The protection graft is the beginning of the great graft system. It is created to be used as a foundation for a thousand and one other sources of graft from sin and vice.
It has been shown that the woman either personally or through the woman or man to whom she is sold or has sold herself offers the first tribute to the Vice Trust and pays for a lease on her demoralizing and destructive life.
Now that she has paid her protective graft, she is to be fleeced by the great trust with its political leaders, out of the remaining part of her earnings.
The women in the resorts are the greatest victims of the “consequential graft.”
Take for instance, the woman inmate of a house who is in need of clothes and other necessities and watch the way the Vice Trust robs her over and over again.
The average earnings of a woman was placed at forty dollars. Of that twenty dollars was turned over to the resort keeper. That leaves an average of twenty dollars weekly to a woman. That is $1,000 a year.
Of this amount these women are compelled to spend $500 yearly. That leaves them but $500. Even that succumbs to a mere nominal figure when graft has finally stopped feasting on it.
THE KIMONA TRUST.
There is a subsidiary trust of the Vice Trust which robs the 2,000 inmates of resorts in the city.
That combine is called the Kimona Trust. It is composed of certain clothing makers who sell exclusively to the inmates of the houses of prostitution. It received its name from the fact that the prostitutes buy and wear light house apparel, consisting of kimonas, wrappers, flimsy gowns and gaudy lingerie.