THE GAMBLING VEINS OF THE COUNTRY.
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.