In 1946, four Italian mobsters dragged a black man from his Chicago South Side home in broad daylight, threw him into the back of a Lincoln, and held him for a week. His family paid $100,000 in ransom to secure his release. But instead of fleeing into hiding, that man walked into a meeting with the Italian Mafia a week later and demanded they pay him $200,000 a year for the rest of his life to stay retired. The mob agreed.
His name was Edward Jones, and he was one of a small group of black gambling operators who built enormous fortunes running illegal numbers games—known as policy or the lottery—for decades. They avoided the violence associated with drug trafficking, and most escaped federal prosecution. Today, state governments run the same game legally: every lottery drawing and scratch-off ticket is a direct descendant of the operations these men perfected. The story begins with John “Mushmouth” Johnson, the man who started it all in Chicago.
In 1897, during the height of Jim Crow segregation, a black man owned the most popular gambling house in the city. The Chicago Tribune reported it on its front page. Johnson’s doors were open to everyone—black, white, Chinese, Italian—and white millionaires lined up to get in. His secret was simple: he paid every cop, politician, and ward boss in the city.
He understood that cash is the only language a crooked man respects. Johnson ran his operation for 17 years without arrest. He died of kidney failure in 1907. His sister inherited his fortune and married Jesse Binga, who used the gambling money to open one of the first black-owned banks in American history.
A gambling empire became a banking empire through marriage. The government never figured out how the game started. Decades later, Fanny Davis brought the numbers game to Detroit. In 1958, she and her family arrived from Nashville.
Her husband couldn’t find work, so she opened a numbers operation out of her kitchen. She had no army of runners: just a phone, a ledger, and a drawer full of cash. She stayed deliberately small, never expanding, never competing with larger operators. For 30 years, from 1958 to the late 1980s, she was never arrested once.
No jail, no federal courthouse, no agents at the door. She died free and rich. Her daughter Bridget later wrote the book “The World According to Fanny Davis” in 2019, which is now being developed into a movie. The government still doesn’t know how much money she made.
In the 1930s, another Detroit numbers king named John Roxborough saw potential in a 20-year-old boxer from Alabama. Roxborough signed him, paid for his training, and hired his coaches. Two years later, that boxer knocked out Primo Carnera and Max Baer and became heavyweight champion of the world. His name was Joe Louis, and his career—including his iconic knockout of Max Schmeling in front of Hitler’s propaganda team—was financed by black Detroit betting on numbers.
Roxborough did eventually serve a short prison term for running policy, but by then Joe Louis had made him respectable. Senators shook his hand, and he was invited to the White House. He spent the rest of his life as a businessman and philanthropist. The federal government prosecuted him for numbers but never touched his real empire.
They never understood that the numbers built a heavyweight champion. Eddie Wingate also ran Detroit numbers in the 1950s, but he faced a different challenge: the Italian Mafia wanted in on the trade. The Detroit partnership tried to muscle into the Paradise Valley numbers racket, but Wingate refused to pay a single dollar. He sent their men home, protected his runners, and personally intimidated the mobsters out of Detroit’s numbers trade—a rare moment in American organized crime history where the Italian Mafia backed down.
Wingate ran his operation for over two decades without a federal indictment or RICO case. He invested in nightclubs, hotels, and a record label called Golden World Records, which recorded early Motown-era music and was later sold to Berry Gordy. The government finally caught up to him in 1977, but not for being a kingpin. They charged him with tax evasion—the same charge used against Al Capone.
He served his time, came home, and died in 1990 at 73, wealthy and free. In Pittsburgh, Gus Greenlee pulled off a different kind of feat. In 1948, the city named him businessman of the year. The mayor shook his hand and newspapers ran the story.
What Pittsburgh didn’t know was that Greenlee was the biggest numbers king in western Pennsylvania. Greenlee arrived in Pittsburgh as a World War I veteran who had taken shrapnel at the Battle of Verdun. Unable to find a paying job, he drove a taxi and ran bootleg whiskey in the trunk. By 1926, he and his partner Woogie Harris had introduced the numbers game to the region.
By 1930, the Pittsburgh Courier was calling them the “Negro overlords of the Hill District. ”
Then Greenlee did something unusual: he got famous. He opened the Crawford Grill, a legendary jazz club where Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, and Ella Fitzgerald performed. He bought a stable of boxers, including the first black light heavyweight champion, John Henry Lewis.
And he bought the Pittsburgh Crawfords, a Negro League baseball team featuring Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, Cool Papa Bell, and Judy Johnson—five future Hall of Famers, all paid with numbers money. In 1933, he built Greenlee Field, a 7,500-seat stadium that was one of the only black-built and black-owned stadiums in American history. The federal government watched him for decades but never convicted him of being a kingpin. He died of a stroke in 1952 and is buried in Pittsburgh’s Allegheny Cemetery with full honors.
But the most audacious story belongs to Edward Jones. He started writing numbers in the back of his family’s Chicago tailor shop in 1930. By 1938, he was making $10,000 a day. By 1946, he and his brothers George and McKissick were worth $25 million in cash, held in 25 different banks, plus real estate across the United States, Europe, and Mexico.
They opened the Ben Franklin Department Store on 47th Street, the only black-owned department store in the world at the time. Quincy Jones, who grew up around these men, called Ed Jones “the Robin Hood of Chicago. ”
Then the Italian Outfit moved in. Sam Giancana had shared a prison cell with Ed Jones during a short tax evasion stretch and learned exactly how much money the Jones brothers were making.
At Giancana’s direction, the Outfit kidnapped Ed Jones and demanded a $100,000 ransom. After the family paid, Jones walked out alive and made an unprecedented decision. He quit. But on his own terms: he would leave Chicago forever, move to his estate in Mexico, never run policy again, and the Italian Mafia would pay him $200,000 a year for the rest of his life.
The mob agreed. The Jones family boarded the Golden State Limited train, crossed the border, and disappeared into Mexico. Ed Jones lived out his life on a ranch, watched his children and grandchildren grow up, and died wealthy and free. In 2022, his granddaughter Harriet Marian Jones made a documentary about him called “King of Kings: Chasing Edward Jones,” with Quincy Jones appearing in the film.
The federal government never caught Ed Jones, never broke the mafia agreement, and never got a single dollar of the Jones brothers’ fortune back. When state governments legalized the lottery starting in the 1960s, they did not invent anything. They copied these men. The three-digit daily drawings, the runner systems, the payout structures—every piece of the modern state lottery industry was built on a game black Americans had been running for 70 years.
Governments legalized it, taxed it, and then drove the black operators out of business with prosecutions and crackdowns. But the men who built the system understood something the government did not: that a financial empire could be built inside a country that refused to serve them. They paid off police, laundered money through department stores, jazz clubs, baseball teams, and boxing gyms, and most of them walked away free—dying of old age in Mexico, Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Chicago with the secrets of their success buried with them.