<EM>Hoodlum</EM>
(Note: "Life and Art"
is an occasional column that compares fiction, in various media, with the
real-life facts it is ostensibly based on.)
Larger-than-life figures
from the annals of organized crime--Bugsy Siegel, Al Capone--are often drafted
into service when Hollywood decides to make one of its perennial gangster
flicks. Whether the characters on-screen end up bearing much relation to their
models, however, varies from film to film. Hoodlum , directed by Bill
Duke, tells the story of Ellsworth "Bumpy" Johnson, a black gangster who did
battle with mobster Dutch Schultz in the 1930s. Though rooted in history, its
portrayal of Johnson fits into the great Hollywood tradition of dramatic
enhancement.
The
film's central story concerns a battle over the Harlem numbers racket. The
numbers game was an illegal daily lottery--particularly popular in Harlem--in
which, typically, players chose a number from zero to 999 and placed bets
through "policy banks." A player won if his number matched an agreed-upon daily
variable made known through some public channel--for example, the last three
digits of the total amount wagered at a given racetrack, which anyone could
learn through the sports pages. Since the game never favored the players, the
"bankers" naturally amassed large profits. Besides, the outcome was often
fixed.
Schultz was one of Harlem's most notorious fixers. When the
film begins, in the early '30s, he (played by Tim Roth) is a white Prohibition
beer baron who has muscled his way into the neighborhood numbers racket,
shutting down competitors or forcing them to join his operation. Johnson
(Laurence Fishburne), who had made his criminal reputation in 1920s Harlem,
returns from jail upset by the white incursion into the trade. Meanwhile,
powerful mobster Lucky Luciano (Andy Garcia) worries that Schultz's
numbers-racket war may be bringing too much attention to bear on organized
crime; even as he continues to do business with Schultz, he schemes to take
over the latter's operation. In the end, Johnson and Luciano form an alliance,
and Schultz is bumped off. This plot line, though embellished, is mostly based
on reality.
Dutch
Schultz and Lucky Luciano are renowned figures, staples of crime books and
studies. But who was Bumpy Johnson? And what are the major discrepancies
between the film's portrayal of him and the record? Though he may have been
overlooked in white newspapers of the time and in subsequent histories of the
era, Johnson was certainly notorious. When he died in 1968, New York's
Amsterdam News called him "Harlem's most famous underworld figure." The
film, though, exaggerates his role in several instances and gives no hint as to
what happened to him after the numbers battle was over.
For starters, Hoodlum elevates Johnson's
importance at the expense of Stephanie St. Clair, a k a Madame Queen (Cicely
Tyson), an immigrant from Martinique who became a numbers millionaire, and for
whom Johnson went to work after his release from jail. In the film, Madame
Queen effectively drops out of the picture when she is sent to jail in 1934.
But Karen E. Quiñones Miller, a staff writer at the Philadelphia
Inquirer who is writing a book on Johnson, says that while St. Clair
was in fact imprisoned for eight months, it was during 1929, before the
fight started for control of the Harlem racket.
On-screen, St. Clair is depicted as being scared of Schultz, and Johnson has to
fight in her place. In life, she was less passive. Paul Sann, former executive
editor of the New York Post , writes in Kill the Dutchman!: The Story
of Dutch Schultz (1971) that St. Clair herself stood up to Schultz, even
asking city officials to crack down on his racket. "It's Schultz's life or
mine," St. Clair reportedly said. "Dutch's men know I am the only one in Harlem
who can take back from their boss the racket he stole from my colored friends
and they know I'm going into action." And in 1935, when Schultz was dying in a
Newark hospital, having been gunned down in a mob hit, St. Clair sent a Western
Union message: "As ye sow, so shall ye reap." That telegram is omitted from the
script, which has Schultz dying immediately after being shot.
That's only one of several inaccuracies in the film's
portrayal of Schultz's murder. Viewers are left with the impression that
Johnson orchestrated the killing. Fishburne's Johnson plays Roth's Schultz off
against Garcia's Luciano, effectively duping Luciano into slaying Schultz. In
life, Schultz's murder was ordered by the national criminal syndicate formed by
Luciano and the famed mobster Meyer Lansky. agree that the main reason Schultz
was killed was because he'd recklessly threatened to rub out special prosecutor
Thomas Dewey, who was after him for tax evasion and racketeering. He'd even
proposed the hit to the syndicate, which rejected it: The mob couldn't afford
the attention such a murder would bring.
Hoodlum 's Dewey (William Atherton) bears little resemblance to the real
prosecutor, district attorney, governor, and failed presidential candidate.
Most glaringly, he's shown taking cash from Luciano, some of which is meant to
prevent him from going after Schultz. This never happened, and there's no
evidence that Dewey was corrupt. In fact, it was Dewey who later successfully
prosecuted Luciano on prostitution-related charges.
Since the film ends with Schultz's death, it
leaves little indication as to what became of Johnson. And it implies that the
Harlem racket reverted to local control. The Encyclopedia of New York
states that, after 1935, Luciano and Lansky took over the Harlem racket.
Johnson's role remained an important one, but he was definitely not his own
boss. In Black Mafia: Ethnic Succession in Organized Crime (1974),
Francis A.J. Ianni writes, "Johnson essentially worked as a middleman for the
Italian syndicate. When a black wanted to buy a franchise to establish a
numbers bank, he went to Bumpy."
As for Johnson's character,
the movie depicts him as a gangster with a heart, but a gangster nonetheless.
At one point, he throws cash to people in a local soup line. At another, the
mother of a teen-ager murdered while in Johnson's employ sobs, "People call you
a hero ... you're just a common thief," reminding us of the violence he brought
to his neighborhood. Quiñones Miller says that, though Johnson's reputation in
Harlem was mixed, he was known for taking care of the community: "Bumpy made
the Italians give money to neighborhood charitable organizations." When Johnson
died in 1968, of natural causes, Jimmy Breslin wrote a column, calling him a
Robin Hood of Harlem.
According to Helen
Lawrenson, a former Vanity Fair editor and Johnson's self-proclaimed
ex-lover, this is a romantic view of him. In her memoir, Stranger at the
Party (1975), she quotes the New York Daily Mirror on the news that
he was sentenced to six-to-10 in Sing Sing: "Harlem is in a state of rejoicing
that his reign of terror is over." But she also quotes the Amsterdam
News , which says that Johnson was "welcomed like a conqueror" when he came
back to Harlem in 1963 after doing time in Alcatraz and other prisons. The film
ends with the camera zooming toward Johnson's eye until the screen becomes more
and more grainy and ultimately black, as if to suggest that settling the big
questions of who Bumpy Johnson really was and what he meant to Harlem may be
beyond its range. After all, it's only a movie.
