In Running the Numbers, Matthew Vaz tells the history of urban gambling in midcentury America, with a focus on the policy game in Chicago and the numbers in New York. In doing so, he unveils a vast pseudo-underground economy that served as a way of life for many in black urban communities, and as a source of financial envy for the white mob, beginning in the 1920s and persisting through the 1970s. In a condensed yet meticulously detailed seven-chapter account, Vaz describes how black neighborhoods in the urban north endured years of corrupt policing and political power struggle over the legality of their enterprise before being left out in the cold when it was taken over by the states and transformed into the modern-day lottery.
Chapter 1 gives an overview of the two most popular gambling games of midcentury urban America—the policy game and the numbers—each of which gained popularity through simplicity, consistency, and by allowing players to pick their own lucky numbers. Chapters 1 and 2 reveal the centrality of gambling in most local political discussions of the time, namely surrounding the question of whether to target gambling for enforcement or to legalize and capitalize on it through taxation. Chapter 3 moves to the topic of policing urban gambling, a story rife with warrantless raids and corruption in many forms. Perhaps most famous among these is “the pad”—the list of gambling operators who purchased immunity from enforcement, enabling the police to take their slice of the pie while at the same time abusing and suppressing anyone who did not pay up. Here, Vaz resurrects a fundamental yet forgotten puzzle piece in the history of the relationship between the police and the black community. It is certainly no coincidence that the Civil Rights Era emerged at the tail end of a half century of corrupt and abusive police gambling suppression.
A key strength of the book is Chapter 3, where Vaz contrasts social control responses to the policy and numbers games (predominantly played in black communities) and other forms of gambling, like bingo (played by middle class women and churches). While numbers players were called “parasites” by New York politicians and hyper-policed (p. 76), bingo played by “housewive[s]” (p. 74) was allowed to flourish under the radar by the NYPD. Incredibly, in 1958 a state amendment was passed to exclude bingo from the antigambling law. Meanwhile, in other cities, arrests for gambling showed colossal racial disparities while arrests for other offenses like disorderly conduct, vagrancy, and intoxication failed to show the same (see Figure 1 on p. 79). These disparities emerged despite the surge of interest in the numbers among the white working class beginning in the 1940s (p. 163). Overall, Vaz offers damning evidence of the subjective criminalization of gambling in midcentury America on the basis of its popularity and profitability among black citizens.
Another highlight is Chapter 4, where Vaz uncovers the central role of gambling in the “due process revolution” (p. 104) of the 1960s, when a slew of Supreme Court rulings strengthened the rights of the accused. Most famous is Mapp v. Ohio (1961) where the Court ruled the exclusionary rule applied to evidence gathered through warrantless searches and seizures. It is less well known that Dollree Mapp was a known gambler arrested on possession of obscene materials and gambling paraphernalia (the latter of which was tossed out early on) as part of a run-of-the-mill warrantless raid characteristic of the time period. The Court ruled in Mapp that the evidence gathered from her house was inadmissible, ending a reign of warrantless raids used to temporarily inconvenience and harass gambling operators, despite their illegality. Another pervasive tool put to rest at this time was the “phantom informant” commonly offered as probable cause by officers for stopping, searching, and arresting known gamblers. Through the Court's ruling in Beck v. Ohio (1964), officers would need more than simple knowledge of past criminal history to initiate a stop. Together, these cases severely limited the viability of many commonly used yet legally questionable law enforcement tools and tactics.
Finally, in Chapter 5, Vaz describes how gambling was legalized and taken over by state governments starting in the 1970s. The takeover was driven by a perfect storm of factors—the increasing popularity of gambling among Americans, the states' desires to profit off of gambling, the collective incense among cops over recent Supreme Court rulings, and their utter failure to curtail illegal gambling. Despite decades of local efforts to legalize and establish community control over gambling, which would have allowed profits to remain in the pockets of black citizens who made their livings creating and operating the enterprise, emerging antitaxation attitudes and racism enabled politicians to cast people of color as welfare cheats who would spend tax dollars on lottery tickets. The successful rhetoric enabled the states to steal the numbers from black communities and establish what is now the modern-day lottery. In a twist of tragic irony, the takeover desolated thousands of black citizens in cities across America, forcing many to solicit welfare assistance to replace lost income. At the same time, Vaz argues the lottery is now a multibillion-dollar industry propelled in large part by corporate greed, blackmail, and fraud, strongly calling into question the justification of the legalized lottery as a crime reduction tactic.
As a policing scholar I both enjoyed and greatly benefited from reading this book. It filled many holes in my knowledge of police-community relations in the 20th century, policing and race, constitutional law, and—of course—the lottery. What I found most shocking from the tale, however, is the likely centrality of midcentury urban gambling in the shaping of the Civil Rights Era and subsequent racial reckonings of the 20th and 21st centuries; of the war on drugs and modern-day urban drug enforcement; of the political campaigns of many well-known actors; and of the existing constitutional protections of the accused; and yet how little I knew of this story. Running the Numbers ensures that urban gambling reclaim its rightful place in American history and remind us of the racist foundations of many of our taken for granted modern day luxuries, including the ability to purchase a lottery ticket.
