On a Monday in January 1938, organized crime bosses converged on Richmond, Virginia to bury one of their own: Carroll Peyton “Nubby” Nuckols, the son of a German immigrant who was raised in Richmond before moving north as a young man. Nuckols ultimately would sit atop Washington, D.C.’s gambling underworld for most of the 1930s. At the age of 41, “Nubby,” who earned the nickname due to his small stature, had chosen the finality of suicide over the certainty of prison.
Jan. 10, 1938 was a cloudy, breezy day in Richmond, and the temperature would struggle to reach 40 degrees. “Barons of Washington’s underworld rubbed elbows with cavaliers of Virginia in Richmond’s beautiful Hollywood Cemetery today to see Carroll Peyton (Nubby) Nuckols lowered into his grave,” Washington Post reporter Howard F. Wentworth wrote. “Full contingents of the gambling elements of Baltimore, Philadelphia and Richmond also heard the simple funeral services and heard the heavy clods thump on the coffin of Washington’s erstwhile king of bookmaking.”
The Post reporter described “small groups of nattily-clad men” standing guard in a two-block radius around the Stuart Avenue home of Nuckols’ parents, located directly across from a chapel built for the Benedictine Sisters of Virginia. The mob muscle “conversed in undertones and eyed carefully every stranger who approached the house,” Wentworth reported. Nubby’s earthly remains temporarily rested inside his parent's house before a 50-car motorcade followed the hearse to Richmond’s revered Hollywood Cemetery.
Nubby's 1938 suicide was front-page news both in Washington and Richmond. It capped a colorful 20-year career that began with bootlegging and ended with a bullet from a .32-caliber pistol in the hallway of his D.C. apartment just north of Dupont Circle.
Nuckols first came to public attention in the pages of The Richmond Times-Dispatch on July 20, 1919. At the age of 22, he already was notorious enough for his hometown newspaper to almost mockingly describe how the bootlegger got flimflammed. "Hard luck is said to have been camping on the trail of C.P. Nuckols, known as 'Nubby,'" the Times-Dispatch reported. Almost two years into Prohibition, it seems Nubby had paid a man $700 for nearly 100 one-quart bottles of illegal whiskey only to discover upon delivery that the bottles were filled with green tea. "While Nuckols was said to have been out on a hunt for the alleged swindler, police raided his residence, armed with a search warrant, and confiscated 96 bottles of the imitation whiskey, which they claim they found hidden in Nuckols' cellar," the newspaper reported. The article noted the difficulty of any criminal prosecution, and ultimately no charges were filed.
Soon after, Nuckols moved north to Washington, where he got himself arrested 29 times during the 1920s and ‘30s on increasingly serious charges, ranging from disorderly conduct to assault to vehicular manslaughter.
With a partner, Nuckols founded The Richmond Club in Washington, a raucous after-hours joint known for serving up bootleg liquor and hosting illegal gambling. He later assumed control of D.C.’s horse betting and numbers game after Sam “Fat Man” Beard was sent to a federal prison in 1936 for his chronic sloppiness about filing income tax returns.
Nuckols’ repeated arrests on gambling charges in D.C. typically were thrown-out of court due to insufficient evidence. Thanks to a fresh-faced police recruit who worked undercover for several months in 1938, one charge finally resulted in a conviction. Nuckols was free on $3,000 bond awaiting sentencing in that case when he was snared in yet another gambling raid: Nubby’s luck finally had run out, and prison appeared inevitable.
“Darling – it was the best way,” Nuckols wrote in a suicide note addressed to his wife found in a pocket of the maroon silk bathrobe he wore when he apparently took his own life. The note also apologized for the public attention he had brought to the family due to the criminal life he had chosen to lead.
Within days of the organized crime gathering at Nuckols’ funeral in Richmond, reporter Howard Wentworth would write another story for the Post. This one speculated about who among the Baltimore-to-Washington crime fraternity might be angling for Nubby’s former role as D.C.’s gambling czar.
High on Wentworth’s list of potential successors was another onetime Richmond boy who was advancing quickly in the Washington underworld: Abe Plisco, who also went by the nickname “Jewboy Dietz,” was busy building a sports wire and numbers racket in the nation's capital. And, as Wentworth dutifully reported, Plisco was one of the mobsters seen paying his respects at Richmond's Hollywood Cemetery on the day Nubby Nuckols was laid to rest.
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