Phoebe Judge

In 1962, there was a massive raid at the Gotham Hotel, the hub of the African American numbers operation in Detroit.

Police conducted a room-by-room search and confiscated numbers tapes, adding machines, hundreds of boxes of bet slips, and 30 safes.

And then, one night in 1970, 200 FBI agents conducted raids all over the city of Detroit, making arrests in 58 different locations.

J. Edgar Hoover called it the largest gambling raid in history.

Brigette was in elementary school.

Do you have any complicated feelings about the fact that it was a crime what your mother was doing?

In 1972, the state of Michigan legalized the state lottery.

The Michigan lottery was drawn every week rather than every day, like the numbers, so people played both.

But in 1977, a new game was introduced, the daily.

It happened every day.

You could choose your numbers.

You could get paid the next day, and the payout was 500 to 1, the same as Fannie's.

The state lottery kept changing, and Fannie Davis kept changing her business right with it.

It was getting tougher to compete.

She started holding poker games to help make up for lost revenue.

But when Michigan introduced the lotto, the prizes were bigger than she could keep up with.

Fannie Davis ran her numbers business for 30 years.

She died in 1992.

Brigette says she can still picture her mother, seated at their dining room table, working.

The money Fannie earned put Brigette through college.