Part 3

May 28, 1905, perhaps, his appearance in the role of a ragpicker, which led to the arrest and conviction of two negro highwaymen, Henry Reed and Ed Lane, was his most daring and successful effort at disguise. Lane is at present serving a life sentence in Joliet for the murder of Robert Metcalfe.

The assault and robbery of a contractor named Anderson was the occasion for Wooldridge's assumption of the guise of ragpicker. Anderson had described Lane so accurately that the detective was sure of recognizing him once he put his eyes upon him, but in those days a detective to go into the black belt looking for a criminal was to spread a wide alarm over the whole district. Consequently he "made up." A pair of large, worn overalls, a coat three sizes too large, a bunch of papers between his shoulder blades to give him a hunch back, burnt cork, a curly wig, a bag and a piece of telegraph wire, and the erstwhile shrewd-looking detective was in ten minutes the typical negro ragpicker who shambles up and down alleys on the south side in hope of picking up enough for his day's bread.

While thus pursuing his way Wooldridge not only discovered the presence of Reed and Lane, but actually worked through the refuse in a garbage box upon which Lane was sitting quarreling with some confederates over the division of the previous night's spoils. He even went so far as to pick up an old coat which Lane had discarded. Thereupon Lane ordered him to get out of the alley or get his throat cut from ear to ear. Wooldridge went humbly out, and waited.

HERO OF SOME FIERCE FIGHTS.

Presently Lane and Reed appeared and went south on State street. Wooldridge followed, and at an opportune moment seized them both from behind. The fight that followed is historic. Only sheer luck and the threat to kill both antagonists on the spot if they did not cease resistance saved the detective's life. After knocking both men down with his billy he succeeded in holding them until a fellow officer came to his rescue. They were arrested and convicted June 25, 1905, and sent to the penitentiary for three years.

May 19, 1906, Detective Wooldridge raided the following places: H. C. Evins, 125 S. Clark street; George Deshone, 64 N. Clark street; E. Manning Stockton, Bar & Co., 56 Fifth avenue, seizing some $30,000 worth of gambling paraphernalia.

Disclosures of conditions which so seriously threatened the discipline of the United States army and navy that the secretaries of the two departments and even President Roosevelt himself were called upon to aid in their suppression.

It was charged that a coterie of Chicago men engaged in making and selling these devices had formed a "trust" and had for years robbed, swindled and corrupted the enlisted men of the army and navy through loaded dice, "hold-outs," magnetized roulette wheels and other crooked gambling apparatus.

CROOKED GAMBLING TRUST.

The "crooked" gambling "trust" in Chicago spread over the civilized world, had its clutches on nearly every United States battleship, army post and military prison; caused wholesale desertions, and in general corrupted the entire defensive institution of the nation.

TRY TO CORRUPT SCHOOLBOYS.

Besides the corruption of the army, these companies are said to have aimed a blow at the foundation of the nation by offering, through a mail order plan, for six cents, loaded dice to schoolboys, provided they sent the names of likely gamblers among their playmates.

This plan had not reached its full growth when nipped. But the disruption of the army and navy had been under way for several years and had reached such gigantic proportions that the military service was in danger of complete disorganization.

Thousands of men were mulcted of their pay monthly. Desertions followed these wholesale robberies. The war department could not find the specific trouble. Post commanders and battleship commanders were instructed to investigate.

The army investigation, confirmed after the raid and arrests, showed that the whole army had been honeycombed with corruption by these companies. Express books and registered mail return cards showed that most of the goods were sold to soldiers and sailors.

DETECTIVE WOOLDRIDGE SECURES EVIDENCE IN NOVEL WAY.

In August, 1890, complaints had been made at the Stanton Avenue Police Station for several weeks concerning the establishment of a disorderly house at 306 Thirty-first street, but try as they would uniformed officers were helpless so far as securing evidence enough to convict was concerned. Wooldridge at that time a uniformed man, was put in plain clothes and detailed on the case. One of the great stumbling blocks in the way of the police had been the high basement under the house, which made it impossible for any one to look in the windows of the flat without the aid of the ladder. As the presence of a ladder would arouse suspicion, the problem of viewing the inside of the flat was a difficult one.

One thing the other men on the case had overlooked. This was the presence of a beam jutting out from the top of the building to which a rope, pulley, and barrel were attached, used as a means of lowering garbage and ashes from the second floor to the alley. Wooldridge saw the possibilities of the rope and barrel trick. Attaching to the rope a vinegar barrel with holes bored in it at convenient intervals, he awaited an opportune time, curled up in the barrel, and had himself drawn up to the level of the windows by two officers. The lowering and raising of the barrel being a customary thing in the building, excited no suspicion in the minds of those in the flat, and Wooldridge, with his sleuth's eye at one of the holes, saw what served to drive the place out of existence and secure the conviction of its keeper.

ACTS AS VENDOR OF FIGHTING "CHICKENS."

One of the last exploits of Detective Wooldridge before his completion of the twenty years of service, was the breaking up of the cock-fighting mains, which infested Chicago during the latter part of 1906 and the early part of 1907.

The story savors of the burlesque. Wooldridge obtained information as to the whereabouts of a cock-fight which was to be pulled off. Then he sought out and purchased a pair of decrepit old roosters, that would not fight an English sparrow, bundled them into a sack and started for scene of action. Arrived in what he knew to be the neighborhood of the fight, he declared that he had been sent to deliver some "fightin' chickuns." He was directed to an old, abandoned building. Here he was admitted and left the antique roosters. Then he said he was going for more birds. Instead he went for a patrol wagon. And that was the end of the chicken fight.

The trapping of the Wildcat Insurance companies furnishes one of the most dramatic chapters in the financial history of the United States, if not in the world. It involves millions of stolen dollars, brutal filching from the poor, heartless commercial brigandage and finally the running to earth and conviction of the ringleaders and promoters of the "WILDCAT INSURANCE COMPANIES" OF CHICAGO, by Detective Wooldridge.

The police and postal authorities worked together. Two thousand eight hundred letters were sent out asking for information and gathering evidence.

At the trial of Dr. S. W. Jacobs, on one of these cases, there were 200 witnesses present. Five of these witnesses were victims, and lived in tents. Three were living in wagons: One, Samuel James, of Westfield, Illinois, a carpenter, 64 years of age, had a wife and six children. He had built his house morning and evening.

BRIBERY TACTICS OF NO AVAIL.

James accomplished the end of his heart's desire. It cost him $900 and his health, for he was in the clutches of consumption when the cottage was finally paid for. Fearing lest the fruit of his life-work should be swept away by fire, James took out an insurance policy in one of Dr. S. W. Jacobs' Wildcat Insurance companies. The house burned down and he was not indemnified. With his wife and six little children James was forced to take shelter in a chicken coop, where they were living when the broken-hearted father came to Chicago as a witness against Dr. S. W. Jacobs.

Twenty-five thousand dollars was tendered to an attorney to bribe Wooldridge in the case.

The breaking up of the drug ring, however, was a delicate task. It was strongly backed financially, and it was aided and abetted throughout the United States by political rings galore. Chicago was the headquarters.

A ten thousand dollar bribe was offered Detective Wooldridge, October 29, 1904, by the spurious medicine concerns to return their goods and stop the prosecution; this failed. Then false and malicious charges were filed with the Civil Service Commissioners against Wooldridge, which was taken up and the trial lasted nineteen sessions.

Detective Wooldridge was exonerated by the entire board of commissioners, and complimented by the press and public-spirited citizens.

Detective Wooldridge secured four indictments against the above four men, which was returned by the Cook county grand jury May 25, 1905. J. S. Dean turned state's evidence and assisted the prosecution.

J. H. Carson promoted and run eighteen different matrimonial agencies. He was arrested eighteen times. He offered Wooldridge a bribe of $100 per month not to arrest him. This failed and he brought suit in the Superior Court against Wooldridge for $5,000 damages, thinking this would stop him. The next day after filing the suit he was arrested again, and was finally driven out of Chicago.

From $10,000 to $20,000 has been offered at a time for his discharge or transfer by these get-rich-quick concerns. Every political pressure was brought to bear, but to no avail.

Ex-Chief of Police Francis O'Neill, in his annual report of 1905, states that Detective Wooldridge accomplished more work in breaking up the get-rich-quick concerns in Chicago, in the year 1904, than the whole Chicago police department had in its lifetime. He did equally as much work, if not more, in the years of 1905, 1906 and 1907.

The day is never too long nor the night too dark for Detective Wooldridge to find time to succor or save a young girl who has gone wrong or strayed from the path of rectitude.

Detective Wooldridge, without fear or favor, for many years inaugurated crusades and waged wars against the hosts of criminal enterprise. Whenever a man or concern could not show a "clear bill of health" he forced him to "disinfect, depart, or submit to the quarantine of the county jail."

By vigilance and hard work he succeeded in obtaining good results. Units, scores, and legions of fraudulent concerns have been exposed and driven out of existence. Owners of others, anticipating exposure, did not wait, but closed their places and fled. Many headquarters of contraband schemes have been raided and their promoters arrested, fined, and forced to cease operations. During that time retributive justice has been visited upon countless heads that were devoted to devising criminal schemes.

Detective Wooldridge permits no creed, color, religion or politics to interfere with him in his sworn duty. He wants and exacts the truth, and a square deal for himself, and accords the same to his fellow men. He has never been known to wilfully persecute any man or to lie or strain a point to convict him, neither will he suffer the same to be done by any man if he can prevent it.

Wooldridge's motto is equal justice to all--be sure you are right, then go ahead.

JAMES P. WILSON.

GRAFT NATION'S WORST FOE.

THE REIGN OF GRAFT.

Recent Exposures That Show How Strongly It Is Intrenched.

ARE YOU A GRAFTER?

Those Shocked at Exposures May Not Be Clean Themselves.

"A 'grafter' is one who makes his living (and sometimes his fortune) by 'grafting.' He may be a political boss, a mayor, a chief of police, a warden of a penitentiary, a municipal contractor, a member of a town council, a representative in the legislature, a judge in the courts, and the upper world may know him only in his political capacity; but if the under world has had occasion to approach him for purposes of 'graft' and found him corrupt, he is immediately classified as an 'unmugged grafter'--one whose photograph is not in the rogues' gallery, but ought to be. The professional thief is the 'mugged grafter'; his photograph and Bertillon measurements are known and recorded.

The world of graft is whereever known and unknown thieves or bribetakers congregate. In the United States it is found mainly in the large cities, but its boundaries take in small county seats and even villages. A correct map of it is impossible, because in a great many places it is represented by an unknown rather than by a known inhabitant, by a dishonest official or an unscrupulous and wary politician rather than a confessed thief, and the geographer is helpless until he can collect the facts, which may never come to light. The most that one man can do is to make voyages of discovery, find out what he can and report upon his experiences to the general public.

Within the last year or two it has become practically a synonym for a thief who filches public money and money of large enterprises. It has been so largely used in the public prints and periodicals, and more recently in books, that it has spread abroad; and London and Paris and Berlin, in referring to many American disclosures, adopt the word without any translation. So today no American word is better known either in this country or in Europe.

When men in office take a bribe and give away what does not belong to them, it is more than the double crime of extorting and stealing; it is treason. Graft is the worst form of despotism. It is a usurpation of government by the forces of crime. There have been many virtuous kings and honest feudal lords, but the despotism of graft never founded its rule upon a semblance of the moral law.

Graft in its highest personification is the king of the American nation in political, commercial and social life.

GRAFT IS OVERLORD.

Overlord of 80,000,000 people in the greatest republic of history, commanding his tens of millions of dollars annually as tribute to graft in a million of his impersonations--was Solomon in all his glory to be compared with this?

Nine states in the union of forty-five states recently have declared that graft exposures have not been in their categories of political publicity for a year. They are Maine, North Carolina, Mississippi, Iowa, Michigan, Colorado, New York, Illinois and California. But who shall say what another six months may bring forth?

In industrial, commercial and social life of the American people there is not a state in which King Graft has not his court and his following. In the capital of capitals at Washington for generations the powers of government as dreamed of for the republic have been superseded by King Graft time after time, and the impeachment of his princes, grand dukes and courtiers generally have not threatened his reign in future generations.

SCORES OF PROUD NAMES SMIRCHED.

Within the last few years names that have stood honored for a generation in financial, political and social life have been dragged down from high places perhaps as never before in America. The court of King Graft has been attacked and threatened as never before, and with greater showing. There is war in the open against this pretender king, and his legions everywhere are retiring behind their breastworks, broken but not defeated.

Graft in its nakedness, has been exposed and the people are aroused, fearing that the grafter has sucked the life blood of the republic.

What they have seen is but a glimpse of real conditions--the ulcer spots where the rottenness beneath has broken through--but they have seen enough to realize the peril and attack it. While the conditions revealed are astounding and alarming, they are signs of improvement.

The nation is better than it was a decade ago, since tens of thousands of grafters have been stamped out, since the leaders of the greatest grafts of the land have been exposed to the withering light of contempt of all decent Americans.

LIFE OF NATION IMPERILED.

Also, born of the conditions, there has arisen a little army of leaders willing to engage the enemy and lead the people against the grafters. They have been raised up to meet the crisis of the nation's life, and with every blow they strike new recruits are joining them in the war against graft.

They are still weak, and King Graft and his votaries are still strong, but during the last year the leaders have won some remarkable skirmishes and routed the grafters.

NATION, STATES AND CITIES AROUSED.

Senators and congressmen at the national capital have been impeached, and indicted, and tried, and convicted of grafting.

Bureau officials, as in the cotton scandal, the postoffice frauds, and other of the departments, and civil service exposes have been arraigned by their own democracy for traitor intrigues with King Graft, and have been beheaded.

State senators, representatives, treasurers and the innumerable "small fry" of official life, together with the millionaire briber and his henchmen at state capitals, have been uncovered and convicted of debauching democracy in behalf of a pretender sovereign.

Great cities have been shaken with the inquisitorial rounds of investigations. Philadelphia of Independence memories has been weighed in the balance and found wanting; in St. Louis the prosecutor governor, Folk, has stirred corruption to the depths; New York has been moved as it has not been since the overthrow of Tammany; Minneapolis has been cleansed; and the spectacular "graft hunt" in Milwaukee has been a lesson in "how to do it." Perhaps never before in the history of America have so many grafters been scattered to the winds, in hiding or locked behind the bars of prisons.

PRESIDENT LEADS FOES OF GRAFT.

But King Graft wears the crown of the pretender still, and there are few of his fighting enemies who are disposed to rest upon their arms in either truce or armistice.

The war against graft is led by the president of the United States, who stands as the foremost foe of grafting--political, financial or social--in the world, and behind him is a phalanx led by Folk, Jerome, Riis, Lawson, Hadley, Miss Tarbell, Deneen, Monnett and others of their type, fighting the nation's most crucial battle.

The grafters have declared that the objects of some of these men were selfish, but, no matter for what object they fight, they are routing the grafters in many fields and showing to the awakening public the peril of the situation; revealing to a commonwealth the worms gnawing at the vitals of the republic.

FORCES OF GRAFT HARD PRESSED.

Never were the forces of money and commercial and industrial power so bewildered and so uncertain of the way to turn as they are now. Graft, to their best interests, is still covertly a necessity to them, but covert graft never was so hard to keep covert, now that briber and the bribed are the common quarry of the law. The time was when the rich man who bought political power to his uses was unnamed, standing apart. The grafter legislator was the cause and the consequence. Beginning and ending with the corrupt official whose official place was grafted upon corruption, the official became immune from the consequences.

"Grafting in this state never has cost the taxpayer a dollar," was one of the slogans of a machine government in its attempts to perpetuate that machine for the purposes of King Graft and his court.

But this false philosophy slowly was undermined. Not only was it found that graft did cost money to the state, but it became a certainty that it was costing something even more valuable than money. Graft became the one object of the political seeker after office. The impersonal graft-giver was a hanger-on at lawmaking centers, and the political graft-seeker was insisting upon election or appointment to the machine positions.

HIDEOUS PERIL IS REVEALED.

The result, first, was a campaign upon the man who had the graft to dispense. He was sought out, and was found in high places. His lobbyists were more easily marked than was the principal. So the law and the law's executive began also to campaign against the lobbyists. Suddenly the "good fellow" at a state capitol who had with him the perquisites of good fellowship in graft measure found himself facing the interrogation:

"What are you doing here?"

The scope of the query has grown, and it is still growing, in some quarters even to the point of requiring the man who is elected to office to render the cost figure of his successful campaign. All over the country, and touching nearly every relation in official, commercial and financial life, men have been put on the griddle of publicity by courts and commissions, and with backs to the wall have been sitting in the witness chair, holding to the one surly response to an irritating, penetrating cross-examination: "Decline to answer on advice of counsel."

But for all purposes of publicity have not these refusals to answer carried light enough?

"The public be d----d!" was the original first utterance of the millionaire, designed to stop interrogations which would not down.

"What are you going to do about it?" was the counter question of the political grafter who once was charged with grafting.

"Where did he get it?" came to be a question of the politician for political purposes, and within a year the country has heard non-political bodies asking the same question of the millionaire philanthropist who has been trying to give it away. Under the growing interrogations of the time, names have been thrown from pedestals within a year as names never before were juggled by the fates.

IDOLS COVERED WITH SLIME.

Depew, once a candidate for nomination for the presidency, a United States senator still by some grace of toleration, and at one time referred to in European royal circles as a "representative American citizen."

United States Senator Mitchell became a derelict, politically and socially.

United States Senator Thomas C. Platt was wrecked in the wreckage.

United States Senator Burton became blackened in the charges of graft.

Depew is a name no longer to conjure with.

Then followed a long list of the commercially and financially prominent civilians, blackened, and with such blackness as never to be white again by any of the old processes which once sufficed.

Graft is still king. But, truer than of any other monarch, it may be repeated: "Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown."

THE UNCONSCIOUS GRAFTER.