In the spring of 1935, Eunice Hunton Carter was given an assignment her male colleagues at the Manhattan District Attorney’s office considered beneath them. Carter, the first black female prosecutor in the state of New York, was posted to the Women’s Court, the designated arena for prostitution cases. She was left more or less alone with the docket, prosecuting the ladies the city’s vice squad kept arresting. What she found there turned out to be the key to taking down one of the most