Twenty Years a Detective in the Wickedest City in the World

by Clifton R. Wooldridge

After these, the huge powers of the land, cleansed states, counties and cities must join the Augean stable-cleaning, for graft is everywhere. The fight against graft is only beginning, and it will end only when a new generation learns that honor is above money, and that "grafting" is the most disreputable form of theft.

Wholesale Swindling Grafters.

A chain of stores in various cities for no other purpose than the obtaining of goods under false pretenses from wholesale merchants is the latest novelty in the swindling line. It has often been remarked that the originators of plans to dupe the public might coin their brains into cash without nearly the draft upon their originality that is called for by the devising of a swindling game. But the criminal instinct or incentive seems to lay its hold upon persons who might otherwise fill a leading and respected place in honorable avocations. The men who conceived the system of credit for goods to the value of many thousands of dollars, which they quickly disposed of in different cities by auction and attractive sales, closing up their stores and decamping when they had converted the credited stock into cash, were swindlers of unusual calibre.

The police of several cities now have the task of unearthing the frauds and bringing them to justice. They may or may not succeed in so doing, as the scheme was craftily laid and carried out. A harvest of $100,000 as the returns for a daring exploitation of the credit system will be regarded, even by the gilt-edged among the robbing fraternity, as a fine stroke of craftsmanship. The ingenuity of these cormorants calls for constant readjustment of honest persons to the conditions created. The lesson of the so-called bargain-house fraud will be conned, and for a long time to come it may be practically impossible for the same scheme to be worked again. But the feature of such enterprises is that they are designed only for the one operation. After that they become worthless to their originators.

Religious Graft Pays.

"Fake" religion as a business may have a fanciful sound, but there are plenty of men, and women, too, in this day and age who have found it to be an extremely practical, well-paying proposition. The readiness with which a good share of the people are always anxious to receive any new religion, or an old religion revamped in new fashion, makes the road of the charlatan whose trade is the promulgation of a fake religion one strewn with roses and money. Women are principally his victims, although there are plenty of men with a penchant for adopting strange religions, and from them the faker manages to reap a harvest that makes the pay of the average minister look like the earnings of an office boy. While the manner of securing money through the cloak of a false new sect is generally so hidden that the votaries of the cult are never aware of its existence until after their leader is exposed, the main object is never lost sight of by the leader, and the main object is always, "Get the money."

Out of the great mass of religions or NEW THOUGHT sects started each year in this country, it is declared that but extremely few are started with any idea other than that of separating a lot of people from their money. Occasionally there is a man who sincerely believes that he has discovered something new and precious in the way of a religion, and establishes a cult with the motive only to help people according to his own lights. But the mass of the new religions, sun worshipers, psychists, Brahmins, Hindus, theosophists, mystics, etc., are promoted with the same object in view as that of the old negro voodoo doctors—get the money.

Financial Yields Are Large.

The financial yields of the new religions are incomparably higher than is the voodoo man's gain. His followers, who believe in black art and other foolish, old-fashioned things, are nearly always drawn from the poorer, even the indigent classes—classes that have but little to spend, even on a religion. But the East Indian religionist, or the sun worshiper, draws his clientele from the better classes, and his followers have the money to reward him in a way that is astounding. He dabbles not with the poor—neither, it must be confessed, entirely with the ignorant. His victims come from the upper walks of life, sometimes from near the top, and their name is legion.

There is a Hindu who has now left this country to go back to spend the rest of his days in luxurious idleness, the while chuckling over the gullibility of the smart American people, who came here with a new religion and made a fortune.