by Josh Levin
As the count proceeded, an officer called Presbyterian–St. Luke’s, then handed the phone to “Mrs. Wakefield.” The nurse on the other end told her that Lawrence Wakefield’s heart attack had been fatal. He’d died at 8:55 p.m. Kennedy cried when she heard the news. A moment later, she sat back down with her pencil and paper. “I loved him and I am sorry he is dead,” she told a policewoman. “Now I want to watch the money.”
* * *
Rose Kennedy watched the money all night long and into the morning. The cops worked in shifts, going through the bills by hand and counting the coins with a high-speed sorting machine on loan from a Catholic church. The Tribune rolled off the presses with a banner front-page headline: “$500,000 Found in Home.” That was just a rough calculation, the paper reported—the police were “up to their necks” in money and wouldn’t be done stacking and sorting until noon. At around 9 a.m. on February 20, a phalanx of television crews came through to film the scene. When one of the TV people asked Kennedy where the booty had come from, she said she’d made it selling hot dogs, peanuts, and popcorn on the streets of downtown Chicago.
The Tribune’s estimate wasn’t nearly high enough. The Chicago Police Department eventually counted $763,223.30* in hard currency, as well as another $30,000 in bank deposits and close to $16,000 in savings bonds. The department couldn’t squeeze all those bags of money into its own vault, so a dozen gun-toting officers escorted the hoard to the Continental Illinois National Bank and Trust Company. That money would stay locked away until the probate division of the Cook County Circuit Court determined its rightful owner.
In the days after Wakefield’s death, the phone wouldn’t stop ringing at Kersey McGowan and Morsell Chapel. “They just wanted to see the man who had so much money—what he looked like,” the manager of the funeral home told the Chicago Daily News. “Some of them asked me, ‘Are you going to bury some of the money with him?’” While most visitors came by to peer into the dead man’s casket, a handful presented themselves as Wakefield’s long-lost relatives. None of them brought flowers.
More than a thousand people showed up at the South Side’s Metropolitan Community Church on February 25 to pay their respects. Kennedy sat in a pew in the front row, flanked by a pair of nurses and dressed in a full-length mink coat. The reverend who delivered Wakefield’s eulogy lauded him as “an unostentatious man.” “If certain doors had not been closed to him because of his color,” the pastor said, “he might have been chairman of the board, the personnel officer of a big corporation. It’s not what he was working at that is important. It’s what he was living for. It’s not what he had in life but what he was in life. He was God’s man.” When the service was over, the Tribune noted, a “long line of Cadillacs” followed Wakefield’s hearse south to Lincoln Cemetery.
So far as anyone could tell, Lawrence Wakefield hadn’t left a will. The State of Illinois also didn’t recognize common-law marriage, which meant Rose Kennedy would have a difficult time reclaiming everything the police had taken from her house. At the end of February, a probate judge ruled that Wakefield had no known heirs—no living parents, children, siblings, aunts, uncles, or cousins. That meant the money now belonged to the Cook County public administrator. If Kennedy’s case got shot down in court and no relatives turned up, the county would keep the cash, minus whatever the Internal Revenue Service took as compensation for unpaid income taxes.
The stash on South Rhodes Avenue didn’t just make headlines in Chicago. The Washington Post and the New York Times both ran stories about Wakefield’s cache, and photos of the money appeared on front pages in Indiana, Wisconsin, Michigan, Missouri, Kentucky, Ohio, Nebraska, New Jersey, Delaware, Connecticut, Oregon, and Florida. In the aftermath of that publicity blitz, upwards of a dozen people got in touch with the public administrator to make a bid for the estate. One of them was the woman who’d later be known as the welfare queen. Ten years before the Tribune chronicled Linda Taylor’s criminal exploits, she declared that she was Lawrence Wakefield’s only child, and that his money belonged to her and no one else.
* * *
On April 18, 1964, the Chicago Defender published a page one item tagged “Exclusive! Dead Policy King’s $763,000 Demanded By His ‘Daughter’; Has Papers to Prove Her Claim.” The story’s first two paragraphs, like the headline, were larded with scare quotes.
A 29-year-old woman who claims to be the daughter of the late policy king, Lawrence Wakefield, has unfolded a fantastic story of “plots” and intrigues which separated her from her “father.”
The claimant, Constance Beverly Wakefield, who lives on Chicago’s Northside, showed the DEFENDER an array of “documents” which, she claims, prove she is the daughter of Wakefield.
The claimant with the fantastic plots was “of light complexion, with straight black hair,” the Defender’s M. Wilson Lewis wrote, noting that she was “still attractive and shows signs of having been a beauty in her younger days.” Lewis spoke with “Miss Wakefield” at her home after being granted entry by “a man said to be her bodyguard.” The house was adorned with “odd figurines,” and an “eerie note was provided by a gabby mynah bird, which constantly squawked the name ‘Lawrence.’”
In addition to this avian evidence of her parentage, the policy-fortune aspirant presented the Defender with a series of official records. Among them was her own Illinois birth certificate, which identified her as the daughter of Lawrence Wakefield and Edith Jarvis. She also produced a family Bible that listed her race as white and that noted she “had a twin brother who died of suffocation at birth.”
Constance Wakefield explained that her father was “considerably confused by the race issue.” She said her guardians, a couple named Jim and Virginia Collins, had tried to send her to a “colored school” but “daddy had them take me out.” The Defender related that the policy king’s “daughter” had experienced a “strange childhood” in Blytheville, Arkansas, one in which she’d received no formal education and “was never allowed to play ordinary children’s games nor lead a normal life, because Wakefield was afraid she might be slained.”
The would-be heir saw herself as the central figure in a sprawling drama, one in which a host of enemies were trying desperately to deprive her of her potential inheritance. In the Defender interview, she recounted a break-in by “two white men” who were “looking for my father’s money,” a menacing visit by “a swarthy Italian,” and “an attempt to blow her 1964 Cadillac up by switching the electrical current into her gasoline tank.” In an accompanying photograph, she exuded solemnity, casting her eyes downward toward her enormous beaded necklace. A day earlier, in a Sun-Times story that identified her as Constance W. Stineberg, she said she’d recently had to wave a pistol at a group of five men and six women who’d tried to steal her birth certificate. In the head shot that ran alongside that piece, “Mrs. Stineberg”—who wore cat-eye glasses and a coat with a fluffy white fur collar—looked as though she’d just exited a costume shop.
* * *
By the summer of 1964, Lawrence Wakefield’s supposed child had emerged as one of the two leading candidates to win control of his hefty estate. Her main competition was Wakefield’s common-law wife.
Before his death, Lawrence Wakefield and Rose Kennedy had owned and operated the Night Owl and Speedway policy wheels,** local lotteries that the Sun-Times noted were “known to a generation of numbers players.” Kennedy said her first husband had invested in the wheels in 1929 and that Wakefield had been running the operation for three decades. They’d found a niche in what had long been a crowded industry. Policy had flourished in Chicago since the late nineteenth century, particularly in the city’s black neighborhoods. Two days after Wakefield’s death, the Daily News reported that underground lotteries amounted to a $50-million-a-year business that lured in five hundred thousand regular bettors. “I wouldn’t be surprised if 70 percent of the Negroes on the South Side bet on the numbers,” an “informed police officer” told the newspaper.
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nbsp; Those nickel, dime, and quarter wagers provided ample salaried employment for bet collectors and money carriers and funneled a huge quantity of cash to a small handful of numbers barons. Kennedy assured her lawyers that the Night Owl and Speedway weren’t rigged in any way. Regardless, the odds in any policy game always favored the house to an absurd degree—per the Daily News, they were typically “less than half what they should be to make the bet a fair one.” For most players, though, fantasies of a big victory offset the quotidian reality of yet another losing ticket. In his posthumously published autobiography, Malcolm X cited Wakefield’s $760,000 stash—“all taken from poor Negroes”—as a telling example of “why we stay so poor.”
Wakefield had been arrested for gambling-related offenses in 1949, 1952, 1960, and 1961, but the cops had never held him for long. The Chicago police and local politicians saw policy as a fixture of urban life, as well as an opportunity for pocket-lining graft. For a black-market entrepreneur like Wakefield, the Italian mob represented a much graver threat to his life and livelihood. In the 1920s, Chicago Outfit boss Al Capone had brokered a deal to cede control of the policy business to the city’s black mafia in exchange for unfettered control of the booze racket. That arrangement had expired in 1946, when the policy tycoon “Big” Ed Jones was kidnapped by Italian mobsters, then fled to Mexico after his brother and his associate Teddy Roe paid a $100,000 ransom. When Roe, the last big holdout among Chicago’s black gambling kingpins, was gunned down in August 1952, the Italians had policy locked up.
The fact that Wakefield was alive and running an independent policy venture in 1964 was almost as shocking as the discovery that he and Kennedy had squirreled away close to $800,000. The Tribune reported that Wakefield hid “behind an appearance of general shabbiness,” wearing worn-out clothes, driving an old Ford, and eschewing “flashy jewels that might attract attention.” Kennedy told the press that her partner’s faux pauperism had tricked the Chicago Outfit. “Two men from the crime syndicate” had come sniffing around, she said, “but after looking things over they decided he was a marginal operator and they would leave him alone.”
Wakefield’s frugality was more than just a ruse. The papers all quoted the family’s maid, who said she’d been shooed away when she asked for a $20 advance on her salary. She’d been told, “There isn’t a penny in the house.” The Daily News wrote that Wakefield’s tightwad ways had caused his business to shrivel—that he’d refused to pay his employees competitive salaries, and the disgruntled workers had taken their best customers elsewhere. While the biggest policy wheel in Chicago brought in an estimated $250,000 per month, the police pegged Wakefield’s monthly gross income at closer to $7,500. Ebony said that the gambling boss, who’d been known as “The Red Streak,” “The Blue Streak,” and “The Flash” in his heyday, “apparently hoarded his take” from the 1930s and 1940s, then maintained “an unattractive token operation” until his death.
A month after Wakefield’s funeral, Kennedy sobbed on the witness stand in Cook County Municipal Court as she recounted the wickedness of the canine-threatening detectives who’d busted into her home. A judge accepted Kennedy’s version of events, ruling that the police had conducted a warrantless and illegal search and dropping all the gambling charges against her. That decision freed her to demand that the county return all the money seized from 9312 South Rhodes Avenue—or at least all the money the cops had bothered to itemize. Kennedy told one of her lawyers that she’d offered the police a bribe to forget what they’d seen. They’d refused, she said, because they wanted to skim some cash for themselves. “The fuckin’ cops took half the money,” she ranted.
In May, Constance Wakefield filed her own petition with the probate court. Rose Kennedy, Constance’s lawyer said, was Lawrence Wakefield’s housekeeper, not his common-law wife. In her interview with the Defender, Constance went so far as to accuse Kennedy of trying to poison her. “The doctors said I had swallowed enough strychnine to kill a dozen people,” she claimed, brandishing hospital receipts that allegedly backed up her story.
Two months later, the purported strychnine survivor sat for the first of a series of depositions. But every time attorneys for Kennedy and Cook County got her in a room to answer questions, Constance Wakefield figured out a way to cut the interrogation short. In August, her lawyer filed a motion to delay the proceedings, writing that his client had been in a car accident and had “suffered recurring illness” that had caused her to shrivel from 135 to 100 pounds. She’d been hospitalized, the motion said, and “it may be necessary to perform surgery upon her.” By mid-October, she’d recovered sufficiently to show up for another deposition, this one to be conducted in a judge’s chambers. This time, she collapsed during questioning and paramedics hauled her out of the building on a gurney. The Tribune reported the next day that “she apparently had fainted from an overdose of barbiturates.” Her attorney later said her pulse had fallen to zero and that she’d nearly died. Hospital records, however, showed that Constance Wakefield had been released shortly after admission and given a clean bill of health.
In between these near-death experiences, the wannabe beneficiary did put some responses on the record. The most junior member of Rose Kennedy’s legal team came to believe that Wakefield’s so-called daughter wasn’t a total phony. Norris Bishton thought Constance knew enough details about Lawrence Wakefield’s life that she’d likely had some kind of relationship with the policy king. But Kennedy insisted she’d never heard of this Constance woman, much less met her face-to-face.
In September, a probate judge had ordered Constance Wakefield to provide evidence that might affirm her connection to Lawrence. She complied with the judge’s request, furnishing the court with letters and insurance policies bearing the names of various Wakefields who lived in Missouri. She included a receipt for $54.90 worth of flowers she’d purchased for Lawrence’s funeral, an invoice from a retail outfit called Tile City on which the customers’ names were written as “Lawrence Wakefield” and “Constance Wakefield (Daughter),” and a note indicating that Lawrence and Constance “had their Pomeranian bred by Tommie’s Tiny Timmie Boy” in Rockford, Illinois, in exchange for a stud fee of $25. She proffered a set of photographs, among them one of a cherubic infant that had been labeled “Constance B. Wakefield, date of birth 12/25/34, Doctor Grant Sill, age 9 month, mother and father Edith Wakefield, Lawrence Wakefield.” And she gave the court a brown leather billfold with the inscription “To My Dauther From Dad 1947, Lawrence Wakefield.” Wakefield’s Social Security number had been scrawled on the wallet’s inside flap, so there could be no mistaking who’d bestowed her with this special gift.
In addition, Constance Wakefield produced correspondence from a Professor Jasper Herman of Miami, Florida, who explained that he was “better known as Black Herman from coast to coast.” Black Herman averred that he had personal knowledge that Constance was the daughter of “Mr. and Mrs. Wakefield,” saying, “They were not white just like Constance is not but they passed for white.” Constance also obtained a sworn statement from the couple she claimed had raised her in Arkansas. Jim and Virginia Collins affirmed that she was Wakefield’s only daughter, writing that Jim’s “grandmother raised Constance Beverly Wakefield until she was 15 years old, but Mr. Wakefield paid for her care.” They added, “We are colored, but Mr. Lawrence Wakefield was not colored, he was a foreigner. He originated from England.”
The Pomeranian-breeding receipt, the baby photo, and these testimonials didn’t add up to much in the way of proof that Constance Wakefield was Lawrence Wakefield’s daughter. She professed, though, to have something closer to ironclad evidence that she deserved ownership of his nearly seven-figure estate. In October 1964, she filed a pair of wills with the probate court. Both carried the signatures of Lawrence W. Wakefield.
The first will, dated October 25, 1943, had been jotted in pencil on a sheet of paper labeled “Daily Programme of Recitation and Study.” The text spilled across the width of the page in a frantic
, erratically capitalized, unpunctuated stream of consciousness. It began,
We Hope This will is Kept in safe in event of our Death we Have almost one million Dollars in propety and in Cash stocks and Bonds We only have one child a girl Constance Beverly Wakefild was bornd Dec 25, 1934 in Chicago
The will went on to list seven people—among them Jim Collins of Blytheville, Arkansas—who’d each be entitled to receive between $1,000 and $5,000. The rest of the money would go to Constance Beverly Wakefield, who could be identified by a scar on her right leg, another scar on her upper lip, and a dark blue mole on “Her Right arm near the shoulder” that was “Hard like a shot.” That list of physical descriptors transitioned into a declaration of love for Lawrence and Edith Wakefield’s daughter. “She well know That We Dearley lovl Her,” the will explained. “We only live for Her for she is all we Have in the world.”
The second will, which had supposedly been written in August 1962, looked more official. It carried the seal of a notary public and attested that its author was “of sound and disposing mind and memory, and not acting under duress, menace, fraud, or the undue influence of any person whomsoever.” That formal, typewritten preamble was followed by a handwritten block of jumbled prose.
Constace Beverly Wakefeild…This is my Daughter and only liveing Blood Kin and she is my Daughter her mother die in 1945 Edith L. Wakefield I leave Constance Wakefield my home at 9312 S. Rhodes and 2 millions doller that is in thy house in a back room lock I have a Key to door and Constance has a Key She Knows about the money and everything about me
