It is not quite clear how it was that she got at cross purposes with the police, but one remark made by Hoch would seem to indicate the existence of an incipient jealousy between the police and Tammany Hall.
Augusta Thurow told the Committee that she said to Hoch:—
“I cannot afford to pay more than I am paying; you people treat me so terribly, and I had to go to Roesch, and I had to pay him for his trouble.” He said, “What did you pay him?” I said “Never mind what I paid him.” He says, “That is how it is with you; you people get us angry; you give money to the politicians that belong to the police.”—Vol. i., p. 1,080.
The Chairman asked her to repeat exactly what he said; and she answered, “He said, ‘You give the money to the politicians that ought to go to the police. Are the politicians doing for you, or are we doing for you?’”
The evidence of the two Madams, and of a great number of other keepers of disorderly houses, proved beyond all gainsaying that the police were in partnership with the prostitutes, and that the firstfruits of the harvest of shame were paid to the Captain of the Precinct. The Report of the Lexow Committee thus sums up the result of their investigations:—
The testimony upon this subject, taken as a whole, establishes conclusively the fact that this variety of vice was regularly and systematically licensed by the police of the city. The system had reached such a perfection in detail that the inmates of the several houses were numbered and classified, and a rateable charge placed upon each proprietor in proportion to the number of inmates, or in cases of houses of assignation the number of rooms occupied and the prices charged, reduced to a monthly rate, which was collected within a few days of the first of each month during the year. This was true apparently with reference to all disorderly houses except in the case of a few specially favoured ones. The prices ran from twenty-five to fifty dollars monthly, depending upon the considerations aforesaid, besides fixed sums for the opening of new houses or the resumption of “business” in old or temporarily abandoned houses, and for “initiation fees” designed as an additional gratuity to captains upon their transfer into new precincts. The established fee for opening and initiation appears to have been five hundred dollars.
Thus it appears that transfers of captains, ostensibly made for the purpose of reform and of enforcing the discontinuance of the practice, the prevalence of which seems to have been generally understood, resulted only in the extortion from these criminal places of additional blackmail.
As an evidence of the perfect system to which this traffic has been reduced, your Committee refers to that part of the testimony which shows that in more than one instance the police officials refused to allow keepers of disorderly houses to discontinue their business, threatening them with persecution if they attempted so to do, and substantially expounding the proposition that they were for the purpose of making money to share with the police. As an evidence of the extraordinary conditions to which this system had given rise, it is proper to call your attention to the fact that in a number of cases women, who, as keepers of disorderly houses, had paid thousands of dollars for police protection, had become reduced to the verge of starvation, while those who had exacted blackmail from them were living in luxury in houses that had been furnished out of the earnings of these women, or they were wearing ornaments of jewelry purchased by them; and even the furniture of their houses had been paid for by those whom they had protected in the commission of crime.
The evidence establishes, furthermore, that not only the proprietors of disorderly houses paid for their illegal privileges, but the outcasts of society paid patrolmen on post for permission to solicit on the public highways, dividing their gains with them, and, often, as appears by proof, when brought before the police magistrates and committed to the penitentiary for disorderly conduct in default of bail, they compounded their sentence, and secured bail by paying ten dollars or fifteen dollars to the clerk of the court, or his agents, and were then released again to ply their calling and to become victimised as before.
The evidence furthermore shows that in some of the houses of the character described, visitors were systematically robbed, and when they made complaint at the station-house the man detailed to examine into the charge failed to arrest the perpetrator, and frightened the victim off by threats, and then returned and received his compensation, an equal division of the plunder between the thief and the officer.