Twenty Years a Detective in the Wickedest City in the World

by Clifton R. Wooldridge

Sensational raids made in the effort to clear Chicago of its numerous "Fake" patent medicine concerns, occurred on the morning of Nov. 29, 1904.

The raids followed a long conference between Chief of Police Francis O'Neill and Col. James E. Stuart, Chief Inspector of Chicago Postal Department, and for the first time in the history of the city, the Federal and City forces worked in unison. They decided that Chicago should be cleared of "Fake" Patent Medicine Concerns which for years had been using the mails to defraud hundreds of thousands of sick and weak persons.

George G. Kimball, U. S. Inspector of Mails, and Detective Clifton R. Wooldridge were assigned to gather the evidence and prepare the cases for prosecution. The work was no easy task. Both officers went about the work of gathering the evidence in a thoroughly systematic manner.

Inspector Kimball discovered the mails were employed extensively by the agents in disposing of their spurious drugs. Investigation proved that large orders were sent to small suburban towns and cities weekly. The correspondence, circulars and goods were secured.

The breaking up of the drug ring, however, was a delicate task. It was strongly backed financially, and it was aided and abetted, throughout the United States, by political rings galore. Chicago was the headquarters, and it was natural that to the police department of this city, ever-famed for its hatred of "grafts" big and little, should fall the lot of exterminating the traffic.

Detective Wooldridge gathered the information in Chicago, the names of the firms, location and the men who owned them.

The men are charged with making and selling a spurious preparation of aristol, a product made in Germany, and valued as a substitute for iodoform. Their products were represented as genuine, were said to differ from those handled by the wholesale drug trade, only in the fact that they were imported from Canada and England instead of from Germany.

Here are a few of the things discovered in the course of the investigation by Detective C. R. Wooldridge. The statements are printed from an interview with the great detective.

"As we have progressed the work has broadened and grown to proportions never anticipated at the start. Among the goods seized were found boxes, the labels of which bore the chemical name and formula of trional, and which gave an exact description of the chemical and physical properties of trional and the medicinal indications of this drug.