It is widely believed that the numbers game started in New York's Harlem neighborhood in the 1920s, quickly spreading to other Black and working-class communities. That's because anyone could play, and everyone had a somewhat reasonable chance of winning a meaningful prize. The numbers created a thriving cultural and economic ecosystem in marginalized communities where opportunity, jobs, and even hope were in short supply.
It helped that the numbers game was easy to understand and easy to play. All that was required to take bets was a pad and pencil and enough ready cash to promptly pay the winners. Richmond native Robert Deane Pharr, author of the excellent 1969 novel The Book of Numbers, suggests the game migrated from Harlem down through the South by way of Black waiters who traveled a circuit working at popular resorts and conventions throughout the 1930s.
"You just let somebody pick any number from zero to 999 and place any amount of money they want on it to come out that day. Every day but Sunday a new number comes out. Understand?" the lead character Dave patiently explains to a potential recruit in Pharr's novel. "Take, for instance, a guy likes 2-4-7 and plays it with you. If 2-4-7 comes out, he gets paid at 600-to-1 odds. ... He wins thirty bucks for a nickel. Three hundred dollars on a fifty-cent hit. Not bad, eh? You won't have to beg people to try to win money like that. Once people hear that you're writing numbers, they will come to you.'"
“From the get go, the numbers racket did indeed focus on the poor ethnic neighborhoods and it spread out from there," U.S. lottery expert Howard Jay Klein told me in a 2019 interview. "The numbers racket was a major employer in Harlem with the banks processing bets, the runners, the salespeople, running into hundreds of people... You could bet anything on a number, a half dollar or a dime in some, with a big prize looming. When someone hit the numbers for something like a $600 payoff, they were the best marketing tools the racketeers could have,” Klein, the founding publisher of Gaming Business magazine, said.
The winning three-number number combinations typically were determined by daily horse race or stock market results -- any sequence of numbers that were pubicly accessible to everyone but conceivably could not be manipulated by anyone.
Bridgett Davis, whose mother bankrolled a numbers syndicate in Detroit and who wrote about it in her recent bestselling book The World According to Fannie Davis, says it is hard to overstate the cultural and economic importance of the numbers. The racket helped fill a void in an economy that often excluded many African-Americans. Big wins financed college educations, new cars, home purchases and family vacations. "Pushing against rampant discrimination, local numbers operators used their profits to found legitimate businesses, providing migrant Blacks with all kinds of access they wouldn’t otherwise have had," Davis writes. "They launched insurance companies, newspapers, loan offices, real estate firms, scholarships for college and more."
A 1939 Paramount News clip illustrated the Harlem numbers racket, showing wagers being accepted by a barber, a newsstand vendor and a doorman. [Sherman Grinberg Library, Clip #516199842, created Jan. 1, 1935. Accessed via Getty Images website]
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In cities like Richmond, the numbers racket depended on a heavy volume of betting conducted every day by hundreds, if not thousands, of people. The operations were relatively sophisticated, too, with street-level "writers," middle-management "pickup men" and clerical workers who would sort and tally the slips at a secret "count house" each day. Those who were arrested often were in and out of jail quickly thanks to bail bondsmen and lawyers readily provided by the kingpins. Besides the occasional big winner, the only people who made really large sums of money from numbers were those who backed the rackets.
In major cities to the north, white gangsters moved into numbers in the '30s to replace the income they lost from bootlegging once Prohibition ended. The Mob's involvement brought occasional flashes of violence between competing syndicates and frequent allegations of payoffs to corrupt cops and politicians. It was widely believed that profits from numbers helped fund the Mob's efforts to diversify into prostitution and drugs.
By 1936, the illegal numbers racket had taken full-root in Richmond, leading federal, state and local authorities to bust 60 people, including Harry Donovan, in a spectacular springtime roundup. Authorities seized $8,500 in cash from a safe in Donovan's Carytown home. Officers even removed the rings from Louise's fingers. Just up the street at an apartment rented by Donovan's sister-in-law, authorities seized sacks of coins, adding machines, a pistol and a shotgun. Donovan was not criminally charged, but he would spend three years battling the IRS over unpaid taxes, ultimately settling for less than one-tenth of what the IRS said he owed.
A 1936 article splashed across the front page of The Richmond Times-Dispatch describes a series of sensational raids targeting the numbers rackets. [Credit: Richmond Times-Dispatch, May 21, 1936, pA1]
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Newspaper coverage indicated those arrested in the 1936 raids included "some obviously well-to-do and others shabbily dressed," and stated that numbers players could be found "in almost every office in Richmond.”
Clearly, people in Richmond enjoyed playing the numbers. They could bet as little as a penny, nickel or dime, and they often could wager on credit through a favored "writer" and settle-up at the end of the week. Bettors could conveniently place bets at the front door of their homes or at the office, and the winnings were not taxed. The numbers game was extremely popular among the thousands of blue-collar workers employed around-the-clock at Richmond's massive cigarette factories.
By 1948, the numbers in Richmond had achieved a certain level of community acceptance, and the local newspaper said placing a bet was surprisingly easy: "If a player wishes to part with a few cents, all he has to do is look up a numbers writer. In downtown Richmond, that is not a difficult thing to do. Just about every office building, factory, shoeshine parlor, confectionary or lunch counter has a writer, some working full time while others do the work as a sideline to their regular employment.”
"I think there was a general knowledge in Richmond that there was gambling, there was something called the numbers racket, but it appeared to most people to be a rather benign thing. They looked upon it as an outlet, especially for the lower-income groups," retired newspaperman Ed Grimsley, 92, recently told me. As a young Times-Dispatch reporter, Grimsley covered City Hall and later served as editor of the editorial page. "People were always hoping to get a break, always hoping to find the path to the gold mine and so forth. And for as little as a dime, they could play at something and get their name in the pot, so to speak. And who knows? They might hit it. And some did."
By the time numbers kingpin Harry Donovan ultimately was taken-down by the IRS in 1960, federal authorities estimated the numbers racket in Richmond represented a $3 million dollar a year underground economy. By 1985, a Richmond grand jury estimated it had grown into a $50 million a year criminal enterprise. And soon after that, Virginia joined the parade of states launching their own state-backed legal lotteries to support schools and other public priorities. Almost overnight, playing the numbers, once widely viewed as a criminal vice, was being marketed as a civic virtue.
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