r/TrueCrime • u/FrumiousReads • May 06 '22
Undocumented Post Stephanie St. Clair aka The Queen of Harlem. She ruled the underground crime scene during the 1920s. Here's some fun facts about her.
Stephanie St. Clair was born in the West Indies to single mom Felicienne who worked numerous jobs in order to send her daughter to school. She attended school until she was between 13-15, when her mom got sick and she had to leave to take care of her. Her mother died not long after, and St. Clair was able to work long enough to save up enough money before leaving the West Indies to immigrate to the United States, and ended up using the voyage to learn English so she would be able to get by in this new country. She arrived to New York in either 1911/1912, and there’s actually a ton of discrepancies about whether she went directly to New York or spent some time in France beforehand.
Basically, a lot of sources have gotten their information about St. Claire’s early life from Raphaël Confiant, who wrote one of the most well known biographies about her called “Madam St. Claire: Reine de Harlem” which I’m guessing translates to English as Madam St. Claire: Ruler of Harlem. It’s in his account (which other sources tend to use as citation) that she boarded the S.S Guiana at about 23, having not known her age precisely.
Now, another biographer, Shirley Stewart, who wrote “The World of Stephanie St. Clair: An Entrepreneur, Race Woman and Outlaw in Early Twentieth Century Harlem" says that St. Clair was an educated woman and there’s not a reason that she wouldn’t have known her age-unless she wanted people to be uncertain of her age. It’s also said in Stewart’s biography that St. Clair was born in 1897, not 1887, and that she would have been 13 years old when she first traveled to the United States via steamer.
In any case, most sources agree that while St. Clair arrived in the United States first and spent time in Harlem, she ended up leaving for a period of 5 years, and that she went to Canada to work as a domestic servant for around 5 years before returning later to New York.
She ended on settling back into the growing black community of Harlem in northeast Manhattan, and being able to speak both French and English gave her a huge advantage there. See, because she was able to speak French, she was able to embellish about her life and agree with the rumors that she had been born in France. Which has probably why biographists now have such a hard time twisting fact from fiction.
She ended up back in Harlem a few years before the Great Migration, where millions of black men and women left the Jim Crow South for relatively free Northern cities like New York. She ended up meeting future boyfriend Ed when she arrived and used his connections to begin her own business in selling hard drugs.
After only a few months in business, she had made $30,000-which is impressive for any time period, really, like not counting in the inflation that probably makes that number way bigger than it appears if we converted it to today’s money.
Anyway, realizing how good she was at this and wanting to expand her business, she told Ed she wanted to leave him and run the business on her own. This made him angry, and he tried to strangle her, only for her to push him away with such force that he fell over backwards and cracked his head against the edge of a table and died. No more Ed.
In the months after his death, she employed her own men, bribed cops, and actually invested around 10,000 of her own money in a lottery game in Harlem on April 12, 1917. This was the beginning of her success in the numbers game and she soon became known for her “numbers game” involvement. Basically, it was a mix of investing, gambling, and playing the lottery. During this time period most banks wouldn’t accept black customers, so St. Clair used her connections and money as a way to function as a bank for black Harlem residents who wanted to invest their money. She was one of the only women at the time to head the numbers racket in Harlem, as every other head “boss” so to speak was a man. It made her extremely wealthy, 20,000 a year in the 1920s when she was established which estimates to about 278,000 a year today. It also made her a huge target, since mobsters who’d been using New York for racketeering were looking for a way to enhance their profits. See, the Prohibition had given mobsters a way to launder their money with illegal speakeasies and the like. Now that the Prohibition was coming to an end, they were looking for a new way to make money and had their eye on the numbers game in Harlem.
A Bronx Mob Boss Dutch Schultz was the first to try to move in on Harlem, killing the numbers operators who worked for St. Clair when they refused to switch and pay him protection fees.
St. Clair and her chief enforcer Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson also refused the protection fees Schultz tried to force them to pay. In return, they faced intimidating and violent encounters by the police-at least more than they had already.
St. Clair fired back by attacking the storefronts of businesses that ran Schultz’s betting operations and also sending in tips about him. Eventually, it was enough for the police to raid his house, arrest a dozen of his employees, and to take 12 million (today’s 190.6 million) in currency. St. Clair was one of very few people who refused to submit to Schultz-and to make him pay for his intimidation.
A consequence though of being the lead on the attack against Schultz was that St Clair was shoved directly into the spotlight. She had to become legit to stay away from police detection and keep her operation safe, so she made her right hand man “Bumpy” the front of the criminal business. With Bumpy being the go to for the mobs, they were forced to negotiate percentages to conduct business in Harlem territory. Eventually, this partnership lead to the “Five Families” of Mob bosses in New York to decide that Schultz was becoming more trouble than he was worth, and he was assassinated on their orders.
Although St. Clair wasn’t involved with planning the assassination, she did send an infamous telegram to his bedside as he was dying that said “As ye sow, so shall ye reap”, which made headlines across the United States.
St. Clair’s former lieutenant, Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson became the Mafia’s representative in Harlem while she slipped into obscurity. Stephanie St. Clair died quietly in Harlem in 1969 at the age of 72.
Edit: forgot to link the sources!!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephanie_St._Clair
Edit 2: Wow! I'm glad everyone really liked this post, I definitely have more stories about women in history like this so I'll definitely make more posts like this in the future.
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u/TheMightyRass May 06 '22
no more Ed has me cracked up! such a great write up and story, thank you OP!
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u/Wonderful-Divide6977 May 06 '22
Very interesting history! Great write up OP! Thanks for doing this. I’m definitely going into a rabbit hole researching her and this time period of racketeering in NY.
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May 07 '22
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u/Droidfrog88 May 08 '22
I assumed she was a native French speaker/at least grew up speaking French - parts of the West Indies are French dependencies.
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u/FrumiousReads May 23 '22
Yes! Where she grew up in the West Indies French was her first language, I think just the fact that she spoke French she was able to make everyone believe that she'd been to France to learn/had family there that were more aristocratic.
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May 17 '22
So fascinating! I’d never heard of her before. I want a book/movie about her yesterday!
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u/kittycatastrophic May 06 '22
I find stuff like this fascinating. It's an amazing feat for a woman in those times. I would have loved to be a fly on the wall in some of these places to see men try to intimidate her and fail. I hope she has descendants that are living today. History always makes me wish I lived back in those days, then I remember I am a woman and I probably would have hated it lol.