Sergeants rate $25 and lieutenants $50, with higher officers greased accordingly.
The cops collect the take from the numbers men and bookmakers and deliver it to their higher-ups, who then transmit the “documents” to the gang collector.
One reason for this complicated business is a shrewd point of law to get around the income tax laws. The government will not allow a deduction for graft to public officials but if the payoff is taken off the top before the mobsters get theirs, then all they need to pay on is what they receive, the net.
Baltimore is a way-station on the international underground railroad that transports narcotics. Considerable foreign stuff comes in through the port. It is also brought down from New York in quantity and stored in the Italian and Negro sections, awaiting transportation in smaller packages to the District of Columbia.
Local street sales of narcotics are concentrated on Pennsylvania Avenue in the Negro district, where individual caps of heroin, morphine and reefers are available cheap. Puerto Rican and Italian peddlers work the white dives in East Baltimore Street, where they sell to whores, strippers and B girls, many of whom use it and others sell it.
Baltimore’s Little Harlem—Pennsylvania Avenue—is more peaceful than the Negro section of any other large town we ever gandered.
The cops don’t let the colored places get away with anywhere near what they act blind to in the white spots on East Baltimore. Some of the cleanest and best night clubs in town are the black-and-tan resorts in the Pennsylvania Avenue district. Though whites are welcome, they seldom visit them.
Gamby’s is an orderly colored night club with fine Negro entertainment and a small but excellent line of tan chorines. There was no stripping here, though one pretty wench, billed as an exotic dancer, shook swiveled hips but took off nothing. It occurred to us that we had never seen a Negro stripper anywhere. The girls of that race refuse to vulgarize themselves in public to the extent that many white girls do. Not only was Gamby’s show clean and entertaining, but the customers, all colored, behaved well and were better dressed than the social sewage we saw in most of the white dives.
We saw no soliciting here. But there was a one-armed bandit in the bar. Willie Adams is the numbers boss of Darktown.
The Negro joints close on the dot, and then the streets fill up with thousands of laughing, shouting, usually sober merrymakers. White policemen patrol the streets in pairs, but at ease. We saw one buck pull a razor on his sugar in front of Gamby’s. Two white cops in a squad car drove off.