Theodore Roe
American mob boss (1898–1952)
Theodore L. "Teddy" Roe (August 26, 1898 – August 4, 1952) was a Black American organized crime figure who led an illegal gambling empire in South Side, Chicago during the 1940s and early 1950s. Roe earned the nickname "Robin Hood" because of his philanthropy among the neighborhood poor. After refusing to pay "street tax" or hand over his illegal gambling empire to the Chicago Outfit, Roe fatally shot a made man who had been ordered to assassinate him.
Early life and career
Roe was born in Galliano, Lafourche Parish, Louisiana to a Black American sharecropper, and raised in Little Rock, Arkansas. As a child, he received no formal education, and when he was of age, he did odd jobs for a tailor and learned how to sew. Some time after that, he got involved in bootlegging and gained a notorious reputation as a colorful racketeer who could pass for white. His career as a bootlegger ended after a few years and he moved to Detroit, where he worked in an automobile plant. When he was 31 years old, he took what he learned working for the tailor in Arkansas, and moved from Detroit to Chicago and began working for a Black American tailor named Edward P. Jones. Shortly after Roe began working for Jones, Jones decided to get involved in policy and he made Roe his first "runner", or salesman of lottery chances. Under the protection of politicians Edward Joseph Kelly and Patrick Nash, the Kelly-Nash Machine, Jones was making $2000 a day by 1930.
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This entry incorporates text from “Theodore Roe” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.