Lucky Ted

As the son of a Negro sharecropper in Gallion, La., light-skinned Theodore Roe got no schooling and was pushed into the world without a nickel. But Ted was luckier than a gallon of Fast Dice Oil. Fate led him to Little Rock, Ark., where he did odd jobs for a tailor and learned to sew. With this education, he pushed on to Chicago and went to work for a Negro tailor named Edward P. Jones. And that put Lucky Ted on the express escalator to Easy Street.

Tailor Jones switched from pantsmaking to the policy racket and made Ted Roe his first "runner," i.e., salesman of lottery chances. Protected by the Kelly-Nash machine, Jones was making $2,000 a day by 1930, $10,000 a day by 1938. Ted Roe got fat cuts of the fat profits.

This prosperity was almost too good to last. Chicago had scores of policy "wheels" —the circular devices from which winning numbers are drawn. Each "wheel" was named—there was the Erie-Buffalo-Goldfield Wheel, the B & O, the Windy City-Subway-Big Town. Each was served by hundreds of runners and had thousands of loyal customers. Each was a gold mine. The Capone Syndicate set out to consolidate them into one big gold mine.

One by one, small policy operators capitulated to the syndicate. Negro Operator Jones was kidnaped in 1946, paid $100,000 in ransom and hurriedly left for Mexico. But Ted Roe, his heir apparent, refused to give in. The Jones-Roe wheels netted $1,120,000 that year.

By last year, Roe was the last lone operator; four gangsters tried to kidnap him, too. But his luck held. Roe, who habitually packed a pistol, got away, leaving a hoodlum named Leonard ("Fat Lennie") Caifano dead. Roe enjoyed life—he drove a Cadillac, wore $50 neckties, and lived in a flamboyant apartment which boasted a revolving television set and pastel-tinted telephones to match the color scheme of each room.

But one night last week, Roe's career ended; as he was unlocking his car on the street outside his apartment, a voice called, "Roe!" He turned and was hit by three twelve-gauge shotgun slugs. Ted was laid out in a $3,500 casket, and got the biggest Negro funeral in the Midwest since Prizefighter Jack Johnson was sent to his reward under a bee's paradise of floral offerings in 1946. At Roe's funeral, Minister Clarence H. Cobb said: "He was a friend of man, and he had a pure heart."

The syndicate took over his policy wheels, and it was hard for his admirers not to feel that Ted Roe, for once, had pushed his luck too far. That is, until his widow let them in on a secret: Lucky Ted had an abdominal cancer, and expected to die within a few months.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,816685,00.html