These two women may have secretly teamed up to bring down Lucky Luciano

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 consequential organized crime conviction in American history, though Carter was largely cut out of the proceedings — and the history books.A new novel, “A Pair of Aces” (Berkley, out now) by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray, sets out to give Carter the reckoning she was denied.The pioneering prosecutor noticed that women who were arrested for prostitution from all corners of the city kept showing up with the same lawyers and bail bondsmen.

That pattern — invisible to the white men who’d considered the work unworthy of their attention — pointed to Charles “Lucky” Luciano, the most powerful gangster in New York.He’d evaded serious prosecution for years by staying out of the crimes authorities thought to look for.

Carter clocked that those lawyers and bail bondsmen were his people, evidence that what looked like scattered street-level crime was a centrally organized racket with one man at the top.She brought the theory to special prosecutor Thomas Dewey, who was skeptical.But she pushed back, and on the night of Feb.

1, 1936, police simultaneously raided brothels across the five boroughs, arresting more than a hundred sex workers and madams in a single sweep.The trial that followed sent Luciano to prison on 61 counts of compulsory prostitution and launched Dewey’s political career.Dewey got the monument.

Carter got the footnote.“We were astonished to discover that she’d been part of Thomas Dewey’s famous team assigned to take down the mob,�...