January 29, 2024 • 47 mins
By 1928, Eunice left the glamor of the Harlem Renaissance behind for the austere world of law school. She is dreaming of making a bigger impact on the world.
As she separates herself from the legacy of her parents, and from the rest of her community, what will it cost Eunice to succeed in a new and unfamiliar world of law?
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
Novel before we begin, a content warning the following episode
contains difficult themes and violence. After making sure my little
brother gets on his bus, I walk a couple of
(00:27):
blocks up the hill to wait on mine. It's the
fall of nineteen eighty three and I'm heading into the
first grade throughout elementary school. Neighborhood. Friends and I meet
at the driveway of some stranger's house to keep an
eye out for the big yellow school bus that will
take us through Nashville.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
For the next four years.
Speaker 1 (00:50):
I always sit next to the window so I can
see the city go by. The morning journey starts in
North Nashville, near Jefferson Street, a black historic neighborhood. The
bus snakes through the streets of quiet homes where you
just knew someone's grandparents lived. There are chairs on front porches,
no matter how small, and carefully wild bushes of roses
(01:12):
or honeysuckle or whatever, bright colorful flowers bloom when it's
their time. Instead of taking the forty interstate that had
devastated the neighborhood with its arrival in the nineteen sixties,
the bus bounces over railroad tracks into the west side
of Nashville until we arrive in Sylvan Park, a white
part of town. The deeper we go, the denser the
(01:36):
trees grow, blocking the sun. Not in a menacing way,
in an undisturbed way. The houses range from quaint to
gingerbread to many country castles, and it's clear no one
is sending an inner state through this neighborhood. As the
bus glides into position in front of my elementary school,
(01:59):
I steal myself.
Speaker 2 (02:00):
For the day ahead.
Speaker 1 (02:02):
Inside I'll be separated from my bus friends and become
the only black girl in whatever they called gifted classes.
Back then, I only see my black friends at lunch
and pe and then again in the afternoon on the bus.
Speaker 2 (02:15):
Ride back to North Nashville.
Speaker 1 (02:19):
When I became an adult, I realized I'd been part
of a long term bussing program to help desegregate schools
in Nashville. The rhythms of my daily school year routine,
the long winding bus journey, days split between black friends
and family and white classmates and teachers, were all part
of a bigger political project to address a deep legacy
(02:42):
of discrimination and segregation. And though I didn't quite realize
it at the time, I was learning not just about multiplications, spelling,
and how to write incursive. I was also absorbing lessons
about what it meant to succeed as a black girl
in America. What was expected of you, what lines and
(03:04):
worlds you had to carefully walk between. When I started
working on this podcast, I recognized this part of myself
in Unice Carter, the need to be respectable, to be
able to move in white spaces. When we last left Unis,
(03:25):
she had been dreaming of making an impact and had
decided the law was the place she was going to
do that. By nineteen twenty eight, Unice left her writing
and the Harlem renaissance behind. When I was separated from
my black friends in school for advanced classes, I did
not enjoy being the only black person or the only
black girl in the room. I wondered if being singled
(03:49):
out for her intelligence and ambition was important to Unis
as she separated herself from her parents' legacy and the
rest of her community in Harlem. It seems like she
wanted more for herself, But did she worry what would
happen if she failed. I'm Nicole Perkins and from the
(04:09):
teams at iHeartRadio and novel This Is the Godmother, Episode three,
(04:40):
Breaking through.
Speaker 3 (04:49):
The gold past a point out where a lot of
the like clubs were compass saying Phillips the Priscopal Church reading.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
During my walking tour of Harlem, one of the stops
my guide was most excited to show me was Seventh Avenue.
Speaker 3 (05:03):
One of start going down Seventh Avenue. Okay, we can
go by what Billie Holliday was discovered. We can go
to the home of Langston News. We'll cut across p
the avenue, go, of course of rankin Newser's house.
Speaker 1 (05:20):
At the height of the Harlem Renaissance, Seventh Avenue was
the scene of some of its best night life, and
just a few blocks south of Seventh Avenue and one
hundred and thirty fifth Street was.
Speaker 2 (05:31):
This large elm tree.
Speaker 1 (05:34):
It had grown there for decades, and it was nicknamed
the Tree of Hope.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
Or the Wishing Tree.
Speaker 1 (05:40):
It gave Seventh Avenue the name the Boulevard of Dreams.
The story is that one day one of Harlem's actors
stood underneath this elm tree wishing for a job, and
then a producer walked up to offer him one. In
nineteen thirty three, America is firmly in the midst of
the Great Depression, passers by are touching that elm tree
(06:03):
for good luck, placing their hands on this trunk, wishing
for work, and wonder if Eunice was superstitious at all,
if she ever made a wish on the tree trunk
as she passed by. Six years have passed since we
last saw Unice. As she's looking for somewhere to hang
the shingle for her own private law practice. She'd settled
(06:25):
on an office just a little way down from the
Tree of Hope. She'd graduated law school and passed the bar.
For all intentsive purposes, she'd succeeded in her plan to
escape a more traditional life as housewife and social life.
But if some of that elmtree luck rubbed off on
Unis her first couple of years as a private practice
attorney do not show it. It was a far cry
(06:49):
from what she imagined for herself when she entered law school. First,
let's go back in time a little bit to Eunice
Hunting Carter arriving at the Woolworth Building downtown Manhattan on
a bright September day in nineteen twenty seven. The Woolworth
(07:10):
Building at two thirty three Broadway is glamorous and Gothic
imagine Westminster Abbey, but slicker and as a skyscraper.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
It's got a cathedral like.
Speaker 1 (07:23):
Presence, all fifty eight floors looming over the city. Eunice
enters the lobby that day, full of hope and with
an ambitious plan. She needs to navigate her way out
of the monotony facing her. She's not just a writer
or a housewife and mother. She's not just missus Lyle Carter.
(07:47):
She is more, or at least she plans to be.
As Unice steps into that lobby for the first time,
she is surrounded by intricate gold latticework, mosaics, glossy marble stone,
shafts of light filtering through lead light windows. When she
(08:12):
enters the elevator, an attendant dings the button that will
take her up to the twenty seventh and twenty eighth floor.
Speaker 2 (08:20):
Fordham Law School.
Speaker 1 (08:24):
There's a library, three large classrooms, some offices for the
dean and the registrar. There's a smoking room, and the
most spectacular view the New York City skyline. It's around
six o'clock in the evening, long shadows cast by the
(08:47):
setting sun on the west side.
Speaker 4 (08:52):
She was attending at night while still working as a
social worker. A lot of law schools made it difficult
to attend if you were working or had other obligations.
So women, black people, Jewish people, Catholics. Bar was trying
to keep all these people out of the practice of law,
and so Fordham was trying to be more inclusive by
allowing people to attend night classes.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
Eunice's decision to attend law school probably came with considerable debate.
She had a toddler at home, a perfectly good career
under her belt already. Eunice's own mother, Addie, preached that
the best place for a black woman was by her
husband's side at home, not gallivanting around Manhattan at night.
(09:35):
A masterclass example of the do as I say, not
as I do lifestyle, Unice strikes me as a stubborn woman,
and as a stubborn woman myself, I wouldn't be surprised
if all the possible backlash against her decision made her
even more determined to earn her law degree. I'm sure
(09:56):
there were plenty of people who doubted her ability to
succeed her classmates. Is she stared at as she makes
her way to class do her peers wonder whether she
strolled in by accident.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
She probably got that a lot in her life.
Speaker 1 (10:12):
Surprised at seeing her in predominantly white spaces. I wonder
if anyone accused her of cheating, or how many times
she remained quiet so no one thought she was trying
to prove herself better than everyone else. Maybe she had
her own doubts. As smart and determined as she is,
She's only human despite it all. During that first term
(10:35):
at Fordham in nineteen twenty seven, Unice's marks are unsurprisingly good.
Speaker 4 (10:41):
She liked the study of law a lot, found it
very interesting. She was very detail oriented.
Speaker 5 (10:46):
Eunice's forte was doing you know, research, and she kind
of excelled in going through documents.
Speaker 1 (10:54):
But she's not at Fordham too long when clouds appear
on the horizon and things start to slide to the left.
In her second year at Fordham, Unice takes a sabbatical. Publicly,
she tells people that it's because she's sick. Later she
would say it was actually her son, Lyle Carter Junior
(11:15):
who was ill. But there's some historical speculation over this.
From everything I know about Unice, the idea of her
taking a break from law school seems unusual. Maybe the
loneliness of being the only black person and the sea
of white men was getting to her. The only reason
I question it is that she wasn't even resting during
(11:37):
that time off.
Speaker 4 (11:40):
And even during her time off for illness, she was
working still political activism and campaigning.
Speaker 1 (11:47):
This is Unice's first foray into politics. She's working on
the campaigns of some Republican candidates. That was probably as
much of an education as law school. Unice's leave of
absence was eighteen months, but something must have drawn her
back because eventually she returns to her evening studies. She
doesn't have the kind of instant success she's probably used to.
Speaker 4 (12:11):
So she did fail the bar exam the first time
that she took it and had to retake it and
passed on the second.
Speaker 1 (12:17):
Try to be fair to Unice, her exam was on mortgages,
so she might have had trouble staying awake. In the end,
she does finally pass her exams. Between her education law
school and her foray into politics, Unice has to recognize
(12:37):
a theme. She's often the only black woman in white,
male dominated spaces. Is this what she thought she had
to deal with in order to be at the top.
In nineteen thirty three, Unice becomes one of the first
black female qualified lawyers in New York. But what has
she sacrificed of herself to get there? Walking along the
(13:04):
Boulevard of Dreams, past the Tree of Hope and towards
her small private practice office in Harlem, Unice would have
been carrying the weight of the decisions she'd made. To
be a trailblazer sometimes means being so far ahead you
end up alone.
Speaker 2 (13:23):
So when she.
Speaker 1 (13:23):
Does finally open up her business, things were pretty slow.
There are no professional accolades and finalizing wills. No one
is going to write an article about her for handling
misdemeanor charges. It's not exactly prestigious work. Unice may have
been a lawyer, but she wasn't exactly setting the world
(13:47):
of law on fire.
Speaker 2 (13:49):
But she sticks with us for nearly two years.
Speaker 1 (13:54):
Did she ever worry she had flung herself in the
wrong direction? Did she have too much pride to turn
and back? Had she sacrificed too much to retrace her steps?
I know I've made some decisions that made me question
if I'd made the right move, But I kept moving forward.
Sometimes that's the only way to shake off self doubt.
(14:15):
This must have been the quote tale of long dark
years she'd imagined for others when she wrote that essay
of hers about blazing trails and breaking through. While she's
struggling to break through on her path, Eunice's former neighbor
from her Brooklyn childhood, Lucky Luciano, is succeeding beyond his
(14:37):
wildest dreams. He had chosen a very different route up
the mountain. Okay, so when we last left legendary New
(15:01):
York mobster Lucky Luciano, he was graduating too, through the
layers of the New York underworld hierarchy and in the twenties,
as Units had been making her way in Harlem during
her years as a czarina and social climber, Lucky was
doing a similar thing, making new friends, new friends with
(15:24):
a certain status.
Speaker 6 (15:26):
They called him the Broadway mob. Frank Costello, Myra Lansky,
Benny Siegel.
Speaker 1 (15:30):
Hip hop heads and fans of gangster movies alike should
recognize these names in a heartbeat. Lucky's new associates have
traveled through time to become some of the most well
known mobsters ever.
Speaker 6 (15:42):
What distinguished Lucky's Broadway mob from a lot of other
gangs was that it was multi ethnic. Mayra Lansky was Jewish,
Benny Siegel was Jewish, Frank Costello was Italian. Unlike his
old fashioned mafia predecessors, what he called the old mustache beats.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
By the nineteen thirties, Lucky and his crew are serious
players in the world of New York crime. And in
nineteen thirty one, as Unice is arriving downtown at the
Woolworth Building each evening, struggling to finish law school, Lucky
is finding.
Speaker 2 (16:14):
Things a little easier.
Speaker 1 (16:17):
Soon He's headed out each evening from an equally impressive
Manhattan address, the Waldorf Astoria, the largest and tallest hotel
in the world. This is Lucky Luciano's new home. Those
who catch a glimpse of him riding down the elevator
from his thirty ninth floor suite and walking confidently through
(16:37):
the luxurious lobby will see an almost unrecognizable figure. He's
no longer the scruffy street urchin from Little Italy.
Speaker 7 (16:46):
Lucky Luciano was known for silk underwear. Silk shirts, never
a suit off the rack, always tailored. Pinky ring in particular,
was gold The shoes were always, of course, Italian leather.
(17:07):
If they would wear a fedora, it was usually some
expensive fur.
Speaker 1 (17:12):
Everything from head to toe, especially tailored.
Speaker 7 (17:16):
This was the general dress of the guys that quote
unquote made it. Yes, there was vanity. Some could argue
it was narcissism.
Speaker 2 (17:26):
But there was more to it than that.
Speaker 7 (17:30):
They didn't want to look like gangsters. They wanted to
look like upstanding, high society citizens. They want to look
like the Rockefellers.
Speaker 1 (17:44):
Eunice and Lucky Luciano. Their journey to respectability is quite similar.
Unis uses education and class status. Lucky uses a tailored
and expensive wardrobe to prove himself, and for now, at least,
Lucky's methods seem to be the ones getting results.
Speaker 7 (18:04):
It was New York high life, if there ever was one.
Traveled in the best cars, dined in the finest restaurants,
hobnobbed with celebrities, living high up in the Waldorf Astoria,
all the best trappings, the best parties.
Speaker 1 (18:22):
For extra protection, he now uses bodyguards and uses frequent aliases.
But not all of Lucky's physical changes since those days
when he and Unice were kids in Brooklyn are deliberate
He's had his own years of struggle too. Just a
few years before he came to live at the.
Speaker 7 (18:42):
Astoria, Lucky Luciano was abducted, taken to Staten Island, beaten up, scarred, bleeding,
passed out, and tossed out on a beach.
Speaker 2 (18:55):
Abducted by police, so the story goes.
Speaker 7 (18:58):
The reason they were beating him up, according to Lucky Luccianum,
is they wanted information on a criminal who was more
infamous than he was at that time. He wouldn't give
it up, so they beat the hell out of him.
Speaker 1 (19:15):
So by nineteen thirty one, Lucky's appearances also marked by
scars that line his face and a droopy eye.
Speaker 7 (19:23):
From that moment on, the mythology of Lucky Lucciano's scars
was born.
Speaker 1 (19:29):
You can't make an omelet without cracking a few eggs,
and it's no surprise Lucky's rise to the Waldorf had
caused him to get into some scrapes. Ever since Lucky
had walked away from school, he was regularly in contact
with some of the underworld's most violent citizens, and not
just in Little.
Speaker 7 (19:47):
Italy, across the country, from New York to Chicago to
Detroit to San Francisco. These people were all on the
same page.
Speaker 2 (20:00):
And that page well.
Speaker 1 (20:03):
While units had been riding high on the socialized scene
in nineteen twenties Harlem Renaissance, Lucky and his contemporaries had
been getting rich supplying all the booze that had been
helping Harlem swing. This is the era of Prohibition, when
religious Zealous convinced the federal government to ban the production, sale,
(20:26):
and transportation of alcohol during the twenties.
Speaker 8 (20:29):
Prohibition is the best thing that ever happened to the
mob because we have something that is illegal, but for
which there's still a very active and consistent market.
Speaker 1 (20:42):
The government had created a gold mine for all kinds
of outlaws.
Speaker 9 (20:46):
Prohibition makes an entire sector of the economy, the booze sector,
illegal overnight. That means if you want a glass beer,
you're going to have to concert with criminals. All of
a sudden need now to be more criminals to provide
all this booze.
Speaker 1 (21:05):
Lucky isn't just any kind of outlaw. He has a
particular knack for making friends in useful places and keeping them.
Speaker 8 (21:15):
There's so many little stories, not even major things, but
there's just many stories of both men and women coming
in contact with him and singling him out for being
this very charismatic man.
Speaker 1 (21:28):
His experience of striving for more in multi ethnic Little
Italy has given him a special appreciation for working across
different gangs.
Speaker 8 (21:37):
He certainly wanted as much power for himself as possible,
but if it benefited him, he did not see any
problem with crossing ethnic lines.
Speaker 1 (21:48):
Lucky was able to make the kind of connections necessary
when sourcing booze from across the country.
Speaker 9 (21:53):
That's where you see the rise of modern organized crime
starting to work across state lines, across city line with
bosses beginning to collaborate. Because it's very expensive and very
difficult to move a lot of liquor, you need to
have really good connections.
Speaker 2 (22:12):
To supply.
Speaker 1 (22:12):
For example, a Harlem speakeasy where jazz pioneer Fletcher Henderson
might pop in to pass the time between sets. Maybe
he sweet talks a young legal student who stopped by
on her way home from her evening classes at the
Woolworth Building, so the rumor goes something to help them
(22:33):
both ignore that ring on her finger.
Speaker 8 (22:36):
Prohibition provides the opportunity for mobsters to become millionaires. Literally,
these are men in their twenties and thirties that are
making millions of dollars when the average salary is a
couple thousand dollars in the United States.
Speaker 1 (22:50):
And that's how Lucky came to be living it up,
riding high on the boozy wave of Prohibition, a wave
that sweeps him as high as the thirty ninth floor
of the Waldorf Astoria in nineteen thirty one. He's far
from done riding that wave, but all waves eventually break.
(23:14):
Lucky's existence in the early nineteen thirties isn't all high life. Yes,
there's the jewelry, the silk shirts, the opium parties, the showgirls,
but the scars that he sees on his face each
morning in the mirror are likely an unnecessary reminder. Lucky
operates in a high stakes business full of danger, death,
(23:37):
and betrayal. At the start of nineteen thirty one, there
are still those above Lucky in the mob food chain.
Because New York is reaching the climax of an especially
bloody mob feud, something that will be known as the Castella.
Speaker 2 (23:55):
Maes A War.
Speaker 1 (23:57):
Lucky is going to use that war to catapult himse
to the top of the underworld food chain and unbeknownst
to him, right into Eunice's orbit.
Speaker 2 (24:10):
So this Caste La Maries War.
Speaker 7 (24:12):
From nineteen thirty to nineteen thirty one, Lucky and many
of his brethren are fighting against each other in a
two pronged war between two would be mob bosses in
New York.
Speaker 1 (24:28):
Two prongs, two mob bosses, Joe Mazzaia and Salvatoria Marizano.
But you don't need to remember them. They're both about
to die. These two guys have been the main New
York mob powers for quite a while, so gangsters know,
if you're involved in crime in New York, you've generally
got to be kicking up some of your profits to
(24:50):
one of them.
Speaker 7 (24:51):
And Lucky he was working from Masorea and realized, as
did his brethren, Masoi was weak.
Speaker 1 (25:08):
On an April morning in nineteen thirty one, Lucky heads
over to Coney Island for a spot of lunch with
the boss Massaia. Legend has it he is at the
table when gunmen roll into the restaurant, aim their guns
at Joe Massaia and shoot, and.
Speaker 6 (25:29):
That ended the cast On Larrazi War.
Speaker 1 (25:35):
You might be wondering how Lucky made such a lucky escape.
From lunch that day. But don't worry, he actually organized
the whole assassination himself.
Speaker 6 (25:46):
Lucky Luciano agreed to kill Joe the Boss Massarea and
throw his lot in with Salvatory Marenzano.
Speaker 1 (25:53):
And now, in this act of Macavelian betrayal, Lucky Luciano
is an even more powerful mandebster. But he's not done there,
especially when word reaches him that luck might not last
with the new boss.
Speaker 7 (26:08):
Marenzano put a nail in his own coffin when he
wrote a list of all the people he wanted knocked off,
and on that list was Lucky Luciano.
Speaker 1 (26:20):
This mobster Marenzano had written down an actual hit list.
It doesn't seem like a very wise thing for a
wise guy to do. And in September nineteen thirty one,
Mafia lore says that associates of Lucky's disguised themselves as
treasury agents.
Speaker 7 (26:39):
They entered Maronzano's office, stabbed and shot him to death.
Speaker 1 (26:47):
Put yourself in lucky shoes. You've just portrayed your first boss,
and now the man you've done it for is journaling
about having you killed. He might not have felt he
had any choice. Left, but to take some kind of
action anyway. By the fall of nineteen thirty one, Lucky's
taken out two bosses of New York's underworld.
Speaker 6 (27:08):
When the smoke cleared in nineteen thirty one, Lucky Luciana
was a head of organized crime in New York.
Speaker 1 (27:16):
But then, according to gangster Laura again, Lucky is said
to do something even more ambitious, something that a million
mob movies and self claimed mob informants will refer back
to for decades to come.
Speaker 10 (27:31):
Luciano decided it's not very safe to be a boss
of bosses, because somehow you don't last very long in
that capacity.
Speaker 8 (27:40):
What he really does is he creates a board of directors.
Speaker 1 (27:45):
Lucky is said to have created something called the Commission.
He's going to be its head, a chairman of the
board of sorts.
Speaker 8 (27:54):
He structures it so that everything, yes, kind of has
to go through him, but also has to go through
every other leader.
Speaker 10 (28:03):
He developed a new job description for the boss of bosses,
Lucky Luciano.
Speaker 6 (28:09):
He's called the man who organized crime in America. For
that reason.
Speaker 1 (28:13):
That's how Lucky. We'll end up at the Waldorf Astoria
sleeping easily in his big featherbed each night. But remember
he is a mobster, and the quiet life can only
last for so long. Just a few years later, in
nineteen thirty one, as Unis sits in her Harlem law
(28:33):
office waiting for her next client to call with an
exciting will or mortgage application, alarm bells are going off
across organized crime in America.
Speaker 2 (28:45):
Prohibition is coming to an end.
Speaker 9 (28:48):
All of a sudden, This huge illegal economy just goes away,
and you have all these bootleggers looking around thinking, what's
our next opportunity? Where are we going to go? They're
not going to go get jobs in the insurance industry.
Speaker 1 (29:03):
It's time for Lucky and his crew to conjure up
some new ways to keep those silk shirts on their backs.
But these guys are professional opportunists, and all around they
see a world.
Speaker 2 (29:16):
Ripe for exploitation.
Speaker 1 (29:33):
If you'd been to most speakeasies or jazz clubs in
New York in the era of prohibition, you're likely to
have noticed a few consistent things. The music, of course,
free and flowing. This is the jazz age. After all,
there's the booze illegal. But thanks to the likes of
Lucky and his networks, just as free flowing as the
(29:54):
jazz around you. Then there's the crowd full of bright
light and inner people like Unice in her twenties and thirties,
cool and glamorous, but linger a little longer, look a
little closer, you might notice some others in the crowd,
maybe looking a little bit more world weary.
Speaker 9 (30:17):
You are at all interested in the jazz age, that
means you are probably interested in nightlife. It's like a
three legged stool. You gotta have music, you gotta have
some kind of stimulant, and you gotta have women. And
turns out there are not enough women to populate every
speakeasy and every jazz club, every dive in New York
(30:39):
City unless you pay them.
Speaker 1 (30:46):
Okay, so we're back in the late twenties now, Prohibition
is still in full swing, so to speak. Unice was
having a harder time that she's used to at law school,
and Lucky is still just a man on the way
up in the underworld. We're in a on the Upper
West Side, just a little farther downtown from the places
Unis frequence in Harlem. And to be honest, the place
(31:08):
we're in is it the kind of spot unis would
likely choose to visit anyway. Across the room sits a small,
pale woman with scarlet painted lips, or at least that's
how the papers will come.
Speaker 2 (31:19):
To describe her.
Speaker 1 (31:22):
Her name is Florence Newman or Florence Brown or Cokeie
Flow Brown or just Cokie Flow. I'm going to stick
with Cokeie Flow, and she's had a pretty rough journey
before arriving here this evening.
Speaker 9 (31:41):
There are, of course, vas swaths of women who are
in fact compelled, who are trafficked, who are manipulated or
beaten into being prostitutes. In many ways, it's a very difficult, stressful,
a dangerous job for a lot of people, but it
pays well and it can offer women amendous amount of autonomy.
Speaker 1 (32:01):
Koki Flow first came to New York in the nineteen twenties.
By the way of Cleveland, Ohio, and Duluth, Minnesota, haven't
been taken in by a businessman at just fifteen years old.
Speaker 2 (32:12):
By eighteen, Cooki Flow.
Speaker 1 (32:14):
Has moved on to become a mistress to three different
underworld figures.
Speaker 9 (32:18):
There are people who are using it just like a
stepping stone in their career.
Speaker 1 (32:21):
By the late nineteen twenties. She's in New York and
running her own brothels on the Upper east Side and
some across town.
Speaker 2 (32:28):
On the East Side, she operated as a madam.
Speaker 9 (32:32):
You could really find sex at every price point.
Speaker 1 (32:37):
If you're looking to buy sex. It's not just Cokie
flows houses that you want to consider. New York City
provides a world of options.
Speaker 9 (32:46):
There are top dollar joints. They were like high end
speakeasies where they have the best food and they have cooks,
so you could stop by anytime for a night cap
and some free food and top flight booth and you
could hang out. You could gamble. You could just come
and drink with your friends by backgammon with the madam
(33:07):
and maybe head off to the bedroom or maybe not.
Speaker 2 (33:09):
From there, you moved down the scale.
Speaker 9 (33:12):
There were ten dollar houses where you could show up
and it would be nice and you might get a
little rushed.
Speaker 2 (33:19):
And further down the scale two dollar houses where.
Speaker 9 (33:23):
They would actually have a ticket that you would wear
on your bathroom and as you service some man, the
housekeeper would click it so that at the end of
the night you would see how many people. And there
are women who were servicing thirty forty men a night,
they just move you through.
Speaker 1 (33:45):
Sex Workers in the twenties also face the new challenges
because across America a general atmosphere of unspoken tolerance towards
the profession is now turning sour.
Speaker 9 (33:58):
At the beginning of the two twentieth century, it was
still super common for young men to lose their virginity
in brothels. Most towns of any size had a red
light district where it wasn't legal, but it was sort
of tolerated. The problem comes for the people in the
business of the flesh trades around World War One, where
(34:20):
there is an uproar over prostitution gaining visibility. You got
all these young boys joining the military, going overseas and
going to brothels with all kinds of sexually transmitted diseases
and all kinds of bad habits, and so the government
feels like we cannot be having all these young men
(34:43):
bringing home sexually transmitted diseases and bringing shame upon our
war and our army. So they require any town that
hosts troops to shut down all of their red light districts.
Speaker 1 (34:56):
So by the early twenties, the madams running brothels, so
they have to be fairly discreet.
Speaker 9 (35:02):
Now, that doesn't mean there's no more prostitutes. They just
go under ground.
Speaker 1 (35:06):
You might meet a woman like Koki Flow and a
speak easy, but her trade is usually carried out from
somewhere else nearby.
Speaker 9 (35:13):
The women have to go into apartment buildings where they're
not going to be seen by cops as much, where
they're going to be able to hide.
Speaker 1 (35:20):
Just as people sell dinner plates or do hair from
their homes, there are some women who run sex work
operations out of these apartments. Think Airbnbs for sex. Scattered
across the city.
Speaker 9 (35:32):
There were just places where you could do whatever you
weren't supposed to be doing out in public. So that's
where you start to see the rise of the booker.
All you had to do is if you got a call,
you could say, okay, go to West seventy third Street.
The key is under the mat. There will be a
girl waiting for you, or there will be a girl
that arrives. In fact, real estate and prostitution are deeply intertwined.
(35:57):
One of the ways you could be sure to both
fill upon artment buildings during economic downturns and get top
dollar for them is by renting them to madams and prostitutes.
They would often pay triple. It also meant that your
superintendent was going to get a bribe, because it's very
hard to keep that secret. Your doorman would often get
(36:19):
a bribe. This is the era when elevators were not automated,
so there would usually be an elevator operator who would
usually get a bribe. So it was an expensive business
to be a madam actually, but it was a lucrative
business if you were a landlord.
Speaker 1 (36:34):
And it's not just dorman, superintendents, elevator operators, and landlords
with their hands out taking money from sex workers during
the twenties. A specific kind of organized criminal is taking
money from them too.
Speaker 9 (36:48):
It is, in fact, the government entities the vice ring
of the nineteen twenties, which is not dominated by criminals.
It's not dominated by syndicated c that got other things
to do that are far more profitable. It's a ring
between the lawyers, the cops, the judges, and the girls.
(37:09):
It is the law who are bleeding the prostitutes dry.
Speaker 1 (37:13):
But as we move into the early thirties, as lucky
as playing both sides in the Castela Maries a war,
something surprising happens. A whole bunch of these corrupt officials,
the judges and cops profiting off the sex workers, start.
Speaker 2 (37:29):
To get arrested.
Speaker 1 (37:31):
City Hall tries to clean house as part of sweeping
anti corruption drives. It doesn't end corruption in New York politics,
far from it, but it does have an impact on
sex work, and it means that at the start of
the thirties Koki flow in her colleagues into their own
strange kind of golden age.
Speaker 9 (37:51):
Those early years in the thirties are kind of a
free for all and a great time to be running
a house of prostitution because nobody's harassing you from the
vice squad. The dirty judges have been mostly kicked out.
Speaker 1 (38:03):
But remember this is nineteen thirties America, and a woman
run unexploited industry was never going to last.
Speaker 9 (38:12):
When prohibition ends, everything changes. You have all these bootleggers
who are looking around thinking what's our next opportunity? Where
are we going to go? So the first thing they
do is they say, let's get in on this booking business.
Speaker 1 (38:28):
On the southern side of East Manhattan, you'll find Mott Street.
It's a narrow, bustling thoroughfare. One of the streets where
Lucky Luciano grew up, and by the end of prohibition
it's the headquarters of Italian organized crime. These headquarters are
run on Lucky's behalf by a bunch of well characters.
Speaker 9 (38:53):
Real scumbags, if I may say so.
Speaker 1 (38:56):
These gangsters from Mott Street were creatively known as the
Mott Street Boys.
Speaker 9 (39:01):
Who had been working for Lucky Luciana for years, running
the liquor exchange, busting' heads, dealing drugs, whatever was profitable.
Speaker 1 (39:10):
The Mott Street Boys are led by a mid level
mob enforcer.
Speaker 9 (39:14):
A guy named Tommy the Bold Pinocchio.
Speaker 1 (39:17):
And at the start of nineteen thirty four, when the
Mott Street Boys and other former bootleggers are still scratching
their heads for new ways of making money post Prohibition,
it's Tommy the Bull who has the bright idea.
Speaker 9 (39:29):
Tommy thinks, look, there's a whole untapped industry here that
we could begin to shake down.
Speaker 1 (39:34):
An industry that does not seem to be suffering. Despite
New York being in the midst of the Great Depression.
Speaker 9 (39:43):
The taste for brothels and for prostitutes did not decline.
Speaker 1 (39:46):
The mob hasn't had much of a connection to that trade.
Before at this point, because sex work is a bit
of a cottage industry.
Speaker 9 (39:53):
Individual women servicing individual men.
Speaker 1 (39:57):
But the Mott Street Boys have an idea a way
for scaling up their involvement across lots of sex work operations.
They start busting up brothels and once inside they give
those businesses an offer they can't refuse to use their
money as a kind of protection racket for the sex
workers in case of trouble with the law.
Speaker 9 (40:18):
That is to say, pooling money to get women out
of jail when they get arrested, and that certainly helps
and you can have it. In terms of booking talent.
Speaker 1 (40:27):
These bookers have become a crucial component to the way
sex work in this era operates.
Speaker 9 (40:32):
Prostitution bookers would treat it like a talent agency where
they had a roster of girls that they would send
out to different brothels around the city.
Speaker 1 (40:42):
But as well as connecting the sex workers with customers,
bookers provide another service.
Speaker 9 (40:47):
The women pay the booker ten bucks a week and
then if you get arrested, he'll come bail you out.
Speaker 1 (40:53):
So now Mott Street Boys are going to run the
bookers and the sex workers.
Speaker 9 (41:00):
They begin to encounter problems almost as soon as they start.
Most of the women did not want to work with
Tommy the Bull and his gang as thugs, and it's.
Speaker 1 (41:09):
Not like sex workers have much spare money to start
handing out for this mob protection.
Speaker 8 (41:14):
They worked twelve hour days, six days a week. They
pocketed about forty dollars out of their roughly two hundred
dollars in weekly earnings.
Speaker 2 (41:23):
But what choice do they really have?
Speaker 1 (41:26):
So the mob moves in and brings an end to
that ever so brief golden age of sex work. Under
the new system, the men working as bookers are making
money from the sex workers and the madams, but not
as much as those at the top of the tree,
men like Luciano, who demand a cut of all the profits.
(41:50):
Sex work is not the only industry noticing an increased
mob presence since the fall of Prohibition. As New York
moves into the mid thirties, this model of diversification grows
and grows, and who was going to stop it?
Speaker 6 (42:04):
Many suspected, as was the case, that New York politics
were deeply corrupted by organized crime.
Speaker 1 (42:12):
Why were the police so ineffective when it came to
curbing some of this organized crime?
Speaker 2 (42:20):
Violence.
Speaker 11 (42:22):
I got. The first thing to do if you're going
to be a good criminal is to start doing something
with the police.
Speaker 1 (42:28):
The mob is on the move across New York, which
meant Harlem as well.
Speaker 2 (42:35):
I imagine for unis.
Speaker 1 (42:36):
Part of Harlem's appeal is the community, the glitz, and
the people. But the mob, of course has more nefarious motivations,
especially when it comes to an industry.
Speaker 2 (42:48):
My own family knows.
Speaker 1 (42:49):
A thing or two about that's coming up in episode
four of The Godmother. On this episode of The Godmother,
you heard Carolyn Johnson, my Harlem tour guide.
Speaker 3 (43:09):
Welcome to Harlem. That's the name of my company.
Speaker 2 (43:11):
I'm still My name is Leah Carter.
Speaker 4 (43:14):
I am Eunice Carter's great granddaughter. Her son. Lyle is
my dad's father. Unis influenced my grandfather, and he influenced
my dad, and my dad influenced me. Now that I
have a grand unified theory of that exactly.
Speaker 5 (43:28):
I'm Marilyn Greenwald. I'm a professor Emerita of journalism at
Ohio University, and I'm the author of five biographies, including
one of Eunice Hunting Carter.
Speaker 6 (43:37):
My name is Chuck Greeves. Before becoming a writer. I
spent twenty five years as a Los Angeles trial lawyer.
My fourth novel was basically a fictionalization of the famous
nineteen thirty six vice trial, in which Luckily Chiana was
prosecuted by Thomas Dewey.
Speaker 7 (43:56):
My name is Christian Sipollini and I am an author
and a historian with a specialty in the fields of
true crime, organized crime, and cartel history.
Speaker 8 (44:08):
I am Claire White and I am the director of
education at the Mob Museum in downtown Las Vegas. I
grew up in Las Vegas, which kind of gives me
a leg up in that regard.
Speaker 9 (44:20):
I'm Debbie Applegate. I'm a historian and biographer, and I
am the author of Madam, The Biography of Polyadler Icon
of the Jazz Age.
Speaker 3 (44:30):
Hi.
Speaker 9 (44:30):
My name is Ellen Paulson.
Speaker 10 (44:33):
I research and I write books about criminal acts and
devis that took place during the nineteen thirties in the
United States, and my focus so far has been women
who were involved with notorious gangsters and desperadoes.
Speaker 2 (44:52):
My name is Leshawn Harris.
Speaker 1 (44:54):
I am an associate professor of history at Michigan State
University in the Department of.
Speaker 11 (45:00):
My name is Robert Whalen, and I'm an Emerathus professor
of History at Queen's University of Charlotte here in Charlotte,
North Carolina. And I've written on both European and American history.
I suppose the most relevant book is what I published
on a Murder Incorporated, which involved people like Thomas Dewey
(45:21):
and Junis Carter and so forth.
Speaker 1 (45:28):
The Godmother is produced by Novel for iHeartRadio. For more
from novel, visit novel dot Audio. The Godmother is hosted
and written by me Nicole Perkins. Our producer is Leona Hamid.
Additional production from Ajuajima Broumpong, Ronald Young Junior and Ziana Yusuf.
(45:48):
Our editor is Ajua Jima Broumpong. Additional story editing from
Max O'Brien and Mitha Lee Raw and our researcher is
Ziana Yusuf. Additional research from Mohammed Ahmed. David wa Is
our executive producer. Field production by Tnito Romani and Pallas Shaw.
Sound design, mixing and scoring by Nicholas Alexander and Daniel Kempsen.
(46:11):
Our score was written, performed and recorded by Jeff Parker
Music supervision by Nicholas Alexander and David Waters. Production management
and endless Patients from Sharie Houston, Sarah Tobin and Charlotte Wolfe.
Fact checking by Fendel Fulton and Dania Suleiman. Story development
by Madeline Parr, Jess Swinburne Aseana Yusuf. Willard Foxton is
(46:35):
our Creative Director of Development. Special thanks to Leah Carter,
Stephen Carter, Angela J. Davis, Andrew Fernley, Marilyn Greenwald, Sondra Lebedy,
Katherine Godfrey, Nadia Maidie, Amalia Sortland, Sean Glenn, Neil Krishnan,
Julia Bromberg, Katrina Norvel, Carly Frankel, and all the team
(46:59):
at Day w Emmy
Speaker 2 (47:09):
Novel
Novel before we begin, a content warning the following episode
contains difficult themes and violence. After making sure my little
brother gets on his bus, I walk a couple of
(00:27):
blocks up the hill to wait on mine. It's the
fall of nineteen eighty three and I'm heading into the
first grade throughout elementary school. Neighborhood. Friends and I meet
at the driveway of some stranger's house to keep an
eye out for the big yellow school bus that will
take us through Nashville.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
For the next four years.
Speaker 1 (00:50):
I always sit next to the window so I can
see the city go by. The morning journey starts in
North Nashville, near Jefferson Street, a black historic neighborhood. The
bus snakes through the streets of quiet homes where you
just knew someone's grandparents lived. There are chairs on front porches,
no matter how small, and carefully wild bushes of roses
(01:12):
or honeysuckle or whatever, bright colorful flowers bloom when it's
their time. Instead of taking the forty interstate that had
devastated the neighborhood with its arrival in the nineteen sixties,
the bus bounces over railroad tracks into the west side
of Nashville until we arrive in Sylvan Park, a white
part of town. The deeper we go, the denser the
(01:36):
trees grow, blocking the sun. Not in a menacing way,
in an undisturbed way. The houses range from quaint to
gingerbread to many country castles, and it's clear no one
is sending an inner state through this neighborhood. As the
bus glides into position in front of my elementary school,
(01:59):
I steal myself.
Speaker 2 (02:00):
For the day ahead.
Speaker 1 (02:02):
Inside I'll be separated from my bus friends and become
the only black girl in whatever they called gifted classes.
Back then, I only see my black friends at lunch
and pe and then again in the afternoon on the bus.
Speaker 2 (02:15):
Ride back to North Nashville.
Speaker 1 (02:19):
When I became an adult, I realized I'd been part
of a long term bussing program to help desegregate schools
in Nashville. The rhythms of my daily school year routine,
the long winding bus journey, days split between black friends
and family and white classmates and teachers, were all part
of a bigger political project to address a deep legacy
(02:42):
of discrimination and segregation. And though I didn't quite realize
it at the time, I was learning not just about multiplications, spelling,
and how to write incursive. I was also absorbing lessons
about what it meant to succeed as a black girl
in America. What was expected of you, what lines and
(03:04):
worlds you had to carefully walk between. When I started
working on this podcast, I recognized this part of myself
in Unice Carter, the need to be respectable, to be
able to move in white spaces. When we last left Unis,
(03:25):
she had been dreaming of making an impact and had
decided the law was the place she was going to
do that. By nineteen twenty eight, Unice left her writing
and the Harlem renaissance behind. When I was separated from
my black friends in school for advanced classes, I did
not enjoy being the only black person or the only
black girl in the room. I wondered if being singled
(03:49):
out for her intelligence and ambition was important to Unis
as she separated herself from her parents' legacy and the
rest of her community in Harlem. It seems like she
wanted more for herself, But did she worry what would
happen if she failed. I'm Nicole Perkins and from the
(04:09):
teams at iHeartRadio and novel This Is the Godmother, Episode three,
(04:40):
Breaking through.
Speaker 3 (04:49):
The gold past a point out where a lot of
the like clubs were compass saying Phillips the Priscopal Church reading.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
During my walking tour of Harlem, one of the stops
my guide was most excited to show me was Seventh Avenue.
Speaker 3 (05:03):
One of start going down Seventh Avenue. Okay, we can
go by what Billie Holliday was discovered. We can go
to the home of Langston News. We'll cut across p
the avenue, go, of course of rankin Newser's house.
Speaker 1 (05:20):
At the height of the Harlem Renaissance, Seventh Avenue was
the scene of some of its best night life, and
just a few blocks south of Seventh Avenue and one
hundred and thirty fifth Street was.
Speaker 2 (05:31):
This large elm tree.
Speaker 1 (05:34):
It had grown there for decades, and it was nicknamed
the Tree of Hope.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
Or the Wishing Tree.
Speaker 1 (05:40):
It gave Seventh Avenue the name the Boulevard of Dreams.
The story is that one day one of Harlem's actors
stood underneath this elm tree wishing for a job, and
then a producer walked up to offer him one. In
nineteen thirty three, America is firmly in the midst of
the Great Depression, passers by are touching that elm tree
(06:03):
for good luck, placing their hands on this trunk, wishing
for work, and wonder if Eunice was superstitious at all,
if she ever made a wish on the tree trunk
as she passed by. Six years have passed since we
last saw Unice. As she's looking for somewhere to hang
the shingle for her own private law practice. She'd settled
(06:25):
on an office just a little way down from the
Tree of Hope. She'd graduated law school and passed the bar.
For all intentsive purposes, she'd succeeded in her plan to
escape a more traditional life as housewife and social life.
But if some of that elmtree luck rubbed off on
Unis her first couple of years as a private practice
attorney do not show it. It was a far cry
(06:49):
from what she imagined for herself when she entered law school. First,
let's go back in time a little bit to Eunice
Hunting Carter arriving at the Woolworth Building downtown Manhattan on
a bright September day in nineteen twenty seven. The Woolworth
(07:10):
Building at two thirty three Broadway is glamorous and Gothic
imagine Westminster Abbey, but slicker and as a skyscraper.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
It's got a cathedral like.
Speaker 1 (07:23):
Presence, all fifty eight floors looming over the city. Eunice
enters the lobby that day, full of hope and with
an ambitious plan. She needs to navigate her way out
of the monotony facing her. She's not just a writer
or a housewife and mother. She's not just missus Lyle Carter.
(07:47):
She is more, or at least she plans to be.
As Unice steps into that lobby for the first time,
she is surrounded by intricate gold latticework, mosaics, glossy marble stone,
shafts of light filtering through lead light windows. When she
(08:12):
enters the elevator, an attendant dings the button that will
take her up to the twenty seventh and twenty eighth floor.
Speaker 2 (08:20):
Fordham Law School.
Speaker 1 (08:24):
There's a library, three large classrooms, some offices for the
dean and the registrar. There's a smoking room, and the
most spectacular view the New York City skyline. It's around
six o'clock in the evening, long shadows cast by the
(08:47):
setting sun on the west side.
Speaker 4 (08:52):
She was attending at night while still working as a
social worker. A lot of law schools made it difficult
to attend if you were working or had other obligations.
So women, black people, Jewish people, Catholics. Bar was trying
to keep all these people out of the practice of law,
and so Fordham was trying to be more inclusive by
allowing people to attend night classes.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
Eunice's decision to attend law school probably came with considerable debate.
She had a toddler at home, a perfectly good career
under her belt already. Eunice's own mother, Addie, preached that
the best place for a black woman was by her
husband's side at home, not gallivanting around Manhattan at night.
(09:35):
A masterclass example of the do as I say, not
as I do lifestyle, Unice strikes me as a stubborn woman,
and as a stubborn woman myself, I wouldn't be surprised
if all the possible backlash against her decision made her
even more determined to earn her law degree. I'm sure
(09:56):
there were plenty of people who doubted her ability to
succeed her classmates. Is she stared at as she makes
her way to class do her peers wonder whether she
strolled in by accident.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
She probably got that a lot in her life.
Speaker 1 (10:12):
Surprised at seeing her in predominantly white spaces. I wonder
if anyone accused her of cheating, or how many times
she remained quiet so no one thought she was trying
to prove herself better than everyone else. Maybe she had
her own doubts. As smart and determined as she is,
She's only human despite it all. During that first term
(10:35):
at Fordham in nineteen twenty seven, Unice's marks are unsurprisingly good.
Speaker 4 (10:41):
She liked the study of law a lot, found it
very interesting. She was very detail oriented.
Speaker 5 (10:46):
Eunice's forte was doing you know, research, and she kind
of excelled in going through documents.
Speaker 1 (10:54):
But she's not at Fordham too long when clouds appear
on the horizon and things start to slide to the left.
In her second year at Fordham, Unice takes a sabbatical. Publicly,
she tells people that it's because she's sick. Later she
would say it was actually her son, Lyle Carter Junior
(11:15):
who was ill. But there's some historical speculation over this.
From everything I know about Unice, the idea of her
taking a break from law school seems unusual. Maybe the
loneliness of being the only black person and the sea
of white men was getting to her. The only reason
I question it is that she wasn't even resting during
(11:37):
that time off.
Speaker 4 (11:40):
And even during her time off for illness, she was
working still political activism and campaigning.
Speaker 1 (11:47):
This is Unice's first foray into politics. She's working on
the campaigns of some Republican candidates. That was probably as
much of an education as law school. Unice's leave of
absence was eighteen months, but something must have drawn her
back because eventually she returns to her evening studies. She
doesn't have the kind of instant success she's probably used to.
Speaker 4 (12:11):
So she did fail the bar exam the first time
that she took it and had to retake it and
passed on the second.
Speaker 1 (12:17):
Try to be fair to Unice, her exam was on mortgages,
so she might have had trouble staying awake. In the end,
she does finally pass her exams. Between her education law
school and her foray into politics, Unice has to recognize
(12:37):
a theme. She's often the only black woman in white,
male dominated spaces. Is this what she thought she had
to deal with in order to be at the top.
In nineteen thirty three, Unice becomes one of the first
black female qualified lawyers in New York. But what has
she sacrificed of herself to get there? Walking along the
(13:04):
Boulevard of Dreams, past the Tree of Hope and towards
her small private practice office in Harlem, Unice would have
been carrying the weight of the decisions she'd made. To
be a trailblazer sometimes means being so far ahead you
end up alone.
Speaker 2 (13:23):
So when she.
Speaker 1 (13:23):
Does finally open up her business, things were pretty slow.
There are no professional accolades and finalizing wills. No one
is going to write an article about her for handling
misdemeanor charges. It's not exactly prestigious work. Unice may have
been a lawyer, but she wasn't exactly setting the world
(13:47):
of law on fire.
Speaker 2 (13:49):
But she sticks with us for nearly two years.
Speaker 1 (13:54):
Did she ever worry she had flung herself in the
wrong direction? Did she have too much pride to turn
and back? Had she sacrificed too much to retrace her steps?
I know I've made some decisions that made me question
if I'd made the right move, But I kept moving forward.
Sometimes that's the only way to shake off self doubt.
(14:15):
This must have been the quote tale of long dark
years she'd imagined for others when she wrote that essay
of hers about blazing trails and breaking through. While she's
struggling to break through on her path, Eunice's former neighbor
from her Brooklyn childhood, Lucky Luciano, is succeeding beyond his
(14:37):
wildest dreams. He had chosen a very different route up
the mountain. Okay, so when we last left legendary New
(15:01):
York mobster Lucky Luciano, he was graduating too, through the
layers of the New York underworld hierarchy and in the twenties,
as Units had been making her way in Harlem during
her years as a czarina and social climber, Lucky was
doing a similar thing, making new friends, new friends with
(15:24):
a certain status.
Speaker 6 (15:26):
They called him the Broadway mob. Frank Costello, Myra Lansky,
Benny Siegel.
Speaker 1 (15:30):
Hip hop heads and fans of gangster movies alike should
recognize these names in a heartbeat. Lucky's new associates have
traveled through time to become some of the most well
known mobsters ever.
Speaker 6 (15:42):
What distinguished Lucky's Broadway mob from a lot of other
gangs was that it was multi ethnic. Mayra Lansky was Jewish,
Benny Siegel was Jewish, Frank Costello was Italian. Unlike his
old fashioned mafia predecessors, what he called the old mustache beats.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
By the nineteen thirties, Lucky and his crew are serious
players in the world of New York crime. And in
nineteen thirty one, as Unice is arriving downtown at the
Woolworth Building each evening, struggling to finish law school, Lucky
is finding.
Speaker 2 (16:14):
Things a little easier.
Speaker 1 (16:17):
Soon He's headed out each evening from an equally impressive
Manhattan address, the Waldorf Astoria, the largest and tallest hotel
in the world. This is Lucky Luciano's new home. Those
who catch a glimpse of him riding down the elevator
from his thirty ninth floor suite and walking confidently through
(16:37):
the luxurious lobby will see an almost unrecognizable figure. He's
no longer the scruffy street urchin from Little Italy.
Speaker 7 (16:46):
Lucky Luciano was known for silk underwear. Silk shirts, never
a suit off the rack, always tailored. Pinky ring in particular,
was gold The shoes were always, of course, Italian leather.
(17:07):
If they would wear a fedora, it was usually some
expensive fur.
Speaker 1 (17:12):
Everything from head to toe, especially tailored.
Speaker 7 (17:16):
This was the general dress of the guys that quote
unquote made it. Yes, there was vanity. Some could argue
it was narcissism.
Speaker 2 (17:26):
But there was more to it than that.
Speaker 7 (17:30):
They didn't want to look like gangsters. They wanted to
look like upstanding, high society citizens. They want to look
like the Rockefellers.
Speaker 1 (17:44):
Eunice and Lucky Luciano. Their journey to respectability is quite similar.
Unis uses education and class status. Lucky uses a tailored
and expensive wardrobe to prove himself, and for now, at least,
Lucky's methods seem to be the ones getting results.
Speaker 7 (18:04):
It was New York high life, if there ever was one.
Traveled in the best cars, dined in the finest restaurants,
hobnobbed with celebrities, living high up in the Waldorf Astoria,
all the best trappings, the best parties.
Speaker 1 (18:22):
For extra protection, he now uses bodyguards and uses frequent aliases.
But not all of Lucky's physical changes since those days
when he and Unice were kids in Brooklyn are deliberate
He's had his own years of struggle too. Just a
few years before he came to live at the.
Speaker 7 (18:42):
Astoria, Lucky Luciano was abducted, taken to Staten Island, beaten up, scarred, bleeding,
passed out, and tossed out on a beach.
Speaker 2 (18:55):
Abducted by police, so the story goes.
Speaker 7 (18:58):
The reason they were beating him up, according to Lucky Luccianum,
is they wanted information on a criminal who was more
infamous than he was at that time. He wouldn't give
it up, so they beat the hell out of him.
Speaker 1 (19:15):
So by nineteen thirty one, Lucky's appearances also marked by
scars that line his face and a droopy eye.
Speaker 7 (19:23):
From that moment on, the mythology of Lucky Lucciano's scars
was born.
Speaker 1 (19:29):
You can't make an omelet without cracking a few eggs,
and it's no surprise Lucky's rise to the Waldorf had
caused him to get into some scrapes. Ever since Lucky
had walked away from school, he was regularly in contact
with some of the underworld's most violent citizens, and not
just in Little.
Speaker 7 (19:47):
Italy, across the country, from New York to Chicago to
Detroit to San Francisco. These people were all on the
same page.
Speaker 2 (20:00):
And that page well.
Speaker 1 (20:03):
While units had been riding high on the socialized scene
in nineteen twenties Harlem Renaissance, Lucky and his contemporaries had
been getting rich supplying all the booze that had been
helping Harlem swing. This is the era of Prohibition, when
religious Zealous convinced the federal government to ban the production, sale,
(20:26):
and transportation of alcohol during the twenties.
Speaker 8 (20:29):
Prohibition is the best thing that ever happened to the
mob because we have something that is illegal, but for
which there's still a very active and consistent market.
Speaker 1 (20:42):
The government had created a gold mine for all kinds
of outlaws.
Speaker 9 (20:46):
Prohibition makes an entire sector of the economy, the booze sector,
illegal overnight. That means if you want a glass beer,
you're going to have to concert with criminals. All of
a sudden need now to be more criminals to provide
all this booze.
Speaker 1 (21:05):
Lucky isn't just any kind of outlaw. He has a
particular knack for making friends in useful places and keeping them.
Speaker 8 (21:15):
There's so many little stories, not even major things, but
there's just many stories of both men and women coming
in contact with him and singling him out for being
this very charismatic man.
Speaker 1 (21:28):
His experience of striving for more in multi ethnic Little
Italy has given him a special appreciation for working across
different gangs.
Speaker 8 (21:37):
He certainly wanted as much power for himself as possible,
but if it benefited him, he did not see any
problem with crossing ethnic lines.
Speaker 1 (21:48):
Lucky was able to make the kind of connections necessary
when sourcing booze from across the country.
Speaker 9 (21:53):
That's where you see the rise of modern organized crime
starting to work across state lines, across city line with
bosses beginning to collaborate. Because it's very expensive and very
difficult to move a lot of liquor, you need to
have really good connections.
Speaker 2 (22:12):
To supply.
Speaker 1 (22:12):
For example, a Harlem speakeasy where jazz pioneer Fletcher Henderson
might pop in to pass the time between sets. Maybe
he sweet talks a young legal student who stopped by
on her way home from her evening classes at the
Woolworth Building, so the rumor goes something to help them
(22:33):
both ignore that ring on her finger.
Speaker 8 (22:36):
Prohibition provides the opportunity for mobsters to become millionaires. Literally,
these are men in their twenties and thirties that are
making millions of dollars when the average salary is a
couple thousand dollars in the United States.
Speaker 1 (22:50):
And that's how Lucky came to be living it up,
riding high on the boozy wave of Prohibition, a wave
that sweeps him as high as the thirty ninth floor
of the Waldorf Astoria in nineteen thirty one. He's far
from done riding that wave, but all waves eventually break.
(23:14):
Lucky's existence in the early nineteen thirties isn't all high life. Yes,
there's the jewelry, the silk shirts, the opium parties, the showgirls,
but the scars that he sees on his face each
morning in the mirror are likely an unnecessary reminder. Lucky
operates in a high stakes business full of danger, death,
(23:37):
and betrayal. At the start of nineteen thirty one, there
are still those above Lucky in the mob food chain.
Because New York is reaching the climax of an especially
bloody mob feud, something that will be known as the Castella.
Speaker 2 (23:55):
Maes A War.
Speaker 1 (23:57):
Lucky is going to use that war to catapult himse
to the top of the underworld food chain and unbeknownst
to him, right into Eunice's orbit.
Speaker 2 (24:10):
So this Caste La Maries War.
Speaker 7 (24:12):
From nineteen thirty to nineteen thirty one, Lucky and many
of his brethren are fighting against each other in a
two pronged war between two would be mob bosses in
New York.
Speaker 1 (24:28):
Two prongs, two mob bosses, Joe Mazzaia and Salvatoria Marizano.
But you don't need to remember them. They're both about
to die. These two guys have been the main New
York mob powers for quite a while, so gangsters know,
if you're involved in crime in New York, you've generally
got to be kicking up some of your profits to
(24:50):
one of them.
Speaker 7 (24:51):
And Lucky he was working from Masorea and realized, as
did his brethren, Masoi was weak.
Speaker 1 (25:08):
On an April morning in nineteen thirty one, Lucky heads
over to Coney Island for a spot of lunch with
the boss Massaia. Legend has it he is at the
table when gunmen roll into the restaurant, aim their guns
at Joe Massaia and shoot, and.
Speaker 6 (25:29):
That ended the cast On Larrazi War.
Speaker 1 (25:35):
You might be wondering how Lucky made such a lucky escape.
From lunch that day. But don't worry, he actually organized
the whole assassination himself.
Speaker 6 (25:46):
Lucky Luciano agreed to kill Joe the Boss Massarea and
throw his lot in with Salvatory Marenzano.
Speaker 1 (25:53):
And now, in this act of Macavelian betrayal, Lucky Luciano
is an even more powerful mandebster. But he's not done there,
especially when word reaches him that luck might not last
with the new boss.
Speaker 7 (26:08):
Marenzano put a nail in his own coffin when he
wrote a list of all the people he wanted knocked off,
and on that list was Lucky Luciano.
Speaker 1 (26:20):
This mobster Marenzano had written down an actual hit list.
It doesn't seem like a very wise thing for a
wise guy to do. And in September nineteen thirty one,
Mafia lore says that associates of Lucky's disguised themselves as
treasury agents.
Speaker 7 (26:39):
They entered Maronzano's office, stabbed and shot him to death.
Speaker 1 (26:47):
Put yourself in lucky shoes. You've just portrayed your first boss,
and now the man you've done it for is journaling
about having you killed. He might not have felt he
had any choice. Left, but to take some kind of
action anyway. By the fall of nineteen thirty one, Lucky's
taken out two bosses of New York's underworld.
Speaker 6 (27:08):
When the smoke cleared in nineteen thirty one, Lucky Luciana
was a head of organized crime in New York.
Speaker 1 (27:16):
But then, according to gangster Laura again, Lucky is said
to do something even more ambitious, something that a million
mob movies and self claimed mob informants will refer back
to for decades to come.
Speaker 10 (27:31):
Luciano decided it's not very safe to be a boss
of bosses, because somehow you don't last very long in
that capacity.
Speaker 8 (27:40):
What he really does is he creates a board of directors.
Speaker 1 (27:45):
Lucky is said to have created something called the Commission.
He's going to be its head, a chairman of the
board of sorts.
Speaker 8 (27:54):
He structures it so that everything, yes, kind of has
to go through him, but also has to go through
every other leader.
Speaker 10 (28:03):
He developed a new job description for the boss of bosses,
Lucky Luciano.
Speaker 6 (28:09):
He's called the man who organized crime in America. For
that reason.
Speaker 1 (28:13):
That's how Lucky. We'll end up at the Waldorf Astoria
sleeping easily in his big featherbed each night. But remember
he is a mobster, and the quiet life can only
last for so long. Just a few years later, in
nineteen thirty one, as Unis sits in her Harlem law
(28:33):
office waiting for her next client to call with an
exciting will or mortgage application, alarm bells are going off
across organized crime in America.
Speaker 2 (28:45):
Prohibition is coming to an end.
Speaker 9 (28:48):
All of a sudden, This huge illegal economy just goes away,
and you have all these bootleggers looking around thinking, what's
our next opportunity? Where are we going to go? They're
not going to go get jobs in the insurance industry.
Speaker 1 (29:03):
It's time for Lucky and his crew to conjure up
some new ways to keep those silk shirts on their backs.
But these guys are professional opportunists, and all around they
see a world.
Speaker 2 (29:16):
Ripe for exploitation.
Speaker 1 (29:33):
If you'd been to most speakeasies or jazz clubs in
New York in the era of prohibition, you're likely to
have noticed a few consistent things. The music, of course,
free and flowing. This is the jazz age. After all,
there's the booze illegal. But thanks to the likes of
Lucky and his networks, just as free flowing as the
(29:54):
jazz around you. Then there's the crowd full of bright
light and inner people like Unice in her twenties and thirties,
cool and glamorous, but linger a little longer, look a
little closer, you might notice some others in the crowd,
maybe looking a little bit more world weary.
Speaker 9 (30:17):
You are at all interested in the jazz age, that
means you are probably interested in nightlife. It's like a
three legged stool. You gotta have music, you gotta have
some kind of stimulant, and you gotta have women. And
turns out there are not enough women to populate every
speakeasy and every jazz club, every dive in New York
(30:39):
City unless you pay them.
Speaker 1 (30:46):
Okay, so we're back in the late twenties now, Prohibition
is still in full swing, so to speak. Unice was
having a harder time that she's used to at law school,
and Lucky is still just a man on the way
up in the underworld. We're in a on the Upper
West Side, just a little farther downtown from the places
Unis frequence in Harlem. And to be honest, the place
(31:08):
we're in is it the kind of spot unis would
likely choose to visit anyway. Across the room sits a small,
pale woman with scarlet painted lips, or at least that's
how the papers will come.
Speaker 2 (31:19):
To describe her.
Speaker 1 (31:22):
Her name is Florence Newman or Florence Brown or Cokeie
Flow Brown or just Cokie Flow. I'm going to stick
with Cokeie Flow, and she's had a pretty rough journey
before arriving here this evening.
Speaker 9 (31:41):
There are, of course, vas swaths of women who are
in fact compelled, who are trafficked, who are manipulated or
beaten into being prostitutes. In many ways, it's a very difficult, stressful,
a dangerous job for a lot of people, but it
pays well and it can offer women amendous amount of autonomy.
Speaker 1 (32:01):
Koki Flow first came to New York in the nineteen twenties.
By the way of Cleveland, Ohio, and Duluth, Minnesota, haven't
been taken in by a businessman at just fifteen years old.
Speaker 2 (32:12):
By eighteen, Cooki Flow.
Speaker 1 (32:14):
Has moved on to become a mistress to three different
underworld figures.
Speaker 9 (32:18):
There are people who are using it just like a
stepping stone in their career.
Speaker 1 (32:21):
By the late nineteen twenties. She's in New York and
running her own brothels on the Upper east Side and
some across town.
Speaker 2 (32:28):
On the East Side, she operated as a madam.
Speaker 9 (32:32):
You could really find sex at every price point.
Speaker 1 (32:37):
If you're looking to buy sex. It's not just Cokie
flows houses that you want to consider. New York City
provides a world of options.
Speaker 9 (32:46):
There are top dollar joints. They were like high end
speakeasies where they have the best food and they have cooks,
so you could stop by anytime for a night cap
and some free food and top flight booth and you
could hang out. You could gamble. You could just come
and drink with your friends by backgammon with the madam
(33:07):
and maybe head off to the bedroom or maybe not.
Speaker 2 (33:09):
From there, you moved down the scale.
Speaker 9 (33:12):
There were ten dollar houses where you could show up
and it would be nice and you might get a
little rushed.
Speaker 2 (33:19):
And further down the scale two dollar houses where.
Speaker 9 (33:23):
They would actually have a ticket that you would wear
on your bathroom and as you service some man, the
housekeeper would click it so that at the end of
the night you would see how many people. And there
are women who were servicing thirty forty men a night,
they just move you through.
Speaker 1 (33:45):
Sex Workers in the twenties also face the new challenges
because across America a general atmosphere of unspoken tolerance towards
the profession is now turning sour.
Speaker 9 (33:58):
At the beginning of the two twentieth century, it was
still super common for young men to lose their virginity
in brothels. Most towns of any size had a red
light district where it wasn't legal, but it was sort
of tolerated. The problem comes for the people in the
business of the flesh trades around World War One, where
(34:20):
there is an uproar over prostitution gaining visibility. You got
all these young boys joining the military, going overseas and
going to brothels with all kinds of sexually transmitted diseases
and all kinds of bad habits, and so the government
feels like we cannot be having all these young men
(34:43):
bringing home sexually transmitted diseases and bringing shame upon our
war and our army. So they require any town that
hosts troops to shut down all of their red light districts.
Speaker 1 (34:56):
So by the early twenties, the madams running brothels, so
they have to be fairly discreet.
Speaker 9 (35:02):
Now, that doesn't mean there's no more prostitutes. They just
go under ground.
Speaker 1 (35:06):
You might meet a woman like Koki Flow and a
speak easy, but her trade is usually carried out from
somewhere else nearby.
Speaker 9 (35:13):
The women have to go into apartment buildings where they're
not going to be seen by cops as much, where
they're going to be able to hide.
Speaker 1 (35:20):
Just as people sell dinner plates or do hair from
their homes, there are some women who run sex work
operations out of these apartments. Think Airbnbs for sex. Scattered
across the city.
Speaker 9 (35:32):
There were just places where you could do whatever you
weren't supposed to be doing out in public. So that's
where you start to see the rise of the booker.
All you had to do is if you got a call,
you could say, okay, go to West seventy third Street.
The key is under the mat. There will be a
girl waiting for you, or there will be a girl
that arrives. In fact, real estate and prostitution are deeply intertwined.
(35:57):
One of the ways you could be sure to both
fill upon artment buildings during economic downturns and get top
dollar for them is by renting them to madams and prostitutes.
They would often pay triple. It also meant that your
superintendent was going to get a bribe, because it's very
hard to keep that secret. Your doorman would often get
(36:19):
a bribe. This is the era when elevators were not automated,
so there would usually be an elevator operator who would
usually get a bribe. So it was an expensive business
to be a madam actually, but it was a lucrative
business if you were a landlord.
Speaker 1 (36:34):
And it's not just dorman, superintendents, elevator operators, and landlords
with their hands out taking money from sex workers during
the twenties. A specific kind of organized criminal is taking
money from them too.
Speaker 9 (36:48):
It is, in fact, the government entities the vice ring
of the nineteen twenties, which is not dominated by criminals.
It's not dominated by syndicated c that got other things
to do that are far more profitable. It's a ring
between the lawyers, the cops, the judges, and the girls.
(37:09):
It is the law who are bleeding the prostitutes dry.
Speaker 1 (37:13):
But as we move into the early thirties, as lucky
as playing both sides in the Castela Maries a war,
something surprising happens. A whole bunch of these corrupt officials,
the judges and cops profiting off the sex workers, start.
Speaker 2 (37:29):
To get arrested.
Speaker 1 (37:31):
City Hall tries to clean house as part of sweeping
anti corruption drives. It doesn't end corruption in New York politics,
far from it, but it does have an impact on
sex work, and it means that at the start of
the thirties Koki flow in her colleagues into their own
strange kind of golden age.
Speaker 9 (37:51):
Those early years in the thirties are kind of a
free for all and a great time to be running
a house of prostitution because nobody's harassing you from the
vice squad. The dirty judges have been mostly kicked out.
Speaker 1 (38:03):
But remember this is nineteen thirties America, and a woman
run unexploited industry was never going to last.
Speaker 9 (38:12):
When prohibition ends, everything changes. You have all these bootleggers
who are looking around thinking what's our next opportunity? Where
are we going to go? So the first thing they
do is they say, let's get in on this booking business.
Speaker 1 (38:28):
On the southern side of East Manhattan, you'll find Mott Street.
It's a narrow, bustling thoroughfare. One of the streets where
Lucky Luciano grew up, and by the end of prohibition
it's the headquarters of Italian organized crime. These headquarters are
run on Lucky's behalf by a bunch of well characters.
Speaker 9 (38:53):
Real scumbags, if I may say so.
Speaker 1 (38:56):
These gangsters from Mott Street were creatively known as the
Mott Street Boys.
Speaker 9 (39:01):
Who had been working for Lucky Luciana for years, running
the liquor exchange, busting' heads, dealing drugs, whatever was profitable.
Speaker 1 (39:10):
The Mott Street Boys are led by a mid level
mob enforcer.
Speaker 9 (39:14):
A guy named Tommy the Bold Pinocchio.
Speaker 1 (39:17):
And at the start of nineteen thirty four, when the
Mott Street Boys and other former bootleggers are still scratching
their heads for new ways of making money post Prohibition,
it's Tommy the Bull who has the bright idea.
Speaker 9 (39:29):
Tommy thinks, look, there's a whole untapped industry here that
we could begin to shake down.
Speaker 1 (39:34):
An industry that does not seem to be suffering. Despite
New York being in the midst of the Great Depression.
Speaker 9 (39:43):
The taste for brothels and for prostitutes did not decline.
Speaker 1 (39:46):
The mob hasn't had much of a connection to that trade.
Before at this point, because sex work is a bit
of a cottage industry.
Speaker 9 (39:53):
Individual women servicing individual men.
Speaker 1 (39:57):
But the Mott Street Boys have an idea a way
for scaling up their involvement across lots of sex work operations.
They start busting up brothels and once inside they give
those businesses an offer they can't refuse to use their
money as a kind of protection racket for the sex
workers in case of trouble with the law.
Speaker 9 (40:18):
That is to say, pooling money to get women out
of jail when they get arrested, and that certainly helps
and you can have it. In terms of booking talent.
Speaker 1 (40:27):
These bookers have become a crucial component to the way
sex work in this era operates.
Speaker 9 (40:32):
Prostitution bookers would treat it like a talent agency where
they had a roster of girls that they would send
out to different brothels around the city.
Speaker 1 (40:42):
But as well as connecting the sex workers with customers,
bookers provide another service.
Speaker 9 (40:47):
The women pay the booker ten bucks a week and
then if you get arrested, he'll come bail you out.
Speaker 1 (40:53):
So now Mott Street Boys are going to run the
bookers and the sex workers.
Speaker 9 (41:00):
They begin to encounter problems almost as soon as they start.
Most of the women did not want to work with
Tommy the Bull and his gang as thugs, and it's.
Speaker 1 (41:09):
Not like sex workers have much spare money to start
handing out for this mob protection.
Speaker 8 (41:14):
They worked twelve hour days, six days a week. They
pocketed about forty dollars out of their roughly two hundred
dollars in weekly earnings.
Speaker 2 (41:23):
But what choice do they really have?
Speaker 1 (41:26):
So the mob moves in and brings an end to
that ever so brief golden age of sex work. Under
the new system, the men working as bookers are making
money from the sex workers and the madams, but not
as much as those at the top of the tree,
men like Luciano, who demand a cut of all the profits.
(41:50):
Sex work is not the only industry noticing an increased
mob presence since the fall of Prohibition. As New York
moves into the mid thirties, this model of diversification grows
and grows, and who was going to stop it?
Speaker 6 (42:04):
Many suspected, as was the case, that New York politics
were deeply corrupted by organized crime.
Speaker 1 (42:12):
Why were the police so ineffective when it came to
curbing some of this organized crime?
Speaker 2 (42:20):
Violence.
Speaker 11 (42:22):
I got. The first thing to do if you're going
to be a good criminal is to start doing something
with the police.
Speaker 1 (42:28):
The mob is on the move across New York, which
meant Harlem as well.
Speaker 2 (42:35):
I imagine for unis.
Speaker 1 (42:36):
Part of Harlem's appeal is the community, the glitz, and
the people. But the mob, of course has more nefarious motivations,
especially when it comes to an industry.
Speaker 2 (42:48):
My own family knows.
Speaker 1 (42:49):
A thing or two about that's coming up in episode
four of The Godmother. On this episode of The Godmother,
you heard Carolyn Johnson, my Harlem tour guide.
Speaker 3 (43:09):
Welcome to Harlem. That's the name of my company.
Speaker 2 (43:11):
I'm still My name is Leah Carter.
Speaker 4 (43:14):
I am Eunice Carter's great granddaughter. Her son. Lyle is
my dad's father. Unis influenced my grandfather, and he influenced
my dad, and my dad influenced me. Now that I
have a grand unified theory of that exactly.
Speaker 5 (43:28):
I'm Marilyn Greenwald. I'm a professor Emerita of journalism at
Ohio University, and I'm the author of five biographies, including
one of Eunice Hunting Carter.
Speaker 6 (43:37):
My name is Chuck Greeves. Before becoming a writer. I
spent twenty five years as a Los Angeles trial lawyer.
My fourth novel was basically a fictionalization of the famous
nineteen thirty six vice trial, in which Luckily Chiana was
prosecuted by Thomas Dewey.
Speaker 7 (43:56):
My name is Christian Sipollini and I am an author
and a historian with a specialty in the fields of
true crime, organized crime, and cartel history.
Speaker 8 (44:08):
I am Claire White and I am the director of
education at the Mob Museum in downtown Las Vegas. I
grew up in Las Vegas, which kind of gives me
a leg up in that regard.
Speaker 9 (44:20):
I'm Debbie Applegate. I'm a historian and biographer, and I
am the author of Madam, The Biography of Polyadler Icon
of the Jazz Age.
Speaker 3 (44:30):
Hi.
Speaker 9 (44:30):
My name is Ellen Paulson.
Speaker 10 (44:33):
I research and I write books about criminal acts and
devis that took place during the nineteen thirties in the
United States, and my focus so far has been women
who were involved with notorious gangsters and desperadoes.
Speaker 2 (44:52):
My name is Leshawn Harris.
Speaker 1 (44:54):
I am an associate professor of history at Michigan State
University in the Department of.
Speaker 11 (45:00):
My name is Robert Whalen, and I'm an Emerathus professor
of History at Queen's University of Charlotte here in Charlotte,
North Carolina. And I've written on both European and American history.
I suppose the most relevant book is what I published
on a Murder Incorporated, which involved people like Thomas Dewey
(45:21):
and Junis Carter and so forth.
Speaker 1 (45:28):
The Godmother is produced by Novel for iHeartRadio. For more
from novel, visit novel dot Audio. The Godmother is hosted
and written by me Nicole Perkins. Our producer is Leona Hamid.
Additional production from Ajuajima Broumpong, Ronald Young Junior and Ziana Yusuf.
(45:48):
Our editor is Ajua Jima Broumpong. Additional story editing from
Max O'Brien and Mitha Lee Raw and our researcher is
Ziana Yusuf. Additional research from Mohammed Ahmed. David wa Is
our executive producer. Field production by Tnito Romani and Pallas Shaw.
Sound design, mixing and scoring by Nicholas Alexander and Daniel Kempsen.
(46:11):
Our score was written, performed and recorded by Jeff Parker
Music supervision by Nicholas Alexander and David Waters. Production management
and endless Patients from Sharie Houston, Sarah Tobin and Charlotte Wolfe.
Fact checking by Fendel Fulton and Dania Suleiman. Story development
by Madeline Parr, Jess Swinburne Aseana Yusuf. Willard Foxton is
(46:35):
our Creative Director of Development. Special thanks to Leah Carter,
Stephen Carter, Angela J. Davis, Andrew Fernley, Marilyn Greenwald, Sondra Lebedy,
Katherine Godfrey, Nadia Maidie, Amalia Sortland, Sean Glenn, Neil Krishnan,
Julia Bromberg, Katrina Norvel, Carly Frankel, and all the team
(46:59):
at Day w Emmy
Speaker 2 (47:09):
Novel
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