Perspective | In the numbers game of the 1950s, one man was on top: ‘Whitetop’ Simkins

“That’s where I learned that bricks hide poverty,” he wrote. “Back in Southeast we could tell which were the poor people’s houses because they were made of wood and would be falling apart. The house on W Street had a nice brick front and looked fine from the outside, but was so terrible inside it was condemned by the city after we moved out.”

It was a neighborhood full of youngsters. Thompson performed stoopball towards the entrance steps and contact soccer in the alleys. He wrote: “I played my first organized sport, on a baseball team whose uniforms were purchased by a local numbers runner named Simpson. He had a restaurant on North Capitol Street where one of my sisters worked.”

Teasing aside the underworld figures of Forties and Nineteen Fifties Washington is an inexact science. There could have been a numbers runner named Simpson. According to newspaper experiences, a man named Henry M. Simpson was indicted on playing fees in 1950. This Simpson lived in the 400 block of M Street NW, 4 blocks from North Capitol.

So, maybe that’s who John Thompson was referring to. If so, Simpson was a small fry in comparison with a man with an identical final identify: Simkins.

For 30 years, Roger W. “Whitetop” Simkins — the nickname was a nod to the snowy hair on his head — was the czar of the District playing scene, an African American man whose operation was as profitable as any White-run game on the town.

Simkins first got here to the consideration of police in the Forties, when he ran a numbers racket out of the Georgia Avenue NW residence of his girlfriend, Sarah “Dimples” Mears Hall.

The numbers game — the place bettors picked numbers and posted wagers with middlemen who delivered money to massive operators like Simkins — was a well-liked pastime throughout the metropolis. In Foggy Bottom and Georgetown, the game was run by the Warring brothers, former bootleggers. Simkins’s territory prolonged out from U Street and 14th Street.

In 1951 and 1952, Congress determined to assault the drawback. Operators had been dragged into listening to rooms for interviews that captivated the metropolis. Dimples Hall was one of the witnesses. Wearing a mink-trimmed Persian lamb coat, she testified that Simkins ran his numbers game from her home from 1940 to 1945. A half dozen employees would tally up the river of cash — as much as $4,000 a day — on including machines.

“Where did you keep the money?” a senator requested.

“We didn’t keep the money,” Hall replied. “When the money — when I checked the money up Mr. Simkins would take it away in the evenings.”

Hall rattled off the names of some of the underworld figures Whitetop Simkins combined with: Little Joe, Sporty Johnson, Jack the Bear, Sunshine Boldware, Odessa Madre, Piggy Leake, Geechee Charlie…

But it was one other sort of customer that particularly the lawmakers: cops. Dimples Hall stated she often noticed cops go to the playing HQ, however Simkins implied she needn’t fear. The operation was protected.

Question: “What did he call the protection that he paid — what was his term for it?”

Hall confirmed that the particulars of which cops had been paid how a lot was stored on an “ice sheet.”

When it got here time for Simkins to testify, he went on document as being against the tv cameras that had been broadcasting the proceedings dwell. Then he clammed up.

Simkins gave the similar response — “I refuse to answer” — to query after query, from “Have you ever given any police officer a television set?” to “Did you keep a pistol in the Brass Rail?”

The Brass Rail was a bar at 1739 Seventh St. NW that was the scene of a capturing in 1948. Simkins stated his spouse, Yvonne, owned it, however authorities yanked its liquor license, sustaining Whitetop was the actual proprietor.

In 1955, Simkins and 5 different playing figures went on trial. They had been charged with bribery and conspiracy to commit bribery. Also on trial had been two officers Simkins was accused of bribing: Capt. John B. Monroe, former head of the twelfth precinct, and Det. George C. Prather of the thirteenth District. Simkins was discovered responsible, as had been each of the soiled cops.

Simkins was sentenced to 16 to 54 months for bribery. His well being failed in jail and after struggling a light coronary heart assault three years into his stint at Lorton Reformatory, Simkins was launched.

Simkins died in 1973 of a cerebral hemorrhage. He was 73. His obituary in The Post famous “Simkins was widely regarded even by police as the dignified gentleman he appeared to be.”

He was so nicely often called a “successful” gambler that when the D.C. Council was discussing legalizing the numbers game fairly than instituting a government-run lottery, former chairman John Hechinger stated, “We might want to get ‘Whitetop’ Simkins to design it for us.”

At Simkins’s funeral at the Peoples Congregational Church on thirteenth Street NW, an attendee stated, “Whitetop was always helping somebody. People thought he was a tough guy, but it you were honest with him and had a problem he’d do anything he could to help.”