the early '50s.) Meanwhile West Indian blacks introduced the numbers game-another form of lottery-into New York City in the early '20s. 1930, West Indians such as Jose Enrique (Henry) Miro, "Big Joe" Ison, and Everett Watson had built powerful empires in the burgeoning ghettos of New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Detroit.
Nothing hastened the spread of gambling as much as the telephone. By 1914, bookies such as Arnold Rothstein and Frank Erickson of New York had learned to elude police...