FIGURES THAT FREEZE THE BLOOD.
In an investigation that took in the cases of 500 prostitutes it was found that their average earnings were $100 a week.
We are aiming to be conservative. Let us place the average earnings at forty dollars a week, as a basis for figuring out some astounding results.
There are 5,000 outright prostitutes in the city of Chicago. Five thousand women making forty dollars a week will make $200,000 a week.
Five thousand women at forty dollars a week earn in one year—
$10,400,000!
Is it conceivable? Is it possible?
Tortured bodies of women yielding that gigantic income!
These are the women who live in the levee resorts, the inmates of flats and hotels and the slaves of the cafe owners.
Those women who live within houses whose owners pay protection for their inmates, give up half of the weekly earnings to the “madam.”
Those women who are known as “hustlers” in the slang phrase, give fifty per cent of their earnings to the police for individual protection.
No matter how and where that protection money is paid, it eventually percolates through the hands of the police or agents to the members of the Vice Trust.
The women of the street who frequent the hotels with their victims, pass their protection money to the hotel owners. They act in furthering protection, in the same capacity as do the keepers of the houses of ill fame for their victims.
The police trail these girls to the favorite hotel and then compel the hotel men to collect from the women.