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Fact Check: Investigator Eunice Hunton Carter Played Key Role in Taking Down Mob Pioneer Lucky Luciano

Fact Check: Investigator Eunice Hunton Carter Played Key Role in Taking Down Mob Pioneer Lucky Luciano

Luciano

Eunice Carter Courtesy Gordon Coster, Time Line Pictures, Fair use image

Charles “Lucky” Luciano was an Italian-born gangster who operated mainly in the United States. He was also the first official boss of the modern Genovese crime family. And it was a Black female investigator named Eunice Hunton Carter who helped bring down Luciano, the most important Mafia crime boss in New York City at the time.

Carter was the first Black woman to work in the New York prosecutor’s office and the only woman and Black person on special prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey’s investigative team.

The investigation led to Luciano being tried and convicted in 1936 in what was dubbed the “Trial of the Century” for compulsory prostitution and running a prostitution racket. It was Carter who made the connection between the mob and prostitution, Untapped Cities reported. At the time, this was the largest organized crime prosecution in U.S. history.

He was sentenced to 30 to 50 years in prison; however, during World War II, the Department of the Navy struck a deal through Luciano’s Jewish Mob associate Meyer Lansky to provide naval intelligence. Due to his alleged wartime cooperation, Luciano’s sentence was commuted in 1946 on the condition that he be deported to Italy. Luciano died in Italy in 1962; he was buried in the U.S.

Carter was born on July 16, 1899, in Atlanta, Georgia, and raised in Brooklyn, New York. Carter’s family was known for social activism. Her grandfather was a slave who purchased his own freedom and went on to become a successful businessman in Canada. Carter’s father, William Alphaeus Sr., was one of the first top Black administrators of the international YMCA. He was responsible for integrating the YMCAs in the American South during the Jim Crow era. Her mother, Addie Waite Hunton, was an organizer in the Black Women’s Club movement. The Black Women’s Club was a reform movement that focused on providing educational and social services to the poor, according to Black Past.

Carter herself went on to become an international peace and women’s rights activist, political office seeker, and crime fighter. Carter received B.A. and M.A. degrees from Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1921. While working on her master’s thesis at Smith College, she met then-Massachusetts Governor Calvin Coolidge, who became her advisor. Following graduation in 1921, Carter worked as a social worker. In 1924, she married dentist Lyle Carter. She had a son. She decided to continue her studies and began studying law at Fordham University. In 1934 became the first African-American woman to pass the New York State Bar.

By 1924, Carter had entered the political arena and was nominated by the Republican Party to represent New York’s 19th District in the State Assembly. She was the first African American to win the Republican nomination for that office. Carter narrowly lost by 1,600 votes. In 1938, she was named to Dewey’s staff to lead the Abandonment Bureau of Women’s Courts. In 1945, she entered private practice. In 1947, Carter was one of 15 American women invited to attend the first International Assembly on Women in Paris. The event focused on “human and educational problems affecting peace and freedom.” During the event, Carter and Madame Simone Sohier-Brunard, of Belgium, the president of the Union of Colonial Women, compared conditions in African colonies with the status of African Americans in the United States, according to Black Past.

Carter was also a consultant to the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations’ International Council of Women. In 1955, she was elected to chair the International Conference of Non-Governmental Organizations. Two years later, she was elected Chairman of the Conference of International Organizations in Consultative Status with the United Nations.

She worked with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the National Urban League, the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), and was legal advisor to the National Council of Negro Women and field representative for the Manhattan Office of Civilian Defense.

Carter died in New York City on January 25, 1970, at the age of 70.

Eunice Carter Courtesy Gordon Coster, Time Line Pictures, Fair use image