Amiru Al-Mu-Minin Sufi Abdul Hamid. I hope I said that right. I'm sorry if I didn't. 

[Amanda] When the Great Depression hit and unemployment rates for persons of color in Harlem's skyrocketed to about 50%, Hamid began to picket and give grand speeches while standing on step ladders on street corners advocating for the white and Jewish business owners. To employ the same persons of color that they had no qualms taking money from for their products. His activism and anti-Semitic stance led to his nickname as the Black Hitler. He would later recant his anti-Semitic stance and would become founder of an organization called the Universal Order of Tranquility where he tried to gain unity between Christians, Whites, Blacks and the Jewish people. After two months of dating, Stephanie Saint Clair and Hamid would enter a contract marriage in 1936. Stephanie was in her late 40s at the time and Hamid was in his late 30s. I've seen varying stories on the marriage. The contract was either for a one year, like a trial period to see how things went, if they went well then then marriage would continue or the other thing I saw was that the marriage was for a period of 99 years, where if it was dissolved early, Hamid would get most of Stephanie's assets. Either way, it was a weird circumstance. Things did not last long between the two before their marriage exploded. 

[Amanda] Hamid had a mistress named Dorothy Matthews, a woman of color who claimed to be a psychic of Asian descent who went by the name Madame Fu Futtam. Stephanie considered Futtam to be a friend of hers until she realized that Futtam was not only scamming her out of her money, she also caught on to the affair one day in 1938. Hamid was visiting his lawyer's office. He was shot at multiple times and was grazed by one of the bullets. Stephanie would end up being charged with the attempted murder of Hamid and sentenced to 2 to 10 years at Bedford Correctional Facility for Women. Hamid would end up marrying Madam Fu Futtam not long after Stephanie went to prison and he died shortly after when his private plane crashed in Long Island. Apparently he had a private plane and he tried to justify the luxury of having this private plane to his followers by keeping it purposely low on fuel, and that plan bit him in the ass because his plane crashed due to running out of fuel. 

[Amanda] Stephanie Saint Clair would be released from prison in the early 1940s. Ohh wait wait wait. I'm gonna go back for a second. Madam Fu Futtam kept their religious order going after his death by claiming that he kept coming to see her in the night daily 

[Amanda]Anyway. Stephanie Saint Clair would be released from prison in the early 1940s. She retired out of the numbers game and disappeared from the spotlight. It's rumored that she moved to Long Island, where she lived in a mansion, living off the fortune that she had made as the Queen of Harlem. She continued to write articles for the paper advocating for black rights and civil liberties. The records show that she might have died in 1969, and there are unconfirmed rumors that she is buried in Trinity Cemetery. As for Bumpy Johnson, he became the Godfather of Harlem, making a killing from the numbers game and running drugs. The Harlem community both feared and ultimately loved him. He was known for having a giving nature. He would give out free turkeys for Thanksgiving, as well as providing other gifts for those in need, he would have end up spending several years in both Sing Sing and Alcatraz for what he would claim to be beefed up federal charges. He was sentenced to 15 years for conspiracy to sell heroin in New York City. He would be released in 1963 and then died in 1968 of a heart attack. And that, my friends, was the story of Stephanie Saint Clair, Madame Queen of Harlem, a badass woman who rose from the orphaned immigrant to a queen of organized crime, standing up to the white mafia and the corruption in the government in a time of prolific racism and misogyny. I fucking love it, man. It's good to be back. To close this out today, don't forget you can follow the show on any of our social media pages. We are on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. You can also check out some of the perks offered on our Patreon page. As a way to help support the show. Shout out to Wicked Wanderings Podcasts for the promotion swap opportunity. If you haven't had a chance to check out their show, please do. I've listened to a couple episodes, they're great. And I would also love if you could take a moment to leave me a rating or review on your podcast platform of choice and share our show so that other like minded dark siders can join our awesome community. I hope everyone has a great week ahead and I will be back next week with more content. Stay curious everyone.