In Popular Culture
The 1948 film noir Force of Evil revolves around the numbers racket, with the plot hinging upon the workings of policy banks. The film tells of a gangster who is trying to take over all the banks in New York City by rigging the mutuel numbers to come up 776 on Independence Day. Since everybody plays those numbers for the Fourth of July, the banks will go bankrupt filling the policies.
The critically praised 1972 Blaxploitation film "Across 110th Street" opens with the brutal robbery of a policy bank.
In the 1973 film The Sting, the main character (played by Robert Redford) spends most of the film evading assassins after he cons a numbers runner out of several thousand dollars worth of racket money belonging to a powerful mob boss (portrayed by Robert Shaw).
Mobster Dutch Schultz's attempts to take control of the New York numbers rackets have been portrayed in two separate films: 1991's Billy Bathgate, about a young boy (Loren Dean) to whom Schultz (Dustin Hoffman) takes a liking, and who witnesses the gangster's decline and fall, and 1997's Hoodlum, which purports to tell the story of the mob war between Schultz (Tim Roth) and black gangster Ellsworth "Bumpy" Johnson (Laurence Fishburne) over control of the Harlem numbers racket. Both films were heavily fictionalized.
In an episode of Sanford and Son, Fred plans to bet on the "numbers" after he has a dream about having the winning number. His son Lamont is against his plan, but Fred bets $1 anyway and wins $600.
In the boardgame Illuminati: Crime Lords by Steve Jackson Games a player can own Numbers game enterprises for different districts of a city, along with other criminal rackets.
In the film The Godfather, Sonny and members of the Corleone family discuss the fact that black gangs have taken over their "policy banks" due to the turmoil caused by the gang wars between the Corleones and other New York Mafia families.
In the film A Bronx Tale, Robert De Niro's character is offered $150 a week to run numbers by a henchman of the criminal Sonny shortly after his son fails to tell the police of Sonny's murder of another man.
In the 1978 film The Wiz, the Good Witch of the North is portrayed as a magical numbers runner called Miss One (Thelma Carpenter), reflecting the association of the numbers game with the lower-class urban areas from which the film draws much of its imagery.
The Spike Lee biographic film Malcolm X portrays some of the revolutionary black leader Malcolm X's early days in Harlem, where he worked as a numbers runner for a man named "West Indian Archie".
Memphis, one of the protagonists of Libba Bray's 2012 teen novel The Diviners, is a numbers-runner in 1920s Harlem.
Read more about this topic: Numbers Game
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