In the 1940s and 1950s, before the Maryland lottery and the casinos, the betting action on the street was “on the numbers” --  and illegal.  It was the bookmakers who took the bets and who controlled the action that were the target of Captain Alexander Emerson’s raids on their “places of business.”. His continuing raids, staged to get them to shut down their operations and send them to jail, made him a threat to and the nemesis of their livelihood. When he died there was a coffin-side eulogy for him by a former victim…