CHAPTER IX.

FARMERS-GENERAL OF THE WAGES OF SIN.

If the Police Captain was the Pantata of the Gambler, he was the Farmer-General of the Houses of Ill-fame in his Precinct. His duty, as defined by the law which he had sworn to enforce, was clear. He was bound to close every disorderly house in his jurisdiction. His practice was to let them all run--for a consideration. The Strange Woman, that pathetic and tragic figure in the streets of all great cities, whose house from of old was said to be the Way of Hell, going down into the Chambers of Death, excited in the Police Captain only the sentiment of rapacity. In his eyes she was merely an asset in his farm, and one of the most valuable.

It was when the Lexow Committee approached this part of the investigation that they found the greatest difficulties placed in their way.

During the whole of the inquiry the Police Department preserved an attitude of animosity to the Lexow Committee. This was only natural, considering that the Committee was engaged in bringing to light all the misdeeds of the Department for the last three or four years. The Committee was protected by law, and supported by public opinion; nevertheless, the police eagerly seized every opportunity that was offered them in order to embarrass the Committee’s investigations, by intimidating witnesses, and sometimes by spiriting them away altogether. It was proved that policemen had gone round to the keepers of disorderly houses, and had begged them to refuse to appear, or to refuse to testify, promising as an inducement that, if they would hold their tongues, they should be allowed to run their houses freely without interference from any one. The tune which all the policemen sang was “Wait till the clouds roll by.” The Lexow Committee was but a creature of to-day, while the Police Department was one of the permanent institutions of the city.

“These fellows have got no pull,” said the police. “You lie low for a time, and we will protect you.”

When this argument failed, they resorted to menace, threatening to close up the house, to fling the keepers into gaol, and occasionally, when these threats failed, they resorted to personal violence.

The Committee, speaking of the terrorism which was employed by the police in order to prevent witnesses testifying, said:--

In the course of the inquiry, a man rushed into the session of your Committee, fresh from an assault made upon him by a notorious politician and two policemen, and with fear depicted upon his countenance, threw himself upon the mercy of the Committee and asked its protection, insisting that he knew of no court and of no place where he could in safety go and obtain protection from his persecutors.--Vol. i., pp. 25, 26.

The most distinguished exploit of the police, however, during the whole of the inquiry was the spiriting away of the French Madam, Matilda Hermann, one of the most notable keepers of disorderly houses in the City of New York. When it was known that the Committee was after her, and that Madam, who had been plundered to the bone by the police, was by no means indisposed to “squeal”--to quote the expressive vernacular of the Department--there was a consultation among the police authorities as to what measures should be taken to close her mouth. A considerable number of people in the same way of business had been induced to migrate to Chicago, where they remained waiting until such time as the Committee adjourned, but Madam Hermann was too dangerous a witness. She required special treatment. A purse was made up for her by the police, which, when the subscription closed, amounted to 1,700 dollars. She was then under subpœna, and was expected before the Committee the next day.

At midnight, a police officer in plain clothes came to her house, bundled her into a carriage in such hot haste that she had not time to complete her toilet, and whisked her off no one knew where. For some weeks the police appeared to have triumphed, but after a time the Committee were able to get upon her track. She had been taken first to New Jersey, and then from New Jersey had been railroaded through to Canada. From thence, after moving about from place to place, she had been taken to a Western city, where at last she was run to ground.

When the agents of the Committee found her she expressed no disinclination to return to New York and testify. She had fulfilled her part of the bargain in keeping out of the way as long as she could. Now that she was discovered she was willing to return. In great triumph she was escorted back to the city. In order to prevent any attempt at rescue, an additional staff of men were sent to Philadelphia to meet her. The precaution was timely, for as soon as they arrived at Jersey City a last desperate attempt was made by the police to prevent her evidence being taken.

She was in the custody of the Deputy Serjeant-at-Arms of the Senate, who had a party of resolute men in his train. But notwithstanding this, no sooner had the party arrived in Jersey City than they were set upon by the Jersey police, who treated them with the greatest roughness. They threatened to break their faces, hustled them about, and endeavoured in the _mêlée_ to get Madam Hermann away. The Deputy Serjeant, however, stuck to his witness, and finally he, Madam Hermann, and all his men were arrested, run into the station-house, and locked up.

The sensation which this occasioned can be imagined. Fortunately, the Committee was in session, otherwise there is no knowing whether the daring attempt to seize and remove the witness might not have succeeded. The immediate publicity, however, that was given to the case convinced the police that the game was up. The Chief of the Police and the Police Magistrate refused to lend their aid in thwarting the ends of justice, and the conspirators, led by a lawyer, who was also a senator of the State of New Jersey, drew off their gang, and reluctantly allowed Madam Hermann to be brought to New York. The story reads more like an episode from the Middle Ages than an excerpt from the proceedings of a senatorial investigation in New York State in the last decade of the nineteenth century.

The French Madam, as she was called in the precinct, was evidently regarded by the police as a gold mine. She had three or four houses, with some twenty-four or twenty-five girls, and was doing a flourishing business. She paid the police altogether in the seven years that she was running the sum of over 30,000 dollars, or more than £6,000; _i.e._, this woman alone yielded the police a revenue of nearly £1,000 a year. Part of this money, it should be said, went to the lawyers, who shared it with the police. Every time she was raided the policeman insisted upon her taking a lawyer, and told her that if she would take the lawyer of his choice, he would not swear against her. He would swear that he was not sure of her identity. This she did, and she was discharged. Every time she took a lawyer she had to pay from £35 to £80, and the lawyer always told her that he only got part of the money, as the rest of it went to fix her detectives. Her evidence on this point was very emphatic. Whether she paid 200 dollars or 100 dollars, the lawyer only got 50 dollars; the rest went up to the police.

Q. Were you told by the lawyers that that must go up?

A. From the smallest lawyer to the biggest lawyer: every lawyer was the same.

Q. And every lawyer whose name you have mentioned told you that they had to give up to the police part of their fees they got from you?

A. Every one of them.--Vol. iv., p. 4,179.

Mrs. Hermann first went into the business from being employed as a dressmaker for the inmates of disorderly houses. She gradually added house to house, until she had four houses and twenty-five girls. She had to pay the police sometimes as much as £200 initiation fee before opening a house, and then from £60 to £100 per annum as protection money.

In addition to these payments, every policeman in the street received a dollar or two whenever he chose to ask for it. The method of exacting this payment was very simple. The policeman said nothing, but simply stood in front of the door. Of course, no one entered the house as long as he was there; therefore, as counsel put it, “in order to induce him to take a little exercise round the block, he was presented with a two-dollar bill.” This little episode used to occur about twice or thrice a week. Notwithstanding these payments, she made too much money to be left alone. She was raided twice in 1890, and on the first occasion the police extracted the sum of £200 before she was allowed to reopen her premises. The next year she was prosecuted, and had to forfeit £200 bail in order to avoid a threatened imprisonment. Immediately after her return she was again arrested, and had to pay £200 to the detective, who shared it with a high official at the Central Police Headquarters.

Her business was so profitable that she admitted in Court that she had been making between £2,000 and £3,000 a year, of which sum the police and the police lawyers seem to have had a good half. On one occasion, when she had paid £100 to her lawyer to get off with a fine of £20, she was liberated on the Friday and re-opened her house on the Saturday.

Notwithstanding the way in which they fleeced their unfortunate victim, she was still subjected, like all her class, to occasional outbursts of brutality on the part of members of the force.

When Dr. Parkhurst was making his tour of investigation through “the avenues of our municipal Inferno,” the wardman was sent round the district to the keepers of all the disorderly houses to describe Dr. Parkhurst, and to tell them to look out for him in case he appeared at their house. Another experience was when she took a house in West Twenty-third Street to start it as an ordinary boarding-house. She had furnished it, and was trying to let it. Promptly the wardman of the precinct came to her and asked her “whether she did not know the law of the precinct.” “You know very well,” he said, “that you cannot move in here until you see the Captain.” And then this estimable officer did all he could to convince her that it was idle trying to run a decent boarding-house, and she had much better open the house in the regular way. The initiation fee would be £400, £200 down and the rest to stand over until business was good. There was to be a further payment of protection money, amounting to £240 a year. She had not much ready money, whereupon the wardman suggested that she might pawn her diamonds, for, said he, “the Captain is very bad off for money.”

Another very amusing thing which came out in her evidence was the argument used by a detective named Zimmerman to induce her to give him £10. He got a couple of pounds one day, and came back the next, asking for another £2. She objected, but he said, “I will be a good friend to you. I have lots of pull, and my brother has shaved the Superintendent for twenty years, and I get a great deal; I have a pull on that account.” It is an interesting illustration of the way in which everything was turned to account for the levying of blackmail. But we could hardly get lower than this. The origin of pulls is mysterious; but to have a pull because your brother shaves the Superintendent is a very mysterious foundation for political influence. It is, however, but one among the many things in the evidence that remind us of Turkey. The barber of the Grand Vizier is no doubt a much more influential person than many a Pasha; and detective Zimmerman was probably right in believing that his pull was good. Everywhere, and at every turn, we are confronted by the omnipresent “pull.” It confirms in the strongest way what Mr. Godkin said long ago as to the city governments in America being a system of government by pulls:--

In the ward in which he lives, the foreign immigrant never comes across any sign of moral right or moral wrong, human or divine justice. He then perceives very soon that, as far as he is concerned, ours is not a government of laws, but a government of “pulls.” When he goes into the only court of justice of which he has any knowledge, he is told he must have a “pull” on the magistrate or he will fare badly. When he opens a liquor-store, he is told he must have a “pull” on the police in order not to be “raided” or arrested for violation of a mysterious something which he hears called “law.” He learns from those of his countrymen who have been here longer than he that, in order to come into possession of this “pull,” he must secure the friendship of the district leader.--_North American Review_, 1890.

Mrs. Hermann was only one among a number of other Madams who appeared before the Committee, but none succeeded in exciting so much sympathy on the part of the senators. The scandalous way in which the poor woman had been fleeced, and bullied, and ultimately reduced to penury by the very officials to whom she was paying protection money, roused the indignation of the Committee. If the police had protected her in return for their fee, it would have been a different matter, but, as Senator O’Connor remarked, indignantly, in addition to paying the monthly tax, and the initiation fees, raids were got up as an excuse to enable a policeman or a class of criminal lawyers to extort money out of her. Senator Pound remarked that it was the practice to protect such women until they became wealthy, and then squeeze it out of them and leave them destitute. They say that there is “honour among thieves,” but there seems to be none with the policemen who handled Mrs. Hermann.

Another Madam, whose case attracted considerable attention, was one Augusta Thurow, whose misfortunes brought her into intimate relations with Senator Roesch, and led to the appearance of that redoubtable politician in the witness-box. The relations between her and the Captain of the Precinct seem to have been on straight business lines. About a dollar a month for each girl in the house was the regular tariff. When beginning business she went round to see the Captain and told him that she was willing to do the right thing, but she had not much money, and could not pay a very heavy initiation fee. He met her fairly, and said that he would send the wardman round, and she was to do what he told her. When the wardman came he said, “You wait until after the election, and, after the election is over, you start right in and do business.” After the election day he returned and said, “Now we will come to terms. Give me twenty-five dollars a month and there will be no trouble either for you or for me.” Business went on smoothly until one day she received a summons to go and see the Captain. When she got there she found a number of other ladies and gentlemen of her own profession at the station-house. On being admitted into the Captain’s presence she thought he wanted money. He replied, “I am not supposed to take money, but you can give me the money;” whereupon she handed him twenty-five dollars. He then told her that he had sent for her, not in order to collect the protection fee, which was the duty of the wardman, but to give her a friendly warning that he had received orders from the Central Office to close all the disorderly houses in the precinct. He hoped, therefore, that she would do her business very carefully, otherwise they might raid her from the Central Office. This was an incident which was constantly occurring. The Central Office, stirred up by newspaper reports, or by the representations of decent citizens, issues orders for enforcing the law. The police captains, instead of executing the orders of the Central Office in the spirit as well as in the letter, send word round to all those concerned warning them to be on the alert. By this means the Captain of the Precinct effectually nullifies the orders issued from the Central Office, and, even if the Central Office make a raid on their own account, they find nothing to seize.

It was shortly after this visit that Mrs. Thurow made her first acquaintance with a redoubtable policeman of the name of Hoch. Of all the collectors or wardmen who figure in the evidence, Hoch enjoys the most conspicuous notoriety. He was no sooner entrusted with the collections in that district than he insisted upon raising the fees for protection. “A ranch like that,” he said, “is worth seventy-five dollars a month, and here you are only paying twenty-five dollars, and give me only five dollars, although you promised me ten dollars.”

“Hoch,” she replied, “I cannot afford it.”

Q. What did he say when you said you could not afford it?

A. He says, “You have got the house, and why don’t you make money? It is your own fault; and that house is situated in the right spot, and you can do all the business you want and we won’t interfere with you, but you must do better than this.”

Q. Did he make any threats then to pull you, if you did not pay a higher rate?

A. He said, certainly, if I could not do better than that, he would raid the house.--Vol. i., p. 1,055.

This alarmed the Madam, and off she went to her husband, who was sent in quest of Judge Roesch, the leader of the Seventh Assembly District, an ex-senator. “I will go and see somebody, and fix the thing up,” said Roesch. “But it will cost about one hundred dollars.” The money was paid, and she did business right away.

Some time after this she was pulled by another detective. She expostulated against the injustice of being run in, although she was paying protection money, whereupon the detective remarked sententiously, “Somehow or other you did not hitch with the Boss.” She went round to the station-house, to find out what was wrong. The Captain told her that she had to find another house in the precinct, and he would protect her, but he would not stand the house in which she was any longer. The cause of this she discovered when she was told that she could not open the new house until she paid an initiation fee of £200 for the Captain, and £50 for Hoch.

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.

The testimony taken as a whole conclusively establishes that the social evil was, and probably still is, fostered and protected by the police of the city, even to the extent of inducing its votaries to continue their illegal practices, maintaining substantially a partnership with them in the traffic, absorbing the largest part of the resulting profit.--Vol. i., pp. 33-36.

The most startling statement in the whole Report is that which is contained in the paragraph just quoted. From this it appears that the police were not merely toll-keepers on the way to hell, but if by any chance the Strange Woman wished to forsake her chamber of death, they thrust her back into it. What was it to them that she might wish to save her soul alive out of the pit? Her duty was to stay there and earn dollars for the police. Were they not the Farmers-General of the Wages of Sin?

Mrs. Blood, a keeper of houses of ill-fame, was compelled by a Police Captain to purchase the house of Madame Perot at some 10,000 dollars above its value, to carry it on as a house of prostitution (vol. v., p. 5,414). Another Captain smashed in the face of a man named Galingo because he had taken a house in which the Captain wished to instal a brothel-keeper from whom he expected to get £200 opening fee and £10 a month afterwards (vol. iv., p. 4,487). In other cases, witnesses who had intended to leave the business were compelled to go on running by threat of being raided and ruined if they dared to think of ceasing to earn fees for the police. The police had come to believe that they had a vested interest in every brothel; and when a keeper proposed to quit the business, he felt like an Irish tenant who is being evicted without compensation for disturbance.