In the decades between The Roaring Twenties and JFK's New Frontier, Virginia's capital city underwent a dramatic transformation from a sleepy Southern town into a bustling mid-sized city. Richmond offered every type of forbidden vice, too -- if you knew where to look. "Kingpin" is a work-in-progress by former AP journalist Kevin Hall that peeks beneath the rug at a colorful history of bootlegging and illegal gambling in Virginia in the mid-20th century.
Between 1933 and 1960, for instance, Harry L. Donovan, the son of an Irish immigrant farmer, grew to be a man of wealth and influence in Richmond. He ran a successful jukebox business and employed hundreds of people. He lived in a grand house in Richmond's most desirable neighborhood, and he bought a weekend estate in nearby Goochland County where he stabled and trained thoroughbred racehorses. Harry Donovan was on a first-name basis with many of the area's business leaders, and his family's summer travels were routinely mentioned in the society columns of the Richmond newspaper.
Yet for more than 25 years, the former bootlegger also was operating one of the largest illegal numbers rackets in Virginia. By 1950, the federal government estimated it was a $3 million a year operation, and its tentacles gradually expanded into Fredericksburg, Charlottesville and Petersburg. Authorities estimated Donovan had more than 800 "runners" on the street each day, taking-in 50,000 illegal lottery bets at scores of restaurants, newsstands and factories. Players would wager their nickels, dimes and quarters on a set of three numbers, and the day's winning combination was determined by horse racing results printed in the daily newspapers. Prize payouts in Donovan’s illegal numbers game were 500-to-1.
The numbers racket made Donovan rich, and it also made him a target. The Internal Revenue Bureau took direct aim at Harry Donovan in 1936 and again in 1955, using the same tax evasion laws that took-down Al Capone and other big city mobsters. But Harry Donovan beat the Feds both times. The government's third attempt in 1960 would be very different.
In the fall of 1959, the Justice Department sent a team of undercover agents into Richmond to shut-down the Virginia numbers kingpin once and for all. Federal agents spent close to four months conducting intensive surveillance, photographing and filming all aspects of Donovan's operation, before they arrested him in January 1960 in what the Richmond News Leader would call "a movie-like swoop-down."
Four days into his trial, after he saw the full scope of the government's evidence against him, Donovan switched his plea to guilty. He would serve more than two years in federal prison and he would lose nearly everything: the cash, the big house and the horse farm. Donovan died in 1974.
Harry and Louise Donovan leave the federal courthouse in downtown Richmond, Va. on Jan. 25, 1960 after posting bail. [Richmond Times-Dispatch photo]
While federal agents were collecting their evidence against Donovan, they couldn't help but notice the curious parade of Richmond police officers visiting Donovan’s office almost every day. The feds suspected he might be paying-off the local cops for protection, and when 100 Richmond policemen were hauled before a federal grand jury to be questioned about it, 60 of them refused to testify at all. The rumors about Harry Donovan and police corruption would pinball through Richmond City Hall for more than a year after he went to prison, and it cost the police chief his job.
Unsurprisingly, after Donovan's 1960 arrest, others quickly stepped in to take over the profitable numbers game he had bankrolled in Richmond for more than 25 years. Ultimately, it wasn't until the late 1980s -- when Virginia created its own legal lottery -- that the illegal numbers racket in Richmond was shut down for good.
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