POLICE PRICE FOR THE SCARLET WOMAN.
Investigation again discloses a terrible condition of things.
We are going to show what these unfortunate women pay to exist:—the amount of money they pay the police for protection and the money that is passed on.
The prices exacted from a levee house by the police or other agents of the Vice Trust for police protection, varies according to the liberties given these slaves.
From investigation of a thorough character it is safe to say that the average protection price paid per woman in Chicago is twenty dollars a month!
Figuring on the basis of 5,000 women who are prostitutes in the accepted sense of the term, this means a payment of $1,200,000 in protection money a year.
In support of our monthly protective price of twenty dollars, we quote the following from a woman, for twenty years the owner of a big house of prostitution in Chicago and now a married and reformed member of the best society of Cedar Rapids, Ia. This woman in speaking of the question of protection money, said:
“During my experience of twenty years as the keeper of a Chicago resort, 900 girls passed through my hands. The protection prices I paid depended largely on the profits that the girls made. I had as many as forty-five girls in my establishment at once. The girls got half of their earnings and I got the other half. From my part I paid my protection money. I paid from fifteen to thirty-five dollars for each girl to the police. The average for all the girls was twenty dollars a month for each girl I kept. I will not give the names of the police or the collectors.”
When prominent investigators were searching for facts to use in a crusade against the sale of liquor without a license, they visited the Everleigh Club on Dearborn street.
Minnie Everleigh, one of the two women who own that notorious resort, made the following statement, showing the existence of police protection:
“I would be perfectly willing to pay a liquor license of $1,000 a year. I would like to see the entire business legalized. I would pay the price legally demanded.
“As it is today, someone permits us to conduct our establishment. I am paying in other ways.”
The payment which that dive keeper made “in other ways” was the protection money and a dozen allied forms of graft to the Vice Trust through its “lieutenants.”