Despite her criminality, Stephanie St Clair liked to be seen as a ‘lady’ and her story is told in a new Sky History series, Original Gangsters, which is narrated by Sean Bean

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Stephanie St Claire accumulated $30K and launched her own lottery.(Image: SKY HISTORY)

Roaring Twenties New York was a hotbed of crime, where mobsters like Lucky Luciano ruled the roost – cashing in on prohibition with bootleg booze. Then there was the numbers game … and there was Stephanie St. Clair.

Like a people’s lottery, players of the numbers game – which was illegal – would write a lucky three digit number on slips of paper and runners would run these slips and the bets between the gamblers and their ‘bankers.’

The winning numbers were chosen from the last three digits of the daily trading totals of the New York Stock Exchange which, crucially, made the game impossible to tamper with or fix.

At a time when Black people weren’t even allowed bank accounts, St Clair – a Black woman born in Guadalupe who fled to the US from the French West Indies where she was raised at 13 – wanted a piece of the pie.

Anyone with the cash to pay winners, or the front to chance their arm until they built up a big enough pot, could be a numbers banker. And it was a way for Black people to enter the banking system. In 1922, St Clair – until then a cleaner – managed to accumulate $30K and launched her own numbers operation – stepping out of the boundaries of both her sex and her race.

Interestingly, she also used other people – particularly men – to keep her hands clean while masterminding the racket. One such enforcer was Bumpy Johnson, who became known as the Godfather of Harlem where they were based. Bumpy would punish people with beatings – or by taking lives.

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Despite her criminality, Stephanie St Clair liked to be seen as a ‘lady’.(Image: SKY HISTORY)

Featured in a new Sky History series, Original Gangsters, which starts on Tuesday and is narrated by Sean Bean, despite her criminality, St Clair liked to be seen as a ‘lady.’ Sean Bean says:”Although very few photos of her survived, we can see that that image was incredibly important to Stephanie. She never allowed herself to be photographed without her hair, her makeup, her clothes all perfectly styled.”

Alongside being a ruthless gangster, St Clair was a committed activist for the Black community. And when she was arrested, she testified about the participation of the NYPD in vice rackets – leading to more than a dozen police officers being suspended from the force. But when another formidable gangster, Dutch Shultz, tried to muscle in on her numbers, her resistance led to Harlem becoming a warzone – with him using bombings, beatings and murders to muscle in on her turf.

When Shultz was eventually gunned down by a group known as Murder IN, she sent him a message on his death bed saying, ‘As you sew, so shall you reap.’ The same could be said of her, when she is jailed in the 1930s after gunning down her ex and being imprisoned for two to 10 years. Released in the early 1940s, little is known of her after that.

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Stephanie St Clair features in Original Gangsters with Sean Bean.(Image: Adam Hollingworth/Redeeming Features)

But Serena Simmons says of the little known crime boss, who died in 1969 aged around 72: “She was an outlier. She was someone who may have been able to go down a different path – a good path – if circumstances had been different. She was a very strong character. Underneath it all she was thoughtful, sensitive and a deep thinker. She was intelligent, self educated and widely read. Her clothes were her costume – she needed to be taken seriously – and she was functioning in a man’s world.

“Don’t get me wrong, she did do bad things, but she had a strong moral code; she was aware of injustice because she herself had experienced so much. I think her intention was bizarrely a good one. She had to be self-serving to help others. She had a lot of trauma when she was younger – so this is someone for me who was in survival mode and psychologically could compartmentalise her actions.

“She was motivated to achieve something and constructed her own path outside of any institutional support. I’m not sure we have any understanding about how hard that would have been. Is there a little bit of me that admires her? Yes, there is.”