[applause] >> thank you so much. my name is arlo haskell, and i am the executive director of the key west literary seminar. [applause] before i get started, let me make just one quick housekeeping announcement. we're going to do the question and answer session a little bit differently today. there will be stationary mics in each aisle, and if you would like to ask a question, you should get up out of your seat and come to the mic and ask your question. when we get to that point. okay. it is a pleasure to welcome you all to the san carlos institute and to the 35th annual key west literary seminar, revealing power: the literature of politics. this sunday afternoon session is free and open to the public. this is our gift to the community. and it wouldn't be possible without the gifts that many others have made to us that support our operations throughout the year. i'd particularly like to thank peggy whose support makes this free sunday public session possible. thank you. [applause] and in addition to all of you who are here joining us in key west on this warm january afternoon, i'd like to welcome those of you who are watching at home on television on c-span's booktv. we have a video crew here today. they've been here since this morning, and we're grateful for the opportunity to bring what we do here in key west to the viewers of booktv. if you like what you see here this afternoon, i hope you'll consider joining us for our 36th annual seminar next year. if you picked up a program book on your way in and you flip over to the back cover, you'll see our topic next year is writers of the caribbean. we have an extraordinary lineup p already. we have jamaica kincaid, we have marlon james, we have a whole host of other wonderful writers. it's going to be a terrific program. i hope you will consider joining us. if you would like to learn more about next year's ram or about what we do -- program or about what we do, go to kwls.org. and speaking of our web site, i wanted to talk about kind of a new or kind of a revamped feature of our web site. we've just relaunched a kind of totally new, redesigned site. and if you look around on there at our audio archives, you will find now more than 500 hours of audio recordings spanning the past 30 years of the key west literary seminar featuring, truly, some of the greatest writers of our time. most of these are available to listen to right away on our web site. others are available to request, and we will send them to you, and it's really just a terrific resource. we have, you know, like i say, it's 500 hours, but to name just a few, we have gore vidal, junot diaz, elmore leonard, marilyn robinson, a whole host of incredible writers. if you are a teacher, as i know many in the audience are, these recordings make terrific educational resources. we really urge teachers everywhere to use these in the classroom, and we're always interested in hearing about your experiences using these recordings, hearing from your students about how this goes and how this helps to strengthen your curriculum. okay. we have a wonderful program in store for you today including robert a. caro, billy collins, gail collins, brenda wineapple. but first, it is a pleasure and an honor to welcome back to our stage someone who was first here with us, i think, in 2013, a writer of exceptional intellectual charity and grace -- clarity and grace with, steven l. carter. [applause] >> well, thank you, arlo. and thank you. it's a real pleasure to be back in key west. it's a wonderful community, this is a wonderful event, and it's always a great joy. my subject, as you i assume saw from the program, is the black woman who prosecuted lucky louis january know -- luciano. and since i am probably better known as a novelist, you probably assumed this is fiction. actually, this is nonfiction. this is the subject of a book of mine that will be coming out this fall be, and i wanted to give you a little preliminary of what that is about. i'm going to speak for just a few minutes, about probably 15 or 20 minutes, and then i want to take your questions and comments so we'll have a conversation about it. in order to tell you about the black woman who prosecuted lucky luciano, we have to first talk about who was lucky luciano. there's an image of him, a kind of romantic image in the public mind sometimes from some of the movies and television shows and even some of the novels that mention him. lucky luciano, though, was a brutal and savage mobster who rose to the top of the new york criminal underworld at a time when the ethnic gangs were fighting for superiority. the irish gangs had been almost exterminated, although some of them had also moved on to the police force at the time. [laughter] the german -- i'm sorry, the italian and jewish gangs were fighting for superiority in the rackets particularly in manhattan. and at this time, the biggest racketeer in new york was widely believed to be a man named doug schultz who was the last of the kingpins from the jewish gangs in new york. he was being challenged by the upstart italian immigrants and their gangs, and there was all this screaming in the newspapers that we can't let this go on, we have to prosecute these gangsters. nobody but low-level hoods ever got arrested, what are we going to do about that. and the answer was, nothing. for years and years and years, new york politicians and new york d.a.s and new york police, large numbers of them corrupt, didn't do anything. didn't do anything. finally in 1935 under enormous pressure, a special prosecutor was appointed, and that was thomas dewey who became famous for prosecuting the mob. he entitled his book about it "20 against the underworld," and, indeed, the first thing he did when he took office was he began to hire lawyers. he wanted people of integrity, he wants people who could -- he wanted people who could be trusted. he hired 20 lawyers, very famously, 20 lawyers. nineteen of them were white men, and the 20th was a black woman. the 20th was a black woman. and the black woman is the one i want to talk about a little bit today. so who was this black woman? well, she was born eunice hunten in atlanta, georgia, in 1899. she had a younger brother. they were, both of them, the descendants of slaves. three of their four grandparents had been enslaved. in fact, their father's father -- a man named stanton hunten who had been enslaved in virginia -- escaped three times before finally being able to, and he was captured and brought back before finally being able to buy his freedom, he made his way to ontario, and it was there as some of you may know from the history that john brown, the abolitionist, planned his murderous raid on harper's ferry, virginia, that was one of the precipitating events of the civil war. there is a legend in the hunten family that this raid was planned at stanton hunten, that's the formerly enslaved grandfather of eunice, at stanton hunten's kitchen table. that may or may not be true, but certainly he was involved in the planning and, indeed, when john brown was caught and hanged, that among the documents found on his person was a list of his supporters, and stanton hunten's name was there on the list. so stanton hunten stayed in canada pretty much after that. eunice's parents were william hunten and addy can hunten. -- addy hunten. addy, who became a very well known naacp activist in the 1920s, in fact, she was -- she had an interesting job. her job was to go into places where the klan, the revived klan of the 1920s had become so furiously active that the african-american people who lived there had been cowed and crushed, and her job was to go into these communities by herself and go to public meetings and try to rouse people's spirits and plant naacp branches or revive the old ones. william hunten, eunice's father, was the first black international secretary hired by the ymca. and you have to picture the ymca not as a nonprofit that runs health clubs but, rather, as this enormous and actually quite wealthy international organization with chapters all over the world. and william traveled the world on their behalf. so the parents were both these activists. and so it's little surprise that eunice grew up quite ambitious. she attended smith college where she received her master's and her bachelor's in four years and was only the second student at smith ever to do that. she attended 230rd ham law school -- fordham law school. and important to the story, in 1944 the republican party that ran new york city at time, and as a footnote it's important to remember this is a time when virtually the entirety of african america voted republican routinely. so she was republican as were her parents and so on. so in 1944 she ran for state assembly. now, the only reason that matters -- she lost, by the way. the only reason she ran for state assembly is that in the days of machine politics, if you were the machine candidate and you lost, the machine's job was to find you a job. now, you have to understand, she's graduated law school at this time, she's a black woman practicing law in new york. she's hung out her shingle on seventh avenue way up in harlem. she doesn't have a lot of clients. they're mostly misdemeanors. she did a few wills and so on. she'd done some trial work but not much. the following, early the following year riots erupted in harlem, and she became the secretary of the harlem riot commission which brought her a certain degree of public attention so that when tom dewey hired his 20 lawyers, he hired her from the riot commission that had brought her the public attention. all right, she goes to work for dewey. now remember, dewey's job was to take down organized crime in new york. doug schultz, unfortunately, gets himself murdered as underworld figures tend to do. lucky luciano becomes the most prominent crime boss, so now dewey's job is to take down lucky luciano. the problem is how to do it. luciano was much more clever than schultz, much better insulated. the reason that schultz was killed was because he was thinking of killing dewey which the other mobsters wouldn't abide because the net was tightening around him. luciano was very well insulated at street-level operations. it was very unclear how they were going to be able to get to him. every -- because they knew he ran the major rackets in the city. they knew he ran numbers, drugs, they knew he ran a protection racket, lots and lots of things, but they couldn't tie any of it to him. there were too many layers of insulation between the boss and what happened on the streetment well, how were they to do it? well, i told you that he hired eunice in august of 1945, and after he hired eunice he began to parcel out among the 20 lawyers the work of investigating organized crime in new york. and be so these lawyers over here were put on corruption in the unions, and these were put on corruption in the trucking industry, and these over here were put on drugs, and these over here were put on strongarm, and these on bribery and so on and so on and so on. and eunice, the one woman in the office, she was put on prostitution. [laughter] and the reason she was put on prostitution is because nobody thought prostitution was important. there was a long history of when women were prosecutors -- the first come along in the 1880s -- routinely if you were a female and you were a prosecutor, you went to what were called the women's courts which meant you did, basically, abandonment cases, child abuse cases and prostitution cases. and the women's courts at that time -- this is actually very important work. but it's not work that grabs headlines. and the women's courts were seen as places from which your career would never emerge. you were sent to women's courts, and you would spend your entire life there, entire career there, never do anything else. well, she wasn't sent to women's courts, but it was the rough equivalent. she was to investigate prostitution. dewey was very clear, prostitution was not important. he made this clear again and again and again. he told his staff, i am not here on a moral crusade. i am not going to go after the mob for prostitution. we're going to get them for something important. so she's sitting in her office, 19 white men are working on what dewey says is important, and here's the black woman in her office -- which, by the way, was at the furthest end of the furthest corridor on the 14th floor of the woolworth building, in new york at that time the third highest building in the world which is where the offices were. and she's down there in this little cubicle working on prostitution. dewey goes on the radio and makes a speech to the people of new york, we're here, we're investigating crimes in your neighborhoods, if you have a complaint, come down to the office and tell us about it. and the citizens came in droves. and the citizens came in droves to the office. and it quickly became clear that although some of them, yeah, in the one might say there's a stick-up artist in the building, and this one might say there's a drug dealer on the corner, the main complaint was prostitution. the police never come. i think they're on the take. something should be done about it. the receptionist would say go down to the end of the hall and knock on mrs. carter's door. that's what they would say. so eunice handled all these people coming with their complaints. and letters would come to the office. letters would come into the office with people complaining about prostitution, and the letters would all be dumped on her desk. and if it happened sometime when she was out of the office and one of the white men was therefore forced to listen to a complaint about prostitution in the neighborhood, he would write up a memo and drop it on her desk. at some point some of the civic reformers who had compiled this enormous multivolume report on prostitution in new york that no one had done anything about, these were sort of these old, genteel republican gentlemen with the reform committees in new york at the time, and they spent many years supported by the rockefeller foundation trying to locate where the houses of prostitution were. they had this great report, nobody ever cared about it. so one of these gentlemen wrote to dewey -- actually, didn't write to dewey. this such a classic story for this era, he was playing tennis with a guy who knew a guy at the new york law firm of cromwell who knew a guy in dewey's office. and he said, you know, do you think you could get your friend who knows a guy who knows a guy in dewey's office and tell him we have this big report and there was never anything done about? he said, sure. his guy approaches the cromwell guy who approached the dewey guy, and they said sure, and they got this huge report, and they dumped it on her desk. they said go through this report and see if there's anything in it. well, what's interesting about all this is that eunice, rather than take all this and say i'm not going to do it, her view was that she was going to go over onto the attack. let the other people in the office go and look at the strong arm, let the other people in the office go and look at the bribery, the trucks. if this is what she was going to do, she's going to do it. she begins by patiently going through complaint after complaint by complaint, by interviewing police officer after police officer who's worked these cases. she actually begins to build a picture of the structure of prostitution in new york. she develops the theory which at the time almost nobody believed that the many brothels in new york, and they were all over the place, were actually not independent contractors as widely believed, but all paid tribute to the same syndicate. this was her vision. and so the office is still having trouble finding a way to get to luciano, so eventually she goes to dewey and says, this is my theory. this is what's going on. you can get luciano this way. this money is trickling up to him. dewey is skeptical. dewey is highly skeptical. but nevertheless, having nothing else to do, to go on, he says, fine, you can have one other assistant to work with you, and he eventually became a very distinguished federal judge in new york, as some of you may know. so eunice and murray spend another couple of months developing this case. they're allowed, finally, to ask for wiretaps. as a result of the wiretaps, they figured out the structure, the women when they're arrested, they always get out the next day because there are these people called the bookers who book clients for them or call them and tell them where to go. the bookers bail them out, the crooked lawyers bail them out, they got it on wiretaps. they come up with an audacious plan which dewey approves. they, in 1936 on january 31st, they begin arresting all of the bookers, the people who bail the women out. and all of the gunmen who protect the bookers and who also hustle the various brothels that try not to pay tribute. they arrest all these people. they're all off the street. that night they raid -- well, they're supposed to raid every brothel in manhattan. they have these long lists. actually, they only end up raiding half of them. no one knows actually why. they arrest over a hundred women who are all brought to the woolworth building, and they're crowded onto, now, two floors. they're all over the place, and each one, it's eunice's job as each one comes in, she does what's called tagging them. she writes up a report and so on and so on, and they're stuck in an office somewhere or a hallway, wherever it may be. and you have to understand that in order to avoid any problem of, any problem of corruption, any problem with a news leak -- now, the raid was a big secret. most of the assistants, dewey's own lawyers other than eunice and murray, didn't know about the raids until they were happening, until they were told you're going to stay late tonight because everybody was there to do some of the intake on the people who were going to be arrested. the vice squad, no one in the police vice squad was told about the raids. the raids were conducted by plain-clothed detectives drawn from a variety of bureaus around new york. not one of whom was paired with his regular partner. they separated them, they had them stand on street corners and at 9:00 -- i'm sorry, at 8:55 p.m. they were each handed an envelope which had the instructions of where they were going to raid and what they were supposed to do next. they had no idea until they got those envelopes what they were supposed to do, and the secret was actually kept really well. .. the constitution, that is -- the constitution to mean someone is forced into it someone took money. so the crime of prostitution, now you have to pick who is in charge of developing this. eunice has done the work already but she's a black woman so he doesn't pick her. he picks one of his wife male assistant who is investigating the bakery industry, says to him we are going to go after prostitution. i know you know nothing about this but it is your job to put the case together, pick any system you want, put the case together, four more white men to put the case together and eunice is sent back to her cubicle but as it turns out, they need her expertise, the exhibits she creates, the model she creates how the thing works. luciano is convicted. he is convicted in the end and in fairness to do we on the day of the conviction in his press conference he said he couldn't have done it without two of his assistants and one of the two that he names is eunice. the thing you need to understand is the luciano news is all over the world and newspapers and magazines all across the country were covering it almost day today and after the conviction, the summer of 1936, eunice has become, putting entertainers aside, one of the famous black women in the united dates of america. getting awards and degrees to speak here and there, the second largest circulation magazine in the country, a long series about the trial and the hero of the series is eunice. life magazine does a feature about her. on and on she is at the summit of fame and i can imagine her sitting there in summer of 1936 thinking the world is my oyster. i can do anything i want to do. what am i going to do next? she does is things next, she handles other prosecutions, she prosecutes a man who was the silent film king. although the talkies had taken over for silents he was still, if not the most powerful, one of the most powerful moguls in the film industry as she prosecutes him on a gun possession charge where she told the court it is a case she got shot in the neck and he claims he did by accident but it is clear he didn't. the court accepted his plea because we know something happening. she twice prosecutes someone named anna smith who was well known in the 1930s and 40s, doctor and a swift ran from the danish institute which was advertising, was a place he went for counseling, and all these people were counselors, doctor swift was different counseling, something not ordinarily thought of. not once but twice because after she served time the first time she went back into the same business. eunice had political ambitions, she was probably in the 1940s the best black republican in the country in the sense of republican activists. most well-known black people were republicans, going to the conventions, serving as a delegate, campaigning day after day and so on. she campaigned dewey in 1940 when he ran for president, he didn't get the nomination, and that was the year, 1940 as you know, last time a major party had a dark force, someone not on the agenda when they came in and picked on a late hour. roosevelt is a third term, 1944 do we get the nomination, roosevelt wins in a landslide, 1948 gets the nomination again and the day of the election, dewey is ahead in every poll but loses anyway. that happens every now and then. and nevertheless, in spite of those defeats, one would have thought from beginning, she would have gone on too many other great things if she is so well known, why have i not heard of her? the prosecutor's office in 1945, she did do a few other things, she was involved in the founding of the un, she was a poncho in the national council of negro women and the national council of women, traveled all over the world all the time and the truth is a lot of things eunice thought would be coming her way, the judgeships that she covered it or the possibility of running for congress which she was known to be thinking about seriously, they never materialized. why didn't they materialize? a lot of theories about that? a little brother, vs, formidably educated man, phd was from nyu, dorian poets quote 19th century philosophers in three languages, a formidably educated man and a big and active communist. the fbi file was opened in 1941 and by the time it was closed, when he died 30 years later, over 700 pages. i can't prove it but it is in my thesis that her brother and his activism held activities, think about what we are talking about. she left the prosecutor's office in 1945. the end of world war ii, beginning of the cold war, other opportunities that were open to her, roughly the period in which she had various ambitions, none of which come to fruition and this is her brother's greatest notoriety. her brother finally goes to prison in 1951. he goes to prison for refusing to name names and spend 6 months behind bars. as a footnote, learning about that is part of the reason i myself have always been but now more so, try to punish people because when they believe stuff we don't have an to agree with, he goes to prison and this is the end of his public career. he goes to prison in 1951, she is not present at his sentencing, eunice is there, there were estranged, probably estranged for the rest of their lives. they died ten days apart in 1970, both of cancer, she in new york, he in them be a. he left the united states not long after getting out of prison and moved to africa because he couldn't get work, he could work in a factory but his field was closed after his arrest. nevertheless the story of that prosecution and the work she did is one of enormous importance that deserves to be highlighted. in 1930s a resurgence of the clan, some of the darkest days of jim crow, the woman whose research, legwork and theory put into prison the biggest gangster in america at the time, the most powerful mob leader in american history was a black woman. one other thing to say, it is of great importance to me, eunice's last name, her married name was carter. she was my father's mother and my grandmother. thank you very much. [applause] >> i think we have a few minutes for questions. the microphone is down here. if you have a question or comment please come to the microphone. keep your question as short as possible because we are trying to move the schedule along precisely but i am happy to answer any. anyone else who has come to the microphone? >> i appreciate what you say about this, what about her being black and a woman in that time period you wouldn't that have equal -- >> great question. the question was was it mainly her brother being communist that held her black -- back? that is a reasonable question. she suffered enormous discrimination. i said this, discrimination she suffered because of being black, you see that in do we's office and the story i told about her being shunted at the end, great fanfare when eunice was hired she's the only one who gets a picture in the paper, new york times, big picture on page 3, this black woman hired by dewey, certainly suffered discrimination, some of them implicit, perhaps more explicit, but that can't be the entire explanation. there were black judges at the time. in new york city by the 1940s there were several black elected judges, the party could have handed her one of the slots because -- they did not the combination might be what held her back. i do think the party was probably a little bit afraid of what would happen if you put up a candidate for election and in those days -- 1949, put up a candidate for judgeship and next thing you know the newspaper is running stories about her being communist and so on. the communism thing i believe played a dominant role but you are absolutely right she had to sever enormous disabilities because of race and gender, there are people, important to remember the combination point, who tolerate a black man, tolerate a white woman, wouldn't tolerate a black woman. a very common discrimination that is easy to forget answer she must've suffered some of that and to talk with others in the book at greater length. other questions? >> as far as i know this is the first book you have written about a family member. can you talk about what it was like to write about a relative? >> sure. absolutely. that is true. first time i wrote about a family member and first time i have written a biography. i have six novels and thereby name and 7 or 8 nonfiction books, the first time writing a biography and a member of my family. this is my grandmother. i have memories of her. she died when i was in high school. i room for being stern and distant and occasionally scary but obviously brilliant. i remember her as a lover of furs and first class travel and fine wine. very knowledgeable about. as a girl her mother took her and studied in york for two years, in switzerland and germany they went to school, she was very refined. i never felt close to her. there was always -- on my mother's side of the family more like norman rockwell, sitting on the porch, they give you candy and comic books, have your table manners. reading this book, understanding the fire that forged her, the reason the family left to go to brooklyn and she was raised in new york was the atlanta riot of 1906, she, her brother, have memories of cowering in the back of the house as near a burning black business, two days, if they received on the, oregon. this is part of her memory, and the way she is shaped by that, but the and affection, i understand her better than i did before. i understand the forces the drove her and shaped her and that has been for me something that i told my wife has been a pleasure, writing biography, learning about her life and other members of the family. it isn't a joy. although this book has taken longer than i hoped to finish, it is a joy learning so much about members of the family. >> your story sounds like it would make a wonderful movie. i wonder if that is a possibility. >> i sure hope so. in all seriousness, i hope to tell the story well, is it a kind of story that will work on film? it probably is but i'm worried about what works on paper and i hope it works well enough that people in this room and elsewhere will read and enjoy it. even writing a book like this, when i write fiction i always say i am writing to tell a good story, not to send a message which i want people to enjoy it. this book has very sharp aspect of race and gender and culture and our history etched into it, it is written as a story i hope people will enjoy reading. >> did you, personal question, did your mother live long enough to see how you are honoring her mother? >> my father's mother -- no. my father died seven years ago and he had no idea i would take of this project. over the years a lot of people approached to write a book about my mother at a film about my grandmother and do a play about my grandmother and so on and so on and he always thought of making a good story but he never took that active a role in developing it so i feel in a sense even a familial obligation to tell a story so many people find interesting in the family in growing up i always heard snippets which i always heard bits and pieces of family lore, family legend, but i never put them together in one big story and it is also about my great uncle, doing that i do see it is a labor of love and attribute to my family. thank you very much. [applause] >> you are watching booktv on c-span2 with coverage of the 2017 key west literary seminar. now new york times columnist gail collins, author of "when everything changed: the amazing journey of american women from 1960 to the present".

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