PRICE OF PROTECTING VICE.
“Give me so much gold from the earnings of defiled women and we will give you so much protection, so much liberty and so many privileges,” offers the directorate of the Vice Trust.
That protection money is counted out: so much per woman, so much per sin, so much per vice.
The Vice Trust of the grafting directorate accepts the money and vice lives and flourishes.
The purchased souls of policemen, ready to do the bidding of the graft masters, are the agents through which this protective power is dispensed, in the primary matter of existence.
Graft for protection is the vital graft and the primary one. Policemen collect this themselves and turn it over to their superior officers. Their superior officers in turn take out their percentage for the damnable work and pass the bulk on to “men higher up.”
The graft for police protection is not always paid to policemen. High officials, fearing that their hand may show in corrupt and incriminating transactions, hire private and debased citizens to carry on this pernicious work of collecting from the resort keepers and from those whose business depends on the resorts.
That is the graft exacted for the simple existence of prostitution and the carrying on of the trade in women’s bodies.
The more the earnings of the house of ill fame, the higher the value of the women enslaved, the more liberty granted to make hellish profits, the greater the protective graft.
As a corroboration of our flat statement we have scores of men of prominence in every walk of life who have first-hand knowledge of the existence of this alliance of vice and graft.
Recently, an attorney whose business takes him into the “redlight” district on the South side, made the following statement in a Chicago daily paper:
“There is one police official who should be punished for his activity in collecting tribute for the protection he dispenses to levee resort keepers. He is a smooth article, however, and he goes straight to headquarters in a fine show of indignation whenever anyone makes any charges against him.
“My business takes me into the district and I know that there is a regular tax levied on these people. It all depends on the size of the establishment and the amount of business done. The collecting is done by plain clothes men who turn it over to a police official and he takes or sends it to a higher official and after he takes out his share the balance goes to a city official. I’ve had that told me so many times by so many different persons, some of them policemen, that I know it is true.
“But you couldn’t get a person in the district to talk; they are run out of the district as soon as they threaten trouble.”
The man who made the above statement is one of the most prominent attorneys in Chicago. He is simply corroborating our charge of the existence of the practice of protection.
The high city official to whom the money goes and to whom he refers is one of the organizers of the great Vice and Graft Trust; a man who has made thousands of dollars by corrupting the power placed in his hands, and who today continues in the face of reform movements, to instruct his sycophantic police officials to allow vice to flourish just as long as it pours its gold into his coffers.
THE DRUGGED CONSCIENCE.
Copyrighted 1910 by The Midnight Mission.
Used by permission of owners of copyright.
Steeped in iniquity.—Blind to his sin.—One step from eternal ruin.
As an instance that vice is shut down when it fails to make its tribute, we quote the following story from a well known criminal lawyer. It is astonishing in its features and in its revelations. This man said:—
“I was obliged in the course of my professional duties while searching for a woman important to a case at hand to visit the Empire Hotel on Wabash avenue. A week before my visit I had read that the police had raided the hotel and arrested several girls who lived there. These girls were not prosecuted and were discharged the morning after their arrest. The matter was fresh in my mind when I made my visit. I questioned the proprietress of the hotel as to the recent raid, and she smiled at me and said:
“‘Oh, we have to stand for these police gags. You see we weren’t paying protection money and they simply raided us as a warning. We are running full blast now and without any police interference, because we are coming across every week with our protection price.’”
The protection money is gathered principally in the levee districts but it also comes from every other place in the city where vice is made a business.
The protection money that is exacted from the keeper of the brothel is exacted from the keeper of the hotel, cafe, saloon and other species of places of infamy.
Here is another example of the truth of the story of protective graft.
An investigator for the Vice Commission corroborates our own investigation.
This investigator witnessed the following scene and conversation.
A man who had remained in a South side levee resort all night, complained to the police the next day that he had been robbed of fifty dollars by one of the inmates.
Accompanied by two detectives from the Twenty-second street police station, the man went to the house.
The landlady, when she heard his charge, became angry and while the investigator listened made this remark:
“That man never possessed fifty dollars in his life. It’s a frame up. Why are you police bothering me? Are you looking for more money? What do you want? I paid my protection money two days ago.”
We will show the price exacted from the prostitute’s master in order that she may exist as a creature of vice and sell every drop of blood in her body to make more money.