Why?
Because a politician has the controlling interest in the manufacture and sale of a certain brand of whiskey. Therefore, that is the kind of whiskey sold. It is as logical as all things in the harmonious and well-oiled system. No keeper of a house of ill fame, no bloated, blear-eyed saloonkeeper of the district would offer any other brand. Wisely, if not honestly, another capitalist of the vice-corporation has bought up a cigarette concern. He makes and sells a poisonous, brain and moral-destroying cigarette. Ask for cigarettes in any den of infamy in the levees of the city, and this brand will be forced on you. Perhaps if you strongly protest, you can obtain some other brand, but your protest must be loud and insistent.
Once more is evidenced the overwhelming, overreaching power of operative and unified lawlessness.
Another member of the Trust has sunk his crime-tainted dollars into a taxi-cab concern. The corporation must yield a profitable harvest.
Result: The man, who after satisfying his lust and passions, drunk with the wine he has paid dearly for, and exhausted from a repulsive debauch, is put into a taxi-cab and driven away from a “redlight” resort. That taxi-cab belongs, through invested capital, to a member of the Crime Directorate. Again the shadow of the monster.
If a business man engages in the manufacture of gambling paraphernalia he looks for a market,—usually the saloon or dive. When he seeks contracts he is told:
“Better see the boss.”
He sees him. He pays him, and then he installs his machines at will, even over the protest of resort keepers.
Again the hidden graft channel.
Hundreds of pounds of opium are smuggled into Chicago yearly. The opium dens pay their protection price, but long before that the policeman has held out his hand behind his back, accepted the graft from the “importer” and sent him on to sow a slow death to thousands through the petals of the poppy bud.