About %40 of outside money (from wages, etc) that flowed into the inner city came, historically, form the sale of numbers. This activity was destroyed by the beginning of state lotteries. It was replaced by the sale of drugs. So businesses inside the inner city (groceries, bars, drug stores, cleaners, what have you) which formerly had been supported by the incomes of sellers of numbers now depended on the flow of funds from drug retail sales. Drug sales generate more violence than the numbers racket ever did.
A personal memory. When I worked at Detroit Transmission Division of General Motors back in the summer of '55 there was one black worker in my department -- he operated the tempering furnace. He also sold numbers tickets in the factory. So he would have brought back to the black neighborhood not only his wages from GM but the money he got from selling tickets to fellow workers in the plant. No violence there. And one of the reasons there was no violence is because the cops didn't land on that racket the way they land on drug sales. That would have been because in all the large cities there were very respectable and powerful poltical figures linked to the crime sydicates that ran the numbers. For example, Jake ARvey in Chicago, who was an attorney for the 'mafia' -- and also the man who mentored the politcal careers of Paul Douglas and Adlai Stevenson.
Carrol