“I was obliged in the course of my professional duties while searching for a woman important to a case at hand to visit the Empire Hotel on Wabash avenue. A week before my visit I had read that the police had raided the hotel and arrested several girls who lived there. These girls were not prosecuted and were discharged the morning after their arrest. The matter was fresh in my mind when I made my visit. I questioned the proprietress of the hotel as to the recent raid, and she smiled at me and said:
“‘Oh, we have to stand for these police gags. You see we weren’t paying protection money and they simply raided us as a warning. We are running full blast now and without any police interference, because we are coming across every week with our protection price.’”
The protection money is gathered principally in the levee districts but it also comes from every other place in the city where vice is made a business.
The protection money that is exacted from the keeper of the brothel is exacted from the keeper of the hotel, cafe, saloon and other species of places of infamy.
Here is another example of the truth of the story of protective graft.
An investigator for the Vice Commission corroborates our own investigation.
This investigator witnessed the following scene and conversation.
A man who had remained in a South side levee resort all night, complained to the police the next day that he had been robbed of fifty dollars by one of the inmates.
Accompanied by two detectives from the Twenty-second street police station, the man went to the house.
The landlady, when she heard his charge, became angry and while the investigator listened made this remark: