These men exercise the most brutal mastership over the prostitute. Instances have been shown where women were whipped within a few inches of death by the inhuman dogs.
One night in the South side levee, a “cadet” caught one of his women on the street in front of a resort, cursed her for her small earnings and proceeded to beat her into insensibility. Bleeding from his inhuman blows, she reeled and fell to the sidewalk.
Standing in the glare of the arc light, the man’s face and hands were smeared with blood. Two policemen approached and stopped. The “cadet” held up his blood-stained hands and laughed. The policemen pushed him ahead, and one of them said:
“Fred, you better move on. Go and wash your face and hands.”
A woman came from the resort, kicked the prostrate form of the unconscious girl with her foot, then grasping her by the hands, dragged her into the hell chamber from which she had emerged to breathe a little of God’s own air.
That is not the story of a heated imagination. It was actually witnessed. Incidents of similar character which beggar description, occur every night, when these outcasts are confronted by drunken, blood-exacting degenerates.
Some of these men are the slave masters of several women.
In a recent White Slave case in the federal court, one of these wretches confessed that he was the “cadet” of four prostitutes. He drove them on in their vicious labors, forced them to work day and night to bring him money from which he made his own living and paid protection to the police and tribute to the Vice Trust.
This man swore that he made from fifty to sixty dollars a week from each girl.
Many of these “cadets” do not live in the “redlight” districts. They scatter and come back when it is time to gather in the gold.
The business of exacting graft from these men is a difficult police problem because of their nomadic habits. Still it is accomplished.
Rendezvous of these men are frequently raided by the police and these “cadets” to save themselves give up what money they may have with them.
Many of them, however, cannot keep away from the scenes of their crimes and cravenly and regularly pay their price.
The “cadet” system is highly valued by the Directorate of Ten because it is the human prod to vice, the medium of increasing infamous profits from day to day.
As an instance of this, here is a story from police circles which is confirmed by other corroboration.
Recently, a captain of police was transferred to the Twenty-second street police station. He was an unsophisticated police official, then. He was not well acquainted with the workings of the Vice Trust and he was determined to rid the districts of some of the evils which were more flagrant than others.
He determined to destroy the “cadet” system and to cast every “cadet” into jail on charges of vagrancy. He set about to do it and forty-eight hours later the district was seething with indignation, fear and anger.
A conference of the big resort keepers was held and the police captain invited to attend. He went prepared to deliver a staggering ultimatum that would wipe out the evil forever.
When he emerged he was a beaten, broken man, broken on the great, ever turning wheel of vice.
Those keepers told him in that conference that if he drove the “cadets” out, they might as well shut down their houses. He was willing that they should. But there was the rub. He was quietly shown that the graft lords wanted more money and would not stand for a decrease of profits.
They declared that women without “cadets” to urge them on, did not make half the money those did who were driven to death by these inhuman creatures in their exploitation of vice.
To back up their statements they showed him the records of their houses.
The great powers, he realized, were behind commercialized vice. To harm one member of that Directorate of Ten by shearing him of his profits meant ruin to himself. He gave up the battle.
Later on, in another police territory, this same official hemmed in and enmeshed by the exacting system which he had allowed to make him a slave, fell a victim to the Vice Trust and was sacrificed with much pomp of public investigation on the altars of the temple of vice and graft to appease the unseen god of public wrath and indignation.
Another example of how the graft system reaches out and destroys the upright, is the following:—
Another captain of police was sent to take command of the police district including the South side levee. A clean-minded chief of police ordered him to clean up the district. He ordered him to place men in the resorts where there were flagrant violations of the rules regulating the district.
The police official did so. The resort keepers tried to reason with him, argue with him and plead with him, but he refused to listen. “I shall carry out my orders,” he said firmly. Then they predicted his transfer from the police station. They predicted that within thirty days he would be in command at another station. They missed their calculations by but one day. He was transferred to a district where his honesty could do no harm. Beyond and above the chief of police ruled a power—the political power of the Directorate of Ten, that made the final ruling.
A chief of police in a strange manner has admitted the power of the vice combine which he was sworn to annihilate. As a sergeant of police he was powerless to stem the tide of sin and vice. When he received the highest executive office in the department, the Vice Trust compelled him to move from the home in which he had lived on the South side for twenty-five years. The music from the dives floated into the precincts of his home and disturbed his rest; the unfortunate women carried on their immoral profession within a stone’s throw of where his innocent daughter slept; drunken men reeled past his door going to and from the vice haunts. He was surrounded by scarlet women and vicious men. For the salvation of his family he was obliged to seek other quarters.
Oh you that are the children of our flesh and blood, you over whom anxious mothers have watched through the long, weary hours of the night when the shadow of sickness was upon you, you whose lips are still undefiled by the kiss of unclean lips, you who still kneel at night and in the solitude of your chambers, call upon the Master to hold your hearts in the mighty hollow of His hand, bend your heads in meditation on the truth that is hideous, but must be known.
You mothers and fathers, sacrificing every hour of your lives for your daughters, praying for their purity, guarding their chastity, leading them in the paths of righteousness, turn not from the truth that you must know, but listen and take warning.
IN THE LIGHT OF MODERNITY IGNORANCE IS NO LONGER INNOCENCE. IGNORANCE IS CRIME: IGNORANCE IS SIN: THE SIN OF OMISSION AND NEGLECT.
In no age, has a people faced a social problem as vital and crucial as the one facing the American people today. Our rapid progress in the paths of commerce has robbed us of a clear moral conscience; it has made the almighty dollar the ideal, to the detriment of the soul and heart: it has built taller houses of industry while the church steeples have grown shorter.
It has crept unconsciously upon us until it has eaten into our vitals—the commercial and industrial frenzy.
It has recognized in the perversion of woman a source of income and it has commercialized the vicious instincts, and the depraved desires of thousands of them.
The baby girl in the cradle is being watched and waited for by the Vice Trust:—ready to capture her and throw her tortured body into the mart of sin for filthy dollars.
The school girl is trailed and tempted. She falls often unconsciously and awakens when it is too late. The girl who is earning her own living is preyed upon and bartered away; and even the wife and mother is frequently caught in the ever-tightening mesh of the masters Satan has appointed on earth.
Statistics show that two thirds of the women who are found in the infamous resorts of the city drift there in a thousand and one ways.
The White Slaves are in the minority.
Economic and social conditions, starvation wages, environment, unrestrained sexual desires, lack of religious restraint, improper association with the male sex in immature ages, desires for pleasures, luxuries and clothing, betrayal by men, are among the principal reasons why this vast percentage of the prostitutes fills the houses of iniquity.
Tons of literature have been written, warning the girls of the country against the perfidious White Slaver.
These warnings have also been directed to the parents of our girls.
The girls and women that need warning today are those who are drifting to the Lake of Infamy, drifting, some unconsciously and others with knowledge, in a vague way of what is before them.
To this class we cry out until we are exhausted and our throats are bleeding with the effort:
“Leave all hope behind, you who enter here.”
At each avenue leading into the hellish centers of the city should stand a lost woman, peering into the eyes and hearts of each girl who is creeping silently and shamefully to the vice dens. In her hollow, rasping voice, the lost woman should be made to cry out:
“TURN BACK ERE IT IS TOO LATE! THIS IS THE CITY OF THE DAMNED! THIS IS THE SLAUGHTER-HOUSE OF HELL! THIS IS THE CHARNAL-HOUSE OF DEATH! THIS IS THE SPOT WHERE THE GRAVES ARE ALWAYS OPEN AND YAWNING! LIFE HAS NO HOPE HERE!”
If each girl could be told the paralyzing truth of the life of the prostitute as we have told it in this book, would she plunge headlong into the consuming fire? Would she leap into the ever-present abyss? Would she take the first drink? Would she give her lips to the poison of the inhuman wretch who plots her death? Would she give her pure, white body to the abominations of the Vice Trust?
No, no, no: not unless she were born of hell and deprived of reason and judgment.
It has been our object to show that not one dream of the girl who enters a house of prostitution is ever realized.
She has hoped for fine clothes, jewelry, food and money.
She has found nothing but shame, suffering, remorse and sorrow.
“I will become a slave, that is true,” said the girl who is dying in a resort today, as she entered the abominable life, three years ago, “but I shall make hundreds of dollars and then leave it and no one shall know.”
That is the lure that has caught up thousands of women and hurled them into dishonored and polluted graves.
The Vice Trust is the robber combine.
No woman who has once fallen into its inhuman traps can escape until she has paid the last farthing, as we have shown.
The Vice Trust allows the women of its kingdom to make gold fast, that it may rob them faster.
We have shown how each agent of the Vice Trust, each subsidiary combine, each industry dealing with the unfortunate women, suck out the last drop of blood.
In the last analysis, after we have studied how the earnings of the prostitute are snatched away from her, you ask this startling question:
“And to the woman, what?”
And with God as our judge and honest, clean, observant men as our witnesses, we answer:
“DEATH!”
Shudder, all you who today are tempted to give up the struggle against terrible odds. Tremble with fear, all you who are near the gates of the City of Sin! Turn back all you who are picking the insidious blossoms in the pathways that lead to but one end.
DEATH:—not pleasure, not joy, not companionship; not clothes, not the niceties of life, not money!
The Vice Trust paid a high price in one way or another for each woman-soul. Death can claim the victim only after it is torn to pieces by the ravenous wolves.
There is no compensation in the lives of prostitutes for all they have thrown away; not even a sham of compensation.
The prostitutes of Chicago are not only the commercial slaves of the vice lords; they are the victims of the most ravaging and most destructive diseases that science knows. Cold figures prove this. Nearly every woman in the levee districts of Chicago suffers from dread diseases. They are the victims of every possible chronic disease and organic trouble.
They are today the greatest agents in the city for the dissemination of sexual diseases that ruin homes, lead men to suicide and fill the wards of our city hospitals with dying children.
They are the mistresses of the men of the crime-world, who in the last stage of degradation, drive them to careers which are checkered with the murders of their victims.
And now another hideous truth to save our daughters from the blasting curse.
Death claims these women in from one to seven years! That startling statement is based on actual figures dealing with the demand and supply of women for the resorts of Chicago.
Death is really merciful to those whom he takes at the beginning of their blighted lives, for they escape in the darkness and sleep of the tomb the nights of nightmare agony, of remorse, of shame, of physical suffering, of empty and broken hearts, of ghosts of the pure, sweet past, of home with the sweet-faced gentle mother, the loving father and the brothers and sisters.
Think of it! These commercialized creatures of hell grind out of body, blood, heart and soul, millions of dollars for their masters! And for themselves—the GRAVE!
We have been logical in our statements. We have not delivered simply a pulpit warning. We have shown, in undeniable figures, that the motto of the Vice Trust is:
“Millions for ourselves, but not one cent for the women slaves!”
If, as is imagined by thousands of good men and women, these unfortunates derived a profit from their immoral business, then there might exist an excuse for the thousands who enter the life each year. But there is no profit, no matter from what standpoint you might view the situation.
The story of gain is but the lure. The Vice Trust tells lies that are acceptable because of the strange tendencies in the temperament of women.
Dean Walter T. Sumner, one of Chicago’s most prominent ministers and the chairman of the recent Vice Commission, declared that each year the men who visit the many haunts of vice in Chicago spend $60,000,000! He also declared that of this amount, over $16,000,000 goes to the vice lords!
Before closing we wish to give a concrete example of the tenacious power of the life of shame once it has fastened its fangs in the heart and body of its victim. We tell the story so that every girl in this country may know that once enslaved there is scarcely any redemption.
In one of the most notorious resorts in the South side levee district, lost to all self-respect and shame, is a certain prostitute who drags her wornout body about, selling it to vice victims night after night.
That woman is the daughter of an alderman of the city of Chicago!
Four years ago she was the idol of a happy home, the pet of a loving father and the darling of a happy mother. Today she is a drunken, depraved creature.
Her father has done everything in his power to rescue her. With his own political power he has obtained permission from the vice masters to take his daughter from her infamous prison.
That woman has looked at her father and cried out:
“It is too late! Society would spurn me and I would have to flee away. Besides my body is wrecked and could not live without the intoxicants and drugs I can feed it here.”
The father offered her $10,000 a year as an allowance if the girl would leave her evil ways. Again she refused because she knew in the depths of her heart that the shackles welded long ago could never be broken, and that the poison eating through her blood could never be purged out.
If this girl with every possible influence brought to bear to save her was beyond salvation, what of the thousands who, even if they would, cannot move hand or foot to escape the death waiting for them but a few years away?
That is the story of the prostitute. It is not a story of the woman considered as an entity, deprived of her relative existence; it is the story of the slave as a commercialized being existing solely for the enrichment of the Directorate of Ten of the Vice Trust and not because she is needed to serve the passions of men.
And yet in the face of this staggering truth, thousands of women yearly, enter upon the life of death. They go to fill the polluted beds and chambers of horrors from which the gaunt, skeleton form of Death has just crept noiseless, bearing away the victims whose terms of earthly service in the interests of hell were at an end.
God of Heaven, Father of the Just, Thou who watcheth over the universe of living things, teach our daughters to know the truth down to the last, burning, revolting fact. Save them for the motherhood of a perfect race. Protect them against the demons who seek them out in the sanctity of the home. Teach them restraint. Give unto the men and women of Chicago, the strength and power to rise up and destroy the Vice Trust and its members, so that the sun may shine on a spotless city, and love, happiness, purity, and the brotherhood and sisterhood of man may reign supreme!
How long, Oh God, how long?
Side Grafts of The Social Evil.
Rent Graft—Saloon Graft—Dance Halls and Protective Prices—Graft from the Vice Palaces—The Massage Parlor—The Drug Crime—The Vampire Trust.
Woman is the axis around which revolves the wheel of the social evil today.
When directly enmeshed in the woman-traps of the Vice Trust she is the enriching factor as has been shown.
Indirectly connected with the Vice Trust or serving it off and on, she is still the axis of swollen profits to the Trust.
It is the purpose in this chapter to show the side grafts which are derived from the existence of the persons and places contributing to the social evil.
Again the police department figures as the “go-between” hand from the victims of sin to the Directorate of Ten. It is through their protecting agency, permitting haunts of crime and vice to flourish that the already monstrous fortunes of the vice masters are further swollen.
It is astounding to learn the varied sources of side graft in the city of Chicago today. As we have said before, everything must have its price of toleration or cease to exist.
A few of the most notorious and flagrant forms of side graft as separate from the prostitute and her profession are to be exploited in this chapter.
The excess rental profit, due to the fact that at least 1,000 buildings in Chicago are the rendezvous or dwelling places of prostitutes and women of loose character, is today $1,000,000.
This figure is based on the conservative estimate of the Vice Commission arrived at in its recent investigation. In its calculation the members began with the figure of 577 places immorally used. They conservatively estimated that $1,000 was the average excess profit of rent in open houses in the restricted districts, and $300 was a similar profit per year on “flats” and assignation hotels.
This same profit would not exist if vice did not place a high price on the haunts where it thrives. If the profits on vice are so enormous, the Vice Trust figures that the resort keepers and hotel and “flat” renters can pay high prices.
The prices for rent on “flats” are boosted from $20 to $40 above the actual rental valuation of the property.
The rental price on property in the segregated parts of the city is raised five times the actual rental figure.
The real estate owners, and the real estate agents raise the price. But they cannot steal this vast rental profit. The Vice Trust must have a share. A split is made. The lords of the vice combine get their share of the rental theft and back into the pockets of the Directorate of Ten goes the graft.
If this money is not paid by the real estate men and property owners, then they are the losers in the long run. The police department closes the place, refusing to allow prostitutes to live in the building.
Result: The property must be rented to people of poor condition who can pay but small rent. The physical value of the property is so small that a large rent could never be exacted from decent citizens. Therefore in order to make a profit himself, the lessor holds the rent high, countenances prostitution in his buildings and pays his graft to the Vice Trust.
A certain real estate agent controlling a building in Cottage Grove avenue, which is infested with immoral “flats,” declared that he boosted the rents in the building $30 for each flat above the actual rental valuation. This same man declared that he was obliged each month to hand over to detectives who visited him, $20 on each flat, leaving him but a boost of ten dollars per flat.
A woman who keeps a “flat” in Cottage Grove avenue declared that she was compelled to pay $50 for a $25 flat. She argued with the real estate agent but he showed her that if she desired police protection she would have to meet the demand. She did so.
Some time later, on account of public protest by clean-living citizens near this place, the police shut down the “flats” in the building in one day. The women inmates moved out. A week later those flats which had rented from $40 to $75 to the immoral women, were rented for $15 to $25 a flat.
Another example of the rent graft is given on the West side levee. A resort keeper who was once known as a king of the West side levee, owned a two-story building, which was used as a house of prostitution from which he derived the enormous rental of $250 a month. The place was situated in Curtis street. The street was “wiped out” by the police. A week later the two flats were being rented for $20 apiece.
There is one estate in Chicago today situated in a levee district which is valued at $1,000,000. If the segregated districts were wiped out this property would not be worth $20,000.
As an indication of the difficulty that would be experienced in wiping out this graft, remember that three city officials are owners of property used for immoral purposes. They are members of the great Combine. They would not permit the destruction of the immoral “flat” system because it would deprive them of an enormous revenue.
This rental graft is either paid to the police who take a small percentage and then turn the remainder over to the agents of the Directorate of Ten, in return for their protection, or is given to the vice powers direct by the real estate agents.
This rental graft is one of the big factors in maintaining a City Defiled. To strike at these places is to strike at the vice lords not alone through their enslaved women but through their property valuations.
There exist in the city of Chicago 500 disorderly saloons. Those are the places where women are allowed to frequent the backrooms and the wine-rooms for the purpose of soliciting drinks from men.
These places are to be found within the loop district and also in the resident sections of the city.
The owners of these places make enormous profits by the exploitation of vice, but they pay monthly large sums to the Vice Trust in order to carry on their business.
Each one of these places has an average of five women “hustling” for it. That figure is a low estimate.
Drinks are sold in these establishments at exorbitant and robbing prices. It is estimated that the gross profit, on an average, is 175 per cent in such places.
On the basis of five women in each place, earning three dollars a day as commission, which is formed on a twenty per cent basis, the daily net profit from these five girls, is $44. For a year this calculation brings forth the enormous figure of $16,060 for the proprietor. By computation this shows that the total profit of 500 saloons for one year is $8,080,000!
Think of that fortune in poison to thousands of men and women who frequent these infectious places!
But the big point is the graft.
But the big split must be made. Out of that swollen profit, the Directorate of Ten by some hook or crook, must get its dividends.
Although the price of protection by the police, in reality protection by the Big Ten, varies according to the location, possibilities in return and the number of women who work, investigation has shown that the average protective price of the disorderly saloon is $100 a month.
This runs as high as $300 for the big loop places and those whose revenues are excessively high.
Computing on the conservative basis of $100 per month, this means that the Vice Trust reaps a golden harvest of $50,000 a month from the disorderly saloons and cafes of Chicago! This means $600,000 graft a year!
In many of these places forms of entertainment are given, as for instance obscene theatricals and immoral dances. These places increasing their revenue by such displays, must of necessity increase their graft to the powers above. To run such “shows” they are compelled to pay the police $50 a month more, it is said.
In some districts the police charge for permitting music after closing hours. This graft usually is divided among the local police, from some of the police captains down to the man on the beat.
The dance halls which are found in every section of Chicago and the cheap arcades and some of the theaters with their suggestive dramas and vaudevilles are the starting points from which many girls go to ruin. These places earn many a big dollar for their owners. But again the Vice Trust holds out its aching and itching palm and cries for lucrative salve and is anointed with it. These places pay a protective police price ranging from $25 to $100 according to the degree of evil displayed, and the amounts of money taken in at the doors.
The privilege of selling beer at these infamous places to facilitate the work of destroying the souls of young women and young men is placed at $50 a month more to the police.
In previous chapters we have spoken of the richly furnished homes of vice and sin where the man of wealth and position can covertly enjoy his debased passions and ruin young and innocent girls with the assurance that his sins will not find him out.
These places to carry on their trade in human souls, where thousands of dollars are spent on elegant furnishings and where large profits accrue, also have their prices to pay the police and the political powers in the Vice Trust.
Protection prices, ranging from $500 to $1,000 are paid each month to insure their guests and deprive them of the fear of molestation.
These evils are not commonly known. The loop district is infested with such shops which are nothing but thin veils for prostitutes. Many hotels in Chicago contain such forms of vicious evil. These places are known to the police and the women in them, who make a pretense of legitimate work but in reality are ever on the alert for vice victims, are compelled to pay high protective sums to continue in their illegal professions.
These places in the loop district pay an average graft and protective price of $100 a month. This money, taken stealthily by the agents, is sent in the bulk to the members of the Vice Trust as in every other form of graft.
A large percentage of the lost women in Chicago and their male associates are the victims of the drug habit. They are enslaved either by the opium, cocaine or morphine curse. They must have these insidious stimulants to exist, once they are trapped by this form of misery among men and women.
The sale of these drugs is prohibited by law except under the most precautionary methods. In the South side “redlight” district four druggists make a profit on the sale of these drugs which is larger than their income on all other articles combined.
The sellers of these drugs must of necessity be known to the police who see the constant throng of hundreds of unfortunates sneaking shamefully into the places to procure the poisons that bring pleasant dreams, and even unconsciousness.
These places pay on an average $150 a month protection money to officials through their subordinates.
Wherever wealth congregates, and men seek to while away the leisure hours, willing to spend thousands of dollars in a night’s enjoyment, there you will find the agents of vice ready to minister to the wants of those men.
Out of such conditions has been born the Vampire Trust of Chicago.
It is composed of more than 100 women of loose character, women steeped in sin and vice, women of apparent refinement and dashing appearance, women of beauty and luring manner.
These women infest the lobbies, cafes and restaurants of the most exclusive hotels in the city. Their victims are the wealthy Chicago visitors who are compelled to forget their troubles and business worries over a glass of wine with charming, siren members of the trust. These women drug, rob, steal and blackmail their victims.
Many of these women have extensive police records. Their faces are known to the old and young detectives who are appointed to protect the city’s guests.
Then why are they allowed to carry on their thieving trade and fatten on their ill-gotten gains?
Again there is but one answer.
They pay their protection for existence and are allowed by the Vice Trust to thrive unmolested. When a victim does muster up enough courage to complain to the police that he has been victimized by a Vampire, he obtains no satisfaction. In fact he is given a significant warning against prosecution.
Most of the victims are married men, with almost unimpeachable reputations and social positions and families. They are told by the police officer to whom they complain that if they attempt to punish the woman who robbed them, the story would become public and the notoriety would do more harm than the loss of the money.
These women concert with the members of the blackmailers’ trust. These men point out prospective victims. If the men cannot be robbed, their reputations are jeopardized and then the women threaten to disgrace them by telling the story of a night of shame.
It is hard to estimate the protective price paid by these women. Judging from the number of their victims and the large amounts of money stolen, the relative protective price must be enormous.
The police admit the existence of this trust as was shown by a high police official in a recent attempted prosecution of one of its notorious members, who had served a sentence in the state penitentiary and who at one time was the respected wife of a Milwaukee jeweler and a prominent member of Wisconsin society. They do not admit that these women pay them a price to carry on their open robbing of victims.
One man in Chicago, who had been held up by these infamous wretches and bled until he rebelled against the slavery, recently gave up the battle, committed suicide and in a letter penned to his wife before his death, told of the outrages he had been subjected to because of his misstep.
And so these women are the agents of the Vice Trust, the associates of the lowest male creatures in Chicago, the parasites of rich men and the causes of suicide, murder and wrecked homes.
And why?
Because the Vice Trust must have its toll. Because the treasury has still space for more silver and gold. Because the hunger and thirst of the Directorate of Ten is never appeased.
Because the lust of the political powers behind the monster Vice is insatiable.
Not because men must submit to these things because unruly passions drive them to shame, misery, remorse and death, as has been fallaciously charged.
These are the subsidiary vices from which millions of dollars are garnered yearly to feed the Directorate of Ten, to put new diamonds on shirt fronts, brighter stones in heavy gold rings, new automobiles to wait for them outside their palaces whose every stone is hewn by the torn, cut and bleeding hands of thousands of women slaves and raised to its place by exhausted weakened and dying creatures.
Graft, graft, graft!
That word sings, echoes and reverberates through the underworld of Chicago. It is the slogan of the Vice Trust. It is the mystic sign of the vice fraternity.
And while the Vice Trust screams like a voice from the last depths of hell:
Graft, more graft!—
The victims lost in the depths of the Inferno echo back:—
Death, and more victims!
Who can really estimate the actual amount of graft reaped from sin which eats into the hearts of a lost and perished womanhood?
Our estimates have been conservative. They have been based on an average system of computation. The actual figures if we were able to carry our searchlight of truth into the coffers of the Directorate of Ten must be far above those we have given.
We have sought to tell the truth. In our hearts we know that such graft passes from the vicious to their masters each day. From the victims themselves we have learned the figures which we have given above.
Is there any wonder that after a thorough consideration of the subject from every viewpoint, we have closed our eyes and from the depth of our soul cried out in sincere conviction:—
CHICAGO IS THE WICKEDEST CITY IN THE WORLD!
Gambling and its Graft.
The Gambler’s Fate—The Handbook, Other Games of Chance and Their Protection—Police Profit—All Gambling Crooked—A Warning.
In the very heart of every man, woman and child is an instinct to risk the tangible and present for the intangible and the possible future things.
Since the beginning man has played some game of chance in his struggle for existence. He has counted his own possibilities as against those of his enemy, he has abided for what seemed the most opportune time and then he has risked and taken the leap. Often the goddess of Chance has been with him. More often that strange goddess has risen against him.
The boy risks his marbles against those of his playmate. The girl casts her jacks against those of her small companion.
It is the desire of risk showing itself in the immature mind.
As civilization went on and reason developed, the game of chance became a sport which had for its object a lucrative gain in some manner or other.
It became gambling:—the risking of something valuable on the basis that the risk may prove profitable to the risker.
The pages of history are dotted with evidences of gambling in every age. Gambling has passed through a million forms. In our present day life it is looked upon by the general public as a sport.
It is the purpose here not to dissertate on gambling as a moral and commercial evil alone, but to show that it is nothing today but another asset of the Vice Trust, stolen out of the not too plethoric pocket of the sucker public.
It is our purpose to show that a gambling ring, backed by millions of dollars, headed by powerful men and strengthened by the support of the members of the Vice Trust, thrives in Chicago, adding one more stain to her already besmirched municipal escutcheon.
It fattens on those men and women who have already been fleeced by the way of the social evil and on those who have not fallen victims to that sin, and whose besetting sin is gambling.
Yearly, thousands of young men are hurled to financial ruin, sent or headed to the penitentiary because of the gambling houses in the city of Chicago that run full blast with the officers of the law walking blindly past their open doors.
The gambling vice grasps its victims in a clutch as powerful as the grip of the drug habit or as unyielding as the toils of immorality.
The gambling combine in Chicago is as strong as the most powerful house of finance. It is bulwarked by every possible protection. You cannot beat it, in the long run, no matter what your talents, judgment and experience may be.
The average man or woman would stand a fair show of winning in the average gambling game in Chicago were that game “on the square.” But it is not; the entire system is crooked. That is how its profits are enormous.
The thousands of persons who play the handbooks during the day, the poker games and other forms of the gambling evil at night, have no more choice of emerging with the “long green” bulging from every pocket than has the mouse that is caught by the soft-pawed cat in a room and played with until tired and then killed. There is no escape. Everything is crooked and the gambling sucker is dubbed the “bleating sheep” the minute he enters where the chips rattle on the table or where the man with the dirty dollar smears your name on a chart with a stub pencil.
Each year hundreds of men and women end their blasted lives after they have emerged from the dens of the gambling lords, robbed of their last cent and face to face with ruin, disgrace, and punishment.
Each year, men are sent to our state prisons because they dipped their trembling hands into the gold in their employers’ till to make up the money the gambling fraternity had taken from them.
Each year, hundreds of women see their homes crumble beneath them, stand with tear-stained eyes and watch their social positions taken from them, lose the love and protection of their husbands and are turned adrift to stray into the hell houses we have described, because the gambling germ was imbedded and flourished in their blood and drove them on to unnameable ruin.
There is no way of estimating the evils consequent on the vice of gambling as it exists in Chicago today.
As a specific instance of the destructive power of the gambling combine a Chicagoan recently committed suicide after dissipating a fortune in flirting with the goddess of Chance.
In his pockets, stained with blood from the bullet wound through which his life had ebbed away, was the following note:
“Several persons have the right dope on the dive, gamblers and the police. They let a victim go there until they get all and then they blackball him. Why not destroy these vicious people and close the dives and save people from committing suicide?
“This is the raving of a dying and ruined man but I know what I am doing just the same.”
Do the police dare tamper with these men flaunting their violations of the law in their faces?
Even if they desired they could not do them harm. The gambling kings are in direct alliance with members of the Directorate of Ten of the Vice Trust. They turn over to it fifty per cent of their enormous income for the privilege of making the other fifty per cent.
Even in the face of a rigid and apparently sincere recent crusade against the unholy combine between police and gamblers, gambling continued to carry on its trade within a stone’s throw of the City Hall and underneath the shadows of certain big police stations.
The gambling kings are even more avaricious and selfish in their wealthy combine than are the members of the combine living off the social sin.
No one dares attempt to come into the chosen circle unless by direct consent of the big lords, and after he has sworn abject allegiance to the gambling chiefs. He must show the proper spirit by yielding up a large per cent of profit. If this is not forthcoming, the police suddenly and mysteriously awaken to the fact that the unfortunate man is running a gambling establishment. He is raided, arrested and put out of business, while a chosen servant of the fraternity shovels in the golden harvest from the suckers across the street, drops a few choice coins into the hands of the police who raided the opposition place and plies his trade in perfect quiet, comfort and security.
That is the power of the gambling kings. They are the high “lieutenants” of the Vice Trust. They are given big concessions and extraordinary powers because they are in position to show their fealty by the payment of thousands of dollars of tribute weekly.
GOD WORKS MIRACLES TODAY.
Copyrighted 1910 by The Midnight Mission.
Used by permission of owners of copyright.
A hardened heart softened by the appeal of a fellow man.
A drugged conscience awakened by a word picture
of men’s and women’s shame and degradation.
The gambling organization is so perfect today that there is no chance to beat it.
To perfect the system now in vogue it was necessary to do away with all forms of competition and opposition. This was finally accomplished after the expenditure of thousands of dollars by the gambling combine in control today.
It was the spirit of competition and the rivalry of factions that led to the bomb throwing epoch which has left such a deep stain on the history of Chicago.
Dynamite, gun cotton, nitroglycerine and other dangerous combustibles were used to whip the enemies into line.
The bomb throwing era which was the talk of the nation, was nothing more than the outward expression of the gamblers’ hate. The bombs thrown were the means of eliminating the competitor and bringing the enemies into the ranks of the favored as mere slaves.
In three years, fifty bombs were hurled by gamblers in the city of Chicago. A million dollars’ worth of property was destroyed, men were maimed and families broken up in this terrible war. The first bombs were directed against the men in command of the gambling forces. These men then realizing the power of the dynamiters, employed them to destroy the enemies of the protected organization.
As a result the gambling combine today is based on dynamite and gunpowder. The police knew who threw the bombs but dared not arrest the criminals.
Every form of gambling controlled by the gambling combine can be found in Chicago. The high-priced forms are found in the loop district, the gambling handbooks are found everywhere, and the cheap forms can be met with in any part of the big city.
There are nine residents and property holders of Chicago in the directorate of the gambling fraternity and combine. These men control the vicious gambling situation today.
These men control one of the largest and most influential systems in the world. They employ thousands of men to do their bidding and exact thousands of dollars daily from the pockets of an unwary public.
These men as a combine, are subsidiary to the great Vice Trust. These men play directly into the hands of the Directorate of Ten which we have shown as feasting off the well laden tables of prostitution, sin and women. They derive their terrible and crushing power through the big vice masters. They divide the profits with them. They pay high protection in order to operate the thousand and one forms of gambling which they back daily, from the cheap crap games to the highest and most money yielding games of bridge or to the most lucrative, whirling roulette wheels.
One of these men controlling this terrible vice is today a member of the city council making Chicago’s laws for righteousness; one is a former member of the Illinois State legislature; one holds a high place in City Hall circles, and another is a prominent business man carrying on a business as a veil to his real and disgraceful profession.
There exist in Chicago 1,000 handbooks.
A handbook, for the benefit of the unsophisticated reader, is a record made in a local place of horse races which are being run off at a distance. As for instance, a cigar store in the loop district makes bets on races which are being run off at Jacksonville, Florida.
The handbooks are run in saloons, cigar stores, hotels, and on newsstands. Here the dollars of the sucker patrons are drawn from their pockets as by magic, turned over to the agents of the gambling trust, never to return. Clerks, stenographers, office boys, all classes of salaried men and women are the victims of the handbook habit in Chicago.
Day after day this unseeing public scratches its head of “solid ivory,” puzzles its brain in desperation and goes out to “beat” the combination that never has known a real defeat.
Barnum said “there is one sucker born every minute.” Truly there is. The birth statistics of the Chicago sucker, male and female, mostly male, is greater than the birth rate of innocent children. This is a queer world.
In quiet and refined neighborhoods, in the rear of candy stores and even dry goods stores, women who are considered spotless by their social associates drop in daily, nervously look over the “dope sheet,” pick their winner, and hurl their husbands’ hard-earned dollars into the yawning pockets of the gambling combine.
These thousand handbooks daily furnishing the names of horses running on every track in the United States, must have some means of acquiring that important information.
The Vice Trust is never at loss to furnish a medium through which its graft may be increased.
The members of the Vice Trust looked about for men trained to the fine arts of separating the innocent and unwary from their dollars, and found the men who today are the leaders of the gambling combine.
These men incorporated themselves secretly into a powerful corporation,—the gambling industry, capital unlimited.
The superintendent of the strangest gambling news agency in Chicago is Mont Tennes, for twenty years associated with the gambling world in one way or another. Through a news service, which leases telephone and telegraph wires, this man gathers into his clearing houses and exchanges in Chicago, the daily news of the race tracks of the world.
This news, once gathered into “headquarters,” is sold to every handbook runner in the city at prices ranging from $12 to $250 a month.
This news is the same to every place in the city to which it is sent by telephone, or telegraph. The price for that news varies in proportion to the size of the place receiving the service and the amount of the daily profits scraped from the skins of the sucker patrons.
This wire service is national, not local. It is the veins and arteries through which the gambling fluid flows daily to many cities in the country.
On the circuit, furnishing gambling news, there are twenty-nine cities that are receiving gambling information daily and paying for it.
In each of these cities, this gambling magnate has an agent selected to receive his information and to distribute to places in that city demanding it on the payment of high sums of money.
The agent pays for the right of such dissemination. This man in the aggregate receives $40,000 a month from the agents in twenty-nine cities on his circuit who reap vast fortunes from the sending of the gambling news to the handbooks in their respective territories. The “boss” is not satisfied with the swollen profit. He demands a certain percentage in the various cities from the profits of the local men using his service.
Sixty thousand “pikers” in Chicago feeding the gambling goddess through her handbook mouth daily!
Is that figure something to startle you? It is true.
The “piker” plays in small spurts from fifty cents to three dollars a day. Then the bets soar up the ladder until you reach the rich sucker who shovels out as much as $500 a day on an average. Bets are paid as high as $10,000 in one day on downtown handbooks.
One man in State street has maintained a $25,000 a day business for ten years on an average. This has been actually proven.
There are twenty places downtown where handbooks are maintained that do an average business of $5,000 a day year in and year out, with men who dream and plan to beat the unconquerable combine.
Police officials who have consented to talk because they have been disowned by political masters and a former partner of the present gambling head declare that $300 is a fair and conservative estimate of the income from a horde of suckers of each of the 1,000 handbook establishments daily.
This means $300,000 per day changes hands in the race of men to exercise their gambling interests.
The betting combinations are so arranged, according to experts, that the one sucker is pitted against his brother and not against the house.
The placement of money on horse flesh is so arranged that no matter how the horses run, a profit of at least ten per cent accrues to the bookmaker. He is never the big loser. In cold cash that means $30,000 a day to the handbook men of the city.
Few of the races or the racing tips are “on the square.” The sucker plays and attempts to defeat a system which is nothing more than one crooked scheme within another.
Fifty per cent of that is needed by the handbook men to operate their places. It is used in the payment of salaries to hirelings, wire service, rent, telephone service, printing and miscellaneous financial obligations.
The balance or $15,000 is split between two mighty factors. Seven thousand five hundred dollars are kept by the poolroom combination and an equal sum is paid, through members of the police force, or other collectors, as protection money to the great powers of the Vice Trust.
The local police for their vigilance in steering reformers from the door of the gambling holes, carrying on fake raids and helping the sucker to forget the loss of his bankroll by rubbing his injured pocketbook with the salve of warning to keep away and learn a lesson, must be given their share. Then the “big fellows” who in the department are the spokesmen for the Vice combine must dig out their share. Then the remainder,—a large remainder,—must go back to the Directorate of Ten.
Stop and think how swollen and bloated this figure becomes when considered from the standpoint of an annuity.
Two million six hundred and twenty-four thousand dollars are paid each year to the Vice Trust and the big political lords for the right to rob the general public, prey upon its tempting instinct to dare a chance, and drive the individual to ruin, starvation and death.
That same amount of money is split up yearly between the handbook combination and the agents throughout the city.
The handbook which we have described in its method of operation and its graft for police protection is the common man’s expression of his gambling instinct.
There are five hundred other temples of the goddess of Chance, in which a variety of gambling games are played nightly. In some of these places every form of chance game can be found in full force each night. In others, a specialty of one kind of game is made.
The principal forms of gambling that flourish today are roulette, poker, stuss (a Jewish form of poker), fan-tan, faro, whist, craps, black jack and hearts.
In a Michigan avenue hotel at Twenty-second street a roulette wheel is spun nightly to the tune of $3,000. Hundreds of men and women crowd into the stuffy room, filled with smoke and the fumes of beer and wine, and stake their all on the whirling colors.
The man that plays to break the bank at that place is playing the same game as the man who starts out to tear the cast-iron bottom out of the bank of Monte Carlo.
It can’t be done.
Behind the whir and hum of that maddening wheel is $50,000 held by the keepers of the game. Try to break into that treasury with pick, axe or jimmy and you will be caught, trapped and bled to death.
In a house recently closed because of the objectionable notoriety it had obtained, the gambling and vice powers are said to have cleaned up over $100,000 in three months. That place was located in Michigan avenue near Thirteenth street. All forms of chance were thrown into the gambling pot, melted and handed out to the “pikers” as so many gold bricks nightly.
In a famous, or rather infamous, whist club in a downtown building, whose doors open in the face of the offices of several prominent lawyers, $20,000 a night is cleaned up by the keepers.
There are a dozen similar places in the loop district where the money that changes hands in one night, averages $10,000. Men acquainted with the situation declared that $500 a day is a very conservative average of money changing hands in the various gambling holes in Chicago.
For the 500 places this means an exchange of $250,000 a day.
Oh, will a freshly awakened civic conscience save a demoralized public from itself, or will the lethargy which is upon Chicago allow the thousands of young men, men with wives and families, to hurry themselves on to ruin and to death?
The gambling houses, according to old time gamblers, on all forms of gambling, make a “rakeoff” of about seven per cent on each dollar cast by a victim before their greedy eyes.
This means $17,500 a day. Fifty per cent of that or $8,750, is retained by the gambling house keepers for expenses. The remaining profit goes the old, old way, one half—$4,375—is split between the gambling under lords and the gambling kings.
An equal amount, goes to the Vice Trust for the protection received from the police.
So greedy and avaricious are the big chiefs of the gambling fraternity and the members of the Vice Trust that after all is said and done, there is little left for the game keeper.
As a result even the little sporting instinct he may have is sacrificed and he becomes crooked in every dealing he has with the paying public.
“Ninety-eight per cent of the gambling games in Chicago today are crooked,” declared a well-known gambler. “There is no money in the profession unless the public can be hoodwinked.”
Science, electricity, hypnotism, sleight of hand, or other means are used to deceive the player.
Unless you can note the swift touch of the gambler’s foot on the electric button, which drops the little ball into the red hole when you bet on the black, you face ruin every time you face the roulette wheel.
Can you see the invisible hand that is doping the racetrack sheet? If you cannot, stay away from the handbook or be prepared to look into the dark and murky waters of the river as a final hiding place of shame.
Do you think the friendly game of poker is on “the square”? If you do you are mistaken. The house has two men, professional sharks, fishing for your money. They are out to get it and they will succeed. They will whip-saw you back and forth until they exhaust you and tire your alertness. Then they will crucify you on the cross of your own cupidity and zeal to make a millionaire’s fortune in a night on the income of a counter clerk.
The game has not been beaten. That is why the gambling combine is strong. That is why it has the support of the Vice Trust. Like the man who hopes to withstand the temptations of the crime-centers, and as the woman who ventures is poisoned unto death with the venom of sin, so the man who goes forth to tempt Fate and win a kiss from the cold lips of Chance, is enmeshed before he is aware of it and borne onward in the terrible maelstrom which hurls him into the bottomless pit of infamy and shame.
The gambling curse is a terrible one. Its stigma burns on the cheek of its victims forever. Scarcely any hope can be held out to the man who is trapped by its subtle lure.
To those young men and young women of the city and the country, we write this warning. We have shown that you “cannot beat the game,” no matter how intelligently you try.
The Vice Trust has never known defeat. It will not know defeat in this enormous source of revenue pouring into its coffers annually from the favored, police-protected, bomb-throwing, life-destroying Gambling Combine.
IF HOLDUPS INCREASE.
By Courtesy of The Chicago Daily News.
STEPPING OUT TO POST A LETTER
May take the form of an armed sortie.