The Numbers

On Christmas Eve the three-race pari-mutuel total at the Fair Grounds in New Orleans was $107.20. The five-race total was $169.80, the seven-race $219. Taking, in order, the last digit in the dollar column in each total, the result is 799.

That number--799--was of vast importance to hundreds of thousands of U. S. citizens, white and black, for Fair Ground mutuel totals are currently used in the best numbers games. It was particularly important last week because the play was heavy in the hope of a Christmas Eve killing. Last year a Negro on Relief in New York's black Harlem dropped dead from shock when he won $540.

No one dropped dead when the magic 799 came up last week. But a few days prior a numbers runner was murdered in Washington, and a Harlem numbers collector, who was a WPA worker on the side, was shot to death by another WPA worker for welching on a 6-c- bet which hit. This was a fairly routine budget of blood for the biggest, richest racket in the U. S. today.

Conservative estimate of the total take from the numbers racket in the U. S. is $1,000,000 per day, $300,000,000 per year. The unsavory talent which was once lavished upon 'legging is now employed in what is usually known as "the numbers." Credited with having put the numbers on a big-business basis was the late Arthur ("Dutch Schultz") Flegenheimer.* In pennies, nickels, dimes, dollars, mostly from the poor, the money pours into the underworld in an ever-golden stream. The profit margin is high, for while the odds are 1000-to-1, the payoff is usually 600-to-1. Moreover, the runner generally gets 10% of the winnings as commission and an additional tip is in order. Welching is common, and since the use of the track as the basis of the game, the possibility of controlling the numbers has been immeasurably lengthened.

Basic requirement of the numbers game is a figure published daily in the newspapers. Until 1930 the most popular figures were the New York Clearing House daily clearings and balances. In that year, after numerous attempts had been made to bribe staid Clearing House employes for advance information, Manhattan dailies ceased to print the figures. It was a futile gesture, for the bigtime numbers bankers simply shifted to other figures. Butter, egg and stock sales are used in combination for the game in Winston-Salem, N. C. Every important newspaper takes elaborate precautions to see that any figures likely to be used for the numbers racket are printed correctly, the composing room foreman sometimes making a last personal check.

Before the numbers bankers changed from Clearing House to race track figures and began to set rigid deadlines for play, newspaper offices were constantly annoyed by attempts to bribe printers, statisticians, copy boys. Even now an occasional ignoramus who thinks the Press knows everything in advance will approach a financial editor with promises of a split on the contemplated killing. One of the few successful numbers frauds occurred in the Curb's stock sales total. A person who looked like a regular Curb employe marched calmly in to the waiting newsmen, posted faked figures. The newsmen dashed out to report the total before the real one was released. When out-of-town numbers bankers were more innocent, New York racketeers used to take advantage of time differences caused by daylight saving to play a number after it had actually been published.

A big sideline to the numbers game has grown up in dream books, which purport to key nightmares to likely digits. The New York Daily Mirror, which is widely read by devotees of the game, has a regular feature cartoon entitled "Pete,'' familiarly known as "Policy Pete." Pete and his friend say nothing about numbers, but innocently and irrelevantly included in the cartoon are two numbers, presumably suggestions for the day's play. Colored pastors often note with regret that after a hymn is announced there is a rustle in the congregation as the number of the hymn is hastily jotted down for the next day's play. Sometimes certain numbers get so "hot" that the bankers refuse to take plays on them. Famed are 711 and 321.

Legend is that the numbers game was invented in the office of the New York Sun, was spread by its routemen throughout the city. The game rooted fastest in the Spanish section of Harlem, where the residents were steeped in the lore of lotteries. From there it spread into the adjacent colored quarter, where it has kept a large part of the population poor ever since. Metropolitan Life has had trouble with wholesale lapsing of insurance policies throughout Harlem from the beginning of the numbers mania. The game has spread far beyond the borders of Harlem under the high-pressure promotion of the numbers hawkers, who have enlisted a salesman in nearly every second-rate cigar and drug store, widened their distribution to include porters, office boys, taxi drivers, elevator operators.

*The day Dutch Schultz was ambushed in Newark in 1935, the winning number in his Harlem game was 000.

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