Silver Spring, Maryland, is one of several suburbs just across the District of Columbia state line where racketeers operating in the nation’s capital lived and had satellite operations. It is an unincorporated area that abuts Northwest Washington in a sprawling county that until the 1950s was mostly agricultural. Suburbanization attracted throngs of government workers moving to the District of Columbia as well as Washingtonians moving away from Blacks buying homes in previously segregated all-white neighborhoods. Sam Morgan was one of several District racketeers who ended up in the suburbs. This is his story.

I lived in Silver Spring for almost 20 years. During that time, I learned a lot about its history and its people. I also learned that there were large gaps in the published histories and in the ways the community celebrated its past. It took 16 years for me to learn that Silver Spring had been a sundown suburb — a place where Blacks couldn’t buy or rent homes and where their money wasn’t welcome in many businesses — for much of the twentieth century. Some might say that the conspiracy to keep Silver Spring white was a crime in its own right.

Welcome to Silver Spring.

I also didn’t know that Silver Spring was one of several Washington suburban communities with ties to organized crime history. In hindsight, after a few years of reading about crime syndicates in places like Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Cleveland, and New York, it made sense. Organized crime historian Rufus King wrote in 1969, “In metropolitan areas like New York City and Washington, D.C., whose city limits touch state lines, both drops and banks are frequently located just outside the jurisdiction of the authorities where the game is being run.”

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Sam Morgan ran a numbers racket in the District and suburban Maryland counties. He and his crew were well known among local law enforcement agencies and bail bondsmen. A pair of investigative reporters who wrote books on organized crime and political corruption brought Morgan’s story to a national audience. Their 1951 book, Washington Confidential, is where I first encountered Morgan’s story.

The Hood

While the rest of the nation’s housing sector struggled during the Depression, Montgomery County, Maryland, continued to see lots of new residential subdivisions built during the 1930s. Subdivisions sprouted in former farm fields as “organization men” and their families moved into fashionable Cape Cods, Tudor Revivals, and ramblers. In 1934 George and Emily Eckhardt bought a lot in one of those subdivisions just east of Silver Spring’s growing commercial district. The Eckhardts were in their fifties; George (1879-1971) worked as a machinist for the Census Bureau and Emily (1876-1955) worked in the home. They had moved to the suburbs from the District.

Sam and Victoria Morgan homesite, c. 1941.

The Eckhardt home was one block away from new Baptist and Catholic churches. Georgia Avenue, two blocks away, was a straight shot into the District. George could have driven or taken the streetcar. They were the stereotypical suburban family living in a rapidly growing metropolitan suburb. The Eckhardts sold their home in 1943 and retired to Florida. Several owners later, Victoria and Sam Morgan bought the brick Tudor revival home.

Meet the Mobsters Next Door

Sam Morgan was born Samuel Morganstein in 1906. His family arrived in the United States from Poland in 1909 by way of Canada. His father, Phillip, changed the family name in 1921 when he applied for citizenship. Sam had three sisters and one brother. They were among a wave of Jews who emigrated to the United States from Eastern Europe in the first decade of the twentieth century escaping violent pogroms. Sam was the oldest and his siblings were born in Canada and the United States.

Between 1909 and 1917, the Morgansteins moved south. By 1917, they had settled in Richmond, Virginia, where Sam’s father worked as a grocer. Sam’s early life remains a mystery. In 1938, he married Victoria Basslilie, the daughter of Lebanese-Syrian immigrants who arrived in the United States in 1912. The couple married in New Bern, North Carolina and they lived with the Bassilies in their Richmond, Virginia, home. Victoria’s parents, Eddie and Sarah, had moved to Richmond in 1930 or 1931 where they bought a luncheonette. Sam and Victoria worked at the Main Street restaurant during the first years of their marriage.

Richmond Times Dispatch, June 24, 1941.

In the summer of 1941, Richmond police raided a two story building and arrested three men, including Sam Morgan and his brother-in-law, Marvin Heyman (1916-1978) . Ann Morgan (1919-2004) had married Heyman about the same time Sam married Victoria. The Richmond Times- Dispatch described the place raided as “the headquarters of one of the biggest numbers and bookmaking operations” in the city. Cops seized $1,800, numbers slips, horse racing tickets, and an adding machine.

Morgan, Heyman, and another man were convicted of writing numbers and running a horse racing bookmaking operation. Prosecutors maintained that the trio were among Richmond’s leaders in the city’s numbers rackets. All three were fined and got three years of probation; one, Heyman, spent three months in jail.

After the probation ended, Sam and Victoria and Marvin and Ann pulled up stakes at the end of 1944 and moved to Silver Spring. It was close to Marvin’s Baltimore childhood home and family. The Morgans bought the former Eckhardt home paying $10 cash and the rest by way of an unrecorded mortgage. Marvin and Ann Heyman were apartment dwellers and they rented an apartment in a garden apartment complex on Tahoma Street.

Morgan home, Silver Spring, Maryland. Source: Google.

It didn’t take long for Morgan and Heyman to find a place for themselves in the District’s underworld. Morgan’s first known brush with the law in the District came in 1948 when he was arrested in 1948 on gambling charges. A grand jury indicted him and he was tried and acquitted.

Silver Spring apartment building where Marvin and Ann Heyman lived when Heyman and Morgan were arrested in 1950. Source: Google.

Morgan’s name came up in testimony before House hearings on crime in the District. He and other numbers bankers were familiar to the District’s bailbondsmen, who posted bonds for Morgan’s “employees.”

In December 1950 Morgan and Heyman were swept up in vice raids conducted in Anne Arundel and Howard counties. “The raids followed investigations that had lasted four months,” the Hagerstown Daily Mail reported. The raids took place at the same time that Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver was holding hearings investigating organized crime and corruption throughout the United States. “The Senate Crime Investigating Committee knew in advance of Thursday’s twin gambling raids by Maryland State Police,” wrote the Washington Post. At one of the hearings in 1951, a questioner asked Baltimore bailbondsman Willis M. “Buzz” King if he knew Morgan. King replied, “I refuse to answer … Yes; I know him when I see him.”

Hagerstown Daily Mail, December 22, 1950.

Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer mentioned Morgan in their problematic 1951 book, Washington Confidential. Though dubiously sourced and riddled with mistakes, according to the Washington Post‘s Ben Bradlee, the Lait and Mortimer book did have some valid and verifiable information, especially with regard to  Morgan. They described Morgan as “one of the most important gamblers in the area.” They also noted the disposition of his 1950 case: “Morgan drew a suspended sentence . No one ever goes to jail.”

Dodging the law took its toll on Morgan. He and Victoria mortgaged their home for $10,000 in early 1952, presumably to handle mounting legal bills. Their daughter Phyllis graduated from Montgomery Blair High School, less than a mile east on Wayne Avenue, in 1957. Two years later, after moving to Miami, Florida, the Morgan’s sold their Silver Spring home.

Sam and Victoria Morgan don’t appear in any (known) legal databases after 1959. Victoria continued living in Miami until the 1990s and databases show her home addresses as apartments. Sam’s sister Ann and her husband Marvin remained in Montgomery County for the rest of their lives. Marvin became a used car salesman and he died of cancer in 1978. Ann Morgan Heyman died in 2004. Their children and grandchildren still live in Montgomery County.

The Connections

Sam Morgan was one of many Eastern European Jewish immigrants who found themselves leading numbers rackets in the twentieth century. Pittsburgh’s Jakie Lerner, also born in 1906, followed a similar trajectory. Morgan and Heyman became “big shots” in the DC rackets more than a decade after whites, especially Jews and mobsters of Irish descent, began gentrifying the numbers. They also represent an important yet little understood period in Montgomery County’s history, one where organized crime and its entrepreneurs spilled across the Maryland state line into the suburbs.

© 2021 D.S. Rotenstein

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