Bumpy Johnson

• 1. Introduction

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  Bumpy Johnson, a crime boss of Harlem in New York City, died shortly before 2 a.m. on the 7th of July 1968 at Wells Restaurant. A waitress had just set down his coffee, a chicken leg and a plate of hominy grits. Then he fell over, clutching his chest. It was a heart attack, and he was 62 years old. He was also facing a federal indictment for drug conspiracy. How did a boy from South Carolina come to command a New York neighborhood? Where did a nickname like Bumpy come from? And why do filmmakers, rappers and television writers keep calling him back?

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• 2. Charleston Roots

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  Ellsworth Raymond Johnson was born in Charleston, South Carolina, on the 31st of October 1905, the son of Margaret Moultrie and William Johnson. The name that stuck came from a bump on the back of his head.

  When Ellsworth was 10, his older brother Willie was accused of killing a white man. The family feared a lynch mob. His parents mortgaged their tiny home to raise the money to send Willie north to relatives.

  The boy who stayed behind grew up with a short temper and a habit of insolence toward white people. His parents worried about where that would lead. In 1919 they sent him to live with his older sister Mabel in Harlem.

  He dropped out of high school and drifted through casual jobs. Then a gangster named William Hewett took notice of him, and the young man went to work for Hewett.

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• 3. The Numbers Queen

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  Madame Stephanie St. Clair was known as a numbers queen, and Johnson became her associate and enforcer. Through the 1930s he rose until he was the lieutenant she trusted above all others.

  St. Clair pushed her organization into open war with the rival boss Dutch Schultz. The prize was control of Harlem's rackets. The fighting left more than 40 people dead and included several kidnappings. It ended only when St. Clair herself was arrested and imprisoned.

  Schultz was murdered in 1935. Johnson seized the opening and struck a bargain with the Mafia. In exchange for favorable business deals, he was allowed to build an organization of his own in Harlem, and he built it quickly.

  By 1952, a national magazine was reporting on what he was doing.

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• 4. Courts and Alcatraz

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  In 1952, Jet ran an item on Johnson in its celebrity people section. That same year a court sentenced him to 15 years in prison for a heroin-related drug conspiracy.

  Two years later, Jet covered him again, this time in its crime section. He had lost his appeal and was now beginning the sentence. He spent most of it on Alcatraz, the island prison in San Francisco Bay, California, where he was inmate No. 1117. He was released on parole in 1963.

  Police arrested him more than 40 times over his life, and he served two prison terms on narcotics charges. Yet one of his best-known confrontations with the law was a protest rather than a crime.

  In December 1965, Johnson sat down at a police station in Harlem and refused to leave. He was objecting to police surveillance of black neighborhoods. He was charged with "refusal to leave a police station" and a judge acquitted him.

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• 5. Private Life

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  In October 1948, Johnson married Mayme Hatcher, only six months after the two first met. He had two daughters, one of them from another relationship.

  Mayme Hatcher Johnson outlived her husband by more than four decades. She died in May 2009 at the age of 94.

  Johnson himself was buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. Long after the funeral, his name would travel much further than his grave.

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• 6. Screen Portraits

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  In the 1971 film Shaft, the actor Moses Gunn played a gangster called Bumpy Jonas, a character based on Johnson. Gunn played the role again in the 1973 sequel, Shaft's Big Score!

  The 1972 film Come Back, Charleston Blue took a different angle. Its title character is loosely based on Johnson, a criminal admired as a positive role model.

  Paul Benjamin played a character based on him, named English, in the 1979 film Escape from Alcatraz. Laurence Fishburne played Bumpy Rhodes in the 1984 film The Cotton Club. Fishburne returned to the subject in the 1997 film Hoodlum, this time portraying Johnson by name.

  In the 2007 film American Gangster, Clarence Williams III played Johnson without a credit. Williams had also appeared in Hoodlum.

  Most recently, Forest Whitaker plays Johnson as the central figure of the crime drama series Godfather of Harlem, made for Epix and later MGM+.

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• 7. The Escape Rumor

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  An episode of the television program Unsolved Mysteries put forward a startling claim about Johnson and the three men who escaped from Alcatraz. According to the report, he allegedly helped them reach the shore.

  The story says he arranged for a boat to pick the men up out of the bay. The boat is said to have left them at Pier 13 in San Francisco's Hunters Point District.

  The program presented this as a report of what allegedly happened, not as established fact. Yet it shows how the legend of Johnson grew beyond the record of his arrests and sentences.

  The legend also found its way into music.

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• 8. Echoes in Music

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  In 2011, the rapper Prodigy released his first full project after getting out of prison. He named it The Ellsworth Bumpy Johnson EP, using Johnson's given first name in the title. A follow-up, The Bumpy Johnson Album, came next.

  In 2022, Central Cee put out the EP No More Leaks. One of its tracks is titled "Bumpy Johnson".

  A Harlem crime boss born in 1905 is still a name that artists reach for more than a century later.

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