Criminal - The Numbers

Episode Date: February 15, 2019

When Fannie Davis and her family moved to Detroit in the mid-1950s, they had trouble finding steady work. So, Fannie found a way to take care of her family. Bridgett Davis' book is The World According to Fannie Davis: My Mother's Life in the Detroit Numbers. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts. Sign up for Criminal Plus to get behind-the-scenes bonus episodes of Criminal, ad-free listening of all of our shows, special merch deals, and more.  We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop. Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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That's BotoxCosmetic.com. That's BotoxCosmetic.com. The sound of the phone ringing is embedded in my sort of memory of life growing up. The phone was always ringing and it wasn't just one phone. At one point we had lines, and my mom tried to keep them separate, so to speak. One was a business line, one was a personal line, one was the children's phone line. But of course, you know, if people couldn't get through, and these are the days before call waiting, if people couldn't get through and they were anxious, some of them had access to a personal number, and they'd start calling that one. So yeah, ringing phones.

This is Bridgette Davis. Her mother, Fannie Davis, was born in Nashville in 1928. Fannie's grandfather had been born into slavery there, and her father owned a successful plastering business in the early part of the 20th century. And that enabled him to buy property. And so he was both a businessman and a property owner. And so my mom witnessed his entrepreneurial spirit and was highly, highly influenced by him. She really admired her father's life. Fannie grew up in Nashville and married Brigette's father when she was 18. But like many African Americans, she decided to migrate north with her family in the mid-50s so that they could have better opportunities and more liberties. And so they chose Michigan and ultimately Detroit.

And they hadn't prepared themselves for what was awaiting. One, the racism in Michigan was so virulent and distinctive from the Southern sort of discrimination they'd known about that it took them off guard. They weren't prepared for that. And the way it manifested was in all the key ways. They couldn't find decent housing. They were charged exorbitant rent. My father was unable to find steady work. And so these things really plunged them into poverty. So she very early realized she'd have to step in and figure out something. Fannie Davis found a way to take care of her family. She started small, but built a robust and lucrative operation.

A business that a lot of people knew about, but no one talked about. Which happened to be illegal. It was called The Numbers. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. What were The Numbers? The Numbers. The Numbers are an underground lottery business or operation that has been in place since the early 20s.

It moved across the country, and it was designed by, created by a black man in Harlem and really was a black business. It thrived. It was a true economy, actually. By 1970, police estimated that one in every 15 people in Detroit played the numbers daily and that it was generating $94 million a year. Here's how you play.

You get to choose a three-digit number, and if that number is the winning number, you actually win a 500 to 1 payout. So if you bet a dollar on that three-digit number and it came out, as we call it, then you actually would get $500. And so my mom knew about the numbers. Most black Americans knew or know about the numbers. And she played a bit herself. She played a few coins on numbers. But she noticed in her

community where she was living in Detroit that people were playing those numbers a lot. And she thought, hmm, they could actually give me their bets. So she was very small scale at first, what she called a penny business, and eventually worked as a bookie for a large banker. So there were hundreds of bookies. You are a bookie if you take other people's numbers. Maybe you just sit at your kitchen table and you have five customers who call you and turn in their numbers to you. You're a bookie. The thing that distinguished her, the thing she did that almost no other women in Detroit did, was she was a banker. So that meant she paid out hits.

So she wasn't going to the bank to collect on. The bank was her. Yes, ultimately. Before she could graduate from bookie to banker, Fannie needed a pool of money to pay out winning hits. So she asked her brother for help. And so she entered his home. As he tells me, she didn't even take her coat off. And she stood there and told him, John, I want to bank the numbers. And he said, are you sure about that? She says, yes, I've thought about it.

And she explained how she would do it. And he said, okay, it made sense to him. She said, the only thing is I need you to loan me $100. Can you do that? And he said, yes, Fannie, I can do that. Being a banker wasn't something that women did often. What do you think gave your mother the confidence to do this? I don't think it ever occurred to her that she couldn't. I don't think it ever occurred to her that I'm a woman so I can't do this. She thought, I have a head for numbers. I am clear about my goals. I have all the skill sets in place.

I can command respect, so I'm not worried about that. So why not? There was something about her. Not everyone could have done it. She was really perfect for this role, and she had the qualities that made it possible to have done it. She was really perfect for this role, and she had the qualities that made it possible to thrive at it. And that has everything to do with her, just who she was. Tell me about your mother's schedule, how the day would go once the business picked up.

What was the day's schedule? My mom was up taking numbers in the morning, early. Some of her customers wanted to turn their numbers in before they went to work, and so she had to accommodate them. I remember someone in particular, a customer who would love to go fishing on Saturday mornings, so she liked to turn her numbers in at 6 a.m. A lot of people like to call in their numbers during lunchtime. You know, there were these busier periods and then these sort of slowdown periods and then busy again.

And it got a lot more hectic as the afternoon wore on because there was a cutoff time. So that was often the busiest time of the day, that time right before the evening. So that was really how her day went, a lot of taking people's bets. And also there were people who liked to come to the house and give their numbers directly to her. So there was that piece of it. There were people who liked to come in weekly and pay her directly, you know. So there was this mix of collecting the money and then receiving it from people who showed up at the house. How were the winning numbers chosen, decided?

Each city came up with its own way to determine a winning number. And many of them landed on this idea that they would get the number from racing forms, daily racing forms from various racetracks across the country, because those numbers also changed all the time. And there was a calculation that was done to determine each digit of these winning, three-digit winning numbers. The calculation was made using an elaborate formula based on horse race winnings from racetracks. Those results wouldn't be tabulated until after Fannie's bets were closed, so there was no way to cheat. So how would people find out if they'd won?

I always say it's a little bit like a game of telephone, but it has to be accurate. So the numbers bosses would sign off on these winning numbers based on these calculations. And so the word would go out that, okay, it's official. These are the three winning digits for today. And the numbers bosses employees would then make the calls to various bankers who would inform various bookies, and they would inform their customers. And so the word would go out on the street.

It would go out in a telephone call. You know, it really was word of mouth. And it was really an incredible system when you think about it. But that's how it was done. Brigette remembers that when the winning numbers would come in each night, things could get stressful in the house. If someone won big, her mother would have to pay out. That was a big part of sort of the business.

Luckily, it wasn't daily. She didn't get hit daily. But there were times when she got really people won big. And so that was a whole process, you know, gathering that money to pay off, which was her policy to pay off the next day by noon. So that was also a big part of the business. Do you remember being a little kid and helping out with the business. What were some of the tasks that you were given? So I wanted something that I could do to contribute. And so she decided that my job would be to call all the customers and give them that day's numbers. And she paid me $20 a week.

That seems like an important job. It was great, and guess what? You know, the customers loved hearing from me because I was this child calling, Hi, this is Fannie's daughter, and I'm just letting you know today's number is 697, and they'd say, Oh, thank you, baby. Do you remember customers coming over? Oh, I vividly remember customers coming over all the time.

All the time. One of my favorites of her customers was a woman who had been a lady of the evening in her youth. And she had an extraordinary wardrobe of clothes from that life. And she liked to talk to me about fashion. And she knew fashion. She knew real fashion. She knew designers, etc. So I really learned all these things from my mom's customers that went above and beyond just seeing them, you know, engaged in transactions. Do you ever remember anyone sitting around the house and kind of talking with your mother and saying, well, I think maybe 532 this week.

And what do you think about that? Or 478? Or back and forth about the number that they wanted to play? Yes, so much of the reason that people like to come over and turn their numbers in directly is they wanted the social piece of it. You know, they wanted to be in conversation about the numbers. It really generated a kind of sort of like communal experience. So customers are like, what are you feeling is a good number? And I was thinking about this and, oh, I dreamed, I actually dreamed about fish.

And so then a customer could say to my mother, Fanny, what does fish play for? And what does that mean? That means that the customer is asking, what does the dream book say? The three digit equivalent is for fish. What is the dream? And you might ask, what are dream books? Yeah. What is the dream book? The dream book was a publication, a little book that really was more like the Bible for numbers players. And it essentially was encyclopedic. It really listed every person, place, or thing you could imagine, as well as experience,

that someone could dream about. And I mean just about anything. And so, again, as I was saying, these experiences or places or persons or things all had three-digit sort of numbers assigned to them. And so that's how you figured out, again, what does fish play for? Well, the dream book says it plays for 497. I think because I dreamed it, I'm going to play that.

And there were many different versions of dream books. Dream books date back, way back into the 19th century. And so the more popular ones in my household were two in particular, the Red Devil dream book and the Three Wisemen dream book. And so a customer might have a preference for one over the other and say, well, Fanny, I don't know about that. I don't really know about what the three wise men says. Tell me what the red devil says it plays for. And then the customer might say, okay, I'm feeling lucky.

I'm going to put that number in today. Did your mother also believe in the dream books and use that type of mystical numerology in her own life and around your house? My mom believed in luck, and she believed in conjuring luck. And so she had these rituals that she followed. There, I might add, there was a proliferation of sort of paraphernalia that you could purchase around the numbers business. There were shops designed to sell all these things to you. And one of them was candles, lucky candles, the kind that can burn for a week, the nice tall ones.

And so my mom often had these candles burning in the household in strategic places. The idea was that once the candle burned down, there was actually a three-digit number at the bottom. And there were lucky oils, and there was incense that did the same thing. Once it burned down, there would be a three-digit number at the bottom, and that's maybe a number to play. So, yes, in many ways, as a child, I found our home so magical, and I felt that she was at the center of that magic, that she herself was magical. Fanny wasn't just running the numbers.

She played them, and she was lucky. In one especially large hit, she won enough money to put a down payment on a house. She wouldn't tell anyone how much she'd actually won. Brigette says that owning the house meant a lot. Her mother's policy was feel free, feel welcome, be happy, and she wanted her children to feel proud. I went to school one day, and my teacher said to me, you sure do have a lot of pairs of shoes. And it was true. I did. I didn't know how to answer

her. I was concerned because the week before, she had asked me, what does your father do? And I told her, he doesn't work. My father actually was disabled. So she naturally asked, well, what does your mother do? And I said, this time I was lying. I said, I don't know. Because I knew she was in the numbers, but I knew I wasn't supposed to tell anyone that. So I suspect looking back that she was already looking at me and thinking, what? This little girl is really dressing well, this little black girl. And I think that prompted the questions. But I was naive.

I didn't know that. I just knew that on this day, she was telling me I had a lot of pairs of shoes. And I agreed. And then she really stunned me by saying, name every pair of shoes you have. Do not sit down until you do that. Go ahead. And I was so nervous. I thought it was a test and I didn't want to fail it. And I worked really hard, nervously, and named 10 pairs of shoes. I was being so diligent. And she said to me, 10 pairs of shoes, that's an awful lot.

Again, I didn't know how to answer her. I sat down. The surprising thing for me was the next day she called me to her desk again. And this time she said, you did not tell me that you had a white pair too. And I had forgotten to tell her about the white pair I was wearing that day. And I apologized. I didn't know what else to do. She dismissed me with a flip of her hand. But at that point, I thought, oh boy, I'm in trouble. And I need to tell my mom because I've clearly done

something wrong. And I told my mother that evening, and I can't even begin to describe the look on her face. I still remember it. She was furious. I thought she was angry at me, but she said, that is none of her damn business. Who does she think she is? She was so angry. And she told me, get in the car now. I, of course, thought we were going back to the school to confront my teacher, Ms. Miller, and I was really frightened. I did not want to do that. But that's not where we were going at all. My mom took me to Saks Fifth Avenue and she took me to the children's shoe department. She pointed to a gorgeous pair of yellow patent leather shoes and she said, those are pretty. She pulled out a $100

bill and paid for those shoes and then told me, listen, you're going to wear these shoes to school tomorrow and you're going to tell your teacher that you actually have 12 pairs of shoes. You hear me? And I did. And Miss Miller never spoke to me again. Was it just accepted knowledge in your house that you didn't talk about your mother's business? We never talked about not talking about it. It was just understood. There were no conversations around it. It was

clear. It was clear. You don't talk about what happens inside of this household. And of course, we understood the implication that we could get busted by the authorities, and that's not good. Someone could hear about it and try to rob us, not good. So there was no need to work and sort of struggle with keeping the secret. It was natural and easy to keep that secret, and we all did. When did it become clear to you that your mother's business had become very successful? I don't think I processed it that way for years. We lived well from my memory. It was my normal.

And so I didn't think about my mom. Oh, she's successful. I thought we're doing well at this. That's how I looked at it. And so that's how I always viewed it until I was an adult and began to see the toll it was taking. Thank you. recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters,

and even psychic mediums, and leads him to a dark secret about his own family. Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick, completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts. Hey, it's Scott Galloway, and on our podcast, Pivot, we are bringing you a special series about the basics of artificial intelligence. We're answering all your questions. What should you use it for? What tools are right for you?

And what privacy issues should you ultimately watch out for? And to help us out, we are joined by Kylie Robeson, the senior AI reporter for The Verge, to give you a primer on how to integrate AI into your life. So, tune into AI Basics, How and When to Use AI, a special series from Pivot sponsored by AWS, wherever you get your podcasts. Lots of things happened that as a little girl, Bridgette Davis didn't see. In 1962, there was a massive raid at the Gotham Hotel, the hub of the African American numbers operation in Detroit. Police conducted a room-by-room search and confiscated numbers tapes, adding machines, hundreds of boxes of bet slips, and 30 safes.

And then, one night in 1970, 200 FBI agents conducted raids all over the city of Detroit, making arrests in 58 different locations. J. Edgar Hoover called it the largest gambling raid in history. Brigette was in elementary school. My mom never made it known that that was going on. And that's why I always call her an incredible domestic magician. The sleight of hand she had to use to make sure none of us were constantly stressed out by the possibility of these sort of busts happening.

Now, she did do some practical things. She had a big safe that she kept, a combination safe that she kept in her closet. That's where she kept the money. That's where she kept the day's business. We had an incinerator in our basement, and she burned her tickets and proof of the business on a weekly basis. You know, she was in no way reckless. That was not my mom. Do you have any complicated feelings about the fact that it was a crime what your mother was doing? I have no complicated feelings around that because for me, it wasn't a crime. This is a country that put a lot of laws in place to keep black people down. Let's be clear and blunt about it.

It was very clear to me, intuitively and now literally, that there's a difference between a legitimate business and a criminal one. It's criminal because, you know, laws were put in place to say it shouldn't happen. But it was legitimate. And that was proven because the state decided, all these states, almost every state in this country that were not legitimate, that were not fair. But they were laws, so technically you'd be breaking the law if you didn't do what you were supposed to. So that, to me, is never a complicated sort of question. What is the history of the lottery? It was legal and then illegal and then legal again? It turns out that the 13 colonies had lotteries,

and they used those lotteries because they were cash poor and they needed them for capital improvements, like a precursor to the stock market, in fact. They proliferated these lotteries, legal. And in fact, slaves could play these lotteries too and win. And one in particular did just that, a famous slave, Denmark Vesey, who went on to lead a slave revolt years later. But at the time, 1799, he bought his freedom from the proceeds of a lottery he won, $1,500. So that was incredible and extraordinary. However, that and other incidents like that really prompted the new government and the state government to essentially ban

lotteries and make them illegal. It was too egalitarian. And so the answer was to just outlaw it. And that's what they did. For like 100 years, until the mid-60s, they decided that, you know, state officials decided that there was too much money being made in this underground lottery business, this numbers business that black folks were running and profiting from, and that they wanted that money. They wanted in. What was the role of the numbers in the Black community?

I mean, it's hard to overestimate how important the numbers were in the Black community. But the big thing, besides the social piece, which is huge also, it was a communal social experience, and that was important. But also, those big numbers men were race men, and they believed that they should take their wonderful largesse and reinvest in the community. That was just what they did. And that was vital because discrimination and segregation had made it so that black folks had a lot of services that were not available to them. And numbers men stepped in to provide them something as important as providing a home loan for, you know, a black person or family that cannot get a traditional mortgage.

Numbers men would provide the loan money for that. Also, Numbersmen started insurance companies. They started newspapers. They bought and owned and ran hotels where black folks could stay. You could not, as a black American, go to a Detroit hotel downtown and stay in it in much of the 20th century in this country. You couldn't do it. And so Numbers Men, one in particular, he basically ran a beautiful hotel in Detroit that was for African Americans. It was incredible. In 1972, the state of Michigan legalized the state lottery. The Michigan lottery was drawn every week rather than every day, like the numbers, so people played both. But in 1977, a new game was introduced, the daily.

It happened every day. You could choose your numbers. You could get paid the next day, and the payout was 500 to 1, the same as Fannie's. She kept some of her loyal customers for a while, but then they started to peel off. And here's why. That state-run lottery did have one distinct advantage. It had a lot of disadvantages that worked for a while for my mom. You didn't have to pay taxes if you played with Fannie. You could play on credit and pay once a week with Fannie. So there were these things that were an advantage. But the big disadvantage ultimately made it impossible for her to compete. And that is that the state lottery was able to

broadcast its winning numbers on the local TV show every evening, local TV stations. And people absolutely love to learn the winning numbers every night publicly at the same time. And so that's when my mother really started to try to figure out what can I do? And she came up with something. She did. She decided, hmm, if you can't beat them, join them. And you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to take those winning numbers that the lottery provides and make them the winning numbers for my informal lottery business. And it worked. It worked. The state lottery kept changing, and Fannie Davis kept changing her business right with it. It was getting tougher to compete. She started holding poker games to help

make up for lost revenue. But when Michigan introduced the lotto, the prizes were bigger than she could keep up with. Fannie Davis ran her numbers business for 30 years. She died in 1992. Brigette says she can still picture her mother, seated at their dining room table, working. Of course, everyone thinks that her mother is beautiful, but mine really was. And I loved watching her work. You know, she was just there, and she was doing her thing,

and I was just going around, you know, getting ready for school or having my sugar frosted flakes in the morning and just comforted by her presence and the sight of her doing her business. It was like all's well in the world. The money Fannie earned put Brigette through college. It allowed her to buy a home of her own in Brooklyn. She says she plays the numbers now in the form of the legal lottery, almost every day.

She usually plays 313, the area code for Detroit. But sometimes she plays 788, her mother's favorite. Can you do an impression of what it was like when your mother on the phone, when she would pick up the phone to take a number, what she would say, what was the interaction like? Oh, I love the sound of her taking numbers. You know, she'd be on the phone and she'd say, Hi, Miss Queenie, I'm calling to take your numbers. Are you ready?

Okay, good. All right, I'm ready. Come on. 5-4-2-4-quarter? Uh-huh. 6-9-3, straight for 50 cents? Is this both races, Miss Queenie? Detroit and Pontiac? Okay. 3-8-8, straight for a quarter? Uh-huh. 6-9-3 straight for 50 cents. Is this both races, Miss Queenie? Detroit and Pontiac? Okay. 3-8-8 straight for a dollar? Uh-huh. 4-7-5 straight for 50 cents. 1-10 box for a dollar? Hmm. Okay. I got it. All right, Miss Queenie. Well, listen, do you have any more numbers?

No? All right. Okay. I'll take that one more. 6-8 50 cents, uh-huh, and 972 box for 20. Got it. All right, Ms. Queenie, you have a good day. Criminal is created by Lauren Spohr and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Audio mix by Rob Byers. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com, where you can also find information about the book that Brujette Davis has written about her mother. It's called The World According to Fanny Davis,

My Mother's Life in the Detroit Numbers. Criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC. We're a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a collection of the best podcasts around. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. from PRX, a collection of the best podcasts around. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. Radiotopia. From PRX. Look better in adults. Your own weight loss journey is personal. or call 877-351-0300. See for yourself at BotoxCosmetic.com.

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