OTHER FORMS OF GAMBLING AND GRAFT.
The handbook which we have described in its method of operation and its graft for police protection is the common man’s expression of his gambling instinct.
There are five hundred other temples of the goddess of Chance, in which a variety of gambling games are played nightly. In some of these places every form of chance game can be found in full force each night. In others, a specialty of one kind of game is made.
The principal forms of gambling that flourish today are roulette, poker, stuss (a Jewish form of poker), fan-tan, faro, whist, craps, black jack and hearts.
In a Michigan avenue hotel at Twenty-second street a roulette wheel is spun nightly to the tune of $3,000. Hundreds of men and women crowd into the stuffy room, filled with smoke and the fumes of beer and wine, and stake their all on the whirling colors.
The man that plays to break the bank at that place is playing the same game as the man who starts out to tear the cast-iron bottom out of the bank of Monte Carlo.
It can’t be done.
Behind the whir and hum of that maddening wheel is $50,000 held by the keepers of the game. Try to break into that treasury with pick, axe or jimmy and you will be caught, trapped and bled to death.
In a house recently closed because of the objectionable notoriety it had obtained, the gambling and vice powers are said to have cleaned up over $100,000 in three months. That place was located in Michigan avenue near Thirteenth street. All forms of chance were thrown into the gambling pot, melted and handed out to the “pikers” as so many gold bricks nightly.
In a famous, or rather infamous, whist club in a downtown building, whose doors open in the face of the offices of several prominent lawyers, $20,000 a night is cleaned up by the keepers.