THE KIMONA TRUST AND THE VAMPIRE TRUST.
The light, cheap and thin apparel worn by the lost women of the dens of pollution contribute their small share to buy diamonds for the vice-magnates.
There is a vice-asset called the “Kimona Trust.” Every stitch of clothing worn by the women denizens of the underworld is made and sold by its agents.
For that trade it pays a regular and definite tribute.
We could go on enumerating indefinitely and never reach an end.
Graft, graft,—every kind from every dreamed-of source!
The Vampire Trust is one of the novelties of Chicago’s crime-world. It is of recent creation. It is a subsidiary corporation of the “big combine.”
One hundred women, it is estimated, form its rank and file. They are women of luring, attractive appearance, insidious “good-fellows,” smartly educated and vice’s students of human nature.
Like vultures they prey on Chicago’s wealthy visitors. They infest the lobbies, restaurants and cafés of Chicago’s most exclusive hotels. They search out their victims, wile them away from business cares by sensuous charms, take them “slumming,” drug them and rob them.
Then they divide their ill-gotten gains with their protectors.
Then, too, there is the “hotel thieves combine.” It is estimated that more than $1,000 worth of valuables is stolen from the hotels in a month.
Bell boys are numbered among the hotel thieves. The police watch them and follow them to the “fences”—the places where the stolen property is sold for less than one half its value. Once more the trust does its work. The “fence” manager must pay tribute or go to jail. He pays, of course.
That is the story of GRAFT, its origin, source and magnitude.