“Give me so much gold from the earnings of defiled women and we will give you so much protection, so much liberty and so many privileges,” offers the directorate of the Vice Trust.
That protection money is counted out: so much per woman, so much per sin, so much per vice.
The Vice Trust of the grafting directorate accepts the money and vice lives and flourishes.
The purchased souls of policemen, ready to do the bidding of the graft masters, are the agents through which this protective power is dispensed, in the primary matter of existence.
Graft for protection is the vital graft and the primary one. Policemen collect this themselves and turn it over to their superior officers. Their superior officers in turn take out their percentage for the damnable work and pass the bulk on to “men higher up.”
The graft for police protection is not always paid to policemen. High officials, fearing that their hand may show in corrupt and incriminating transactions, hire private and debased citizens to carry on this pernicious work of collecting from the resort keepers and from those whose business depends on the resorts.
That is the graft exacted for the simple existence of prostitution and the carrying on of the trade in women’s bodies.
The more the earnings of the house of ill fame, the higher the value of the women enslaved, the more liberty granted to make hellish profits, the greater the protective graft.
As a corroboration of our flat statement we have scores of men of prominence in every walk of life who have first-hand knowledge of the existence of this alliance of vice and graft.
Recently, an attorney whose business takes him into the “redlight” district on the South side, made the following statement in a Chicago daily paper: