“CADETS” AND POLICE GRAFT.
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.