Sin in the Second City (26 page)

Doll also entertained the Swinger (who liked the harlot to swing, trapeze style, from his extended, muscled arm). But her most lucrative—and strangest—client was the Gold Coin Kid.

The Gold Coin Kid was a bachelor, about thirty years old. His late father had been president of two Chicago manufacturing companies, and he flung money around like confetti. The Everleigh butterflies looked past the fact that the man still lived with his mother.

The Gold Coin Kid earned his nickname one night after several quiet, uneventful visits to the Club. Minna escorted him inside and inquired about her boy. He handed Ada a large black bag and asked if she would please check it for him.

“What’ve you got in there?” Ada teased. “Rocks?”

She showed him into the conversation parlors, where he mingled with the girls. He settled on Doll, she of the crimson hair and impressive measurements.

The Gold Coin Kid and Doll enjoyed dinner and champagne in the Pullman Buffet, during which Doll uncharacteristically ignored Club rules and drank until the alcohol took over her head. But as the evening progressed, she recalled later, it was clear that she had “deviated with a deviate.”

Precisely at midnight, the Gold Coin Kid sent word asking if Ada might retrieve his bag. The madam did, and he tucked it under his arm as he followed Doll up the stairs. She locked the door behind them and he took her by the wrist.

“I’ve got a feeling I’m in love with you,” he said.

She kissed him “real good” and answered, “Just you don’t lose that feeling, sweetie.”

He tightened his grip, the points of his fingers making a bracelet around her wrist.

“Every time I’ve been here before,” he said, “I’ve seen you occupied with others downstairs, and whenever I inquired about you I was politely told you weren’t available. So tonight I brought along my magic bag to guarantee an evening with you.”

He released her and placed his black bag, slowly, ceremoniously, on the dresser and pulled open its latch. The bag was crammed with a jumble of $5 coins made of solid gold.

Doll, who thought she had seen everything, could only say, “Holy cow!” The Gold Coin Kid waited for her to recover, and after a moment she remembered where she was and what she was there for. She lifted her arms, shrugged her shoulders, and her gown fell. Her corset gave way with a few twists and tugs. Everleigh girls made undressing seem like a Houdini trick.

The Gold Coin Kid shrugged off his suit and shirt and tie, everything except a pair of multicolored briefs, and Doll shot him a look that said
Finish.
He was sorry, he said, but he wanted to leave that last bit of clothing on for now. He dipped his hand into his bag and lifted a heap of gold coins, letting them fall in a slow stream from one palm to the other.

“I know you’ll find this game extremely interesting,” he said, “and I’m sure I wouldn’t care to play it with any girl but you.”

Get on the bed, he said. He remained six feet away, by the dresser, and confided that as a young man, his favorite game was pitching pennies, and now he had an inexplicable desire to resume this childhood pastime. He would pitch the coins, if it was all right with Doll, at the “most erogenic area” of her body. She could keep each piece that hit the bull’s-eye.

It was, naturally, all right with Doll.

Doll assumed a pose on the bed that provided the Kid with a can’t-miss target, “leaning back with a graceful swanlike arrangement of my hands while keeping my knees apart.” She called out her approval for each shot, counting score. He was such a darling, insisting on pitching until every coin hit its mark.

After that night, Doll amassed quite a collection of gold coins.

Minna ascended the stairs to Doll’s bedroom and knocked. The girl opened the door, a translucent swirl of incense climbing the air behind her.

Minna explained the Suzy Poon Tang situation and wrapped her arm around Doll. Rubbing the girl’s back, she said, “If I pay you well, much more than you could make in several days, would you permit the Chinese girl to spend tomorrow evening in your room while you brief her on our routine? That would enable her to start working the parlors on the following day, and I’d feel much more confident about her performance.”

Of course, Doll answered.

Minna, still smoothing the harlot’s back, asked another favor. “And, of course, you’ll allow Suzy to sleep with you for the night?”

Yes, Doll answered.

Minna kissed her cheek. “Good girl. I feel you’ve solved my big problem.”

Tomorrow, she would fetch Suzy Poon Tang, and Ada would help smuggle her upstairs. They’d have time later to explain to the rest of the harlots, to reassure them their own earnings wouldn’t suffer. She’d leave a menu in Doll’s room, tell her to order a feast for the Chinese girl. It was clear that Doll loved women, though Minna didn’t care to know the details, as long as the Asian girl was soon fluent in Balzac.

O
n May 4, Roe and five colleagues with the Illinois Vigilance Association boarded the Chicago & Alton, heading two hundred miles southwest toward the state capital. The train rumbled through Joliet, Mazonia, Dwight, Bloomington, dozens of far-flung towns removed from the mayhem of the city. Roe gazed out the window, taking in a leisurely slide show of looming silos and waving spikes of prairie grass.

His mind was on his career. Numerous successful prosecutions aside, he was frustrated by the “archaic” and “moss-covered” Illinois statutes that were “full of loopholes through which the slave traders crawled.” He had to prove each victim was unmarried, had been procured through deception, and was of previous “chaste life.” That last stipulation was most troubling. If the rape gangs attacked a girl right away, thereby robbing her of her chastity, the case was as good as lost.

Most of his convictions were under the Disorderly Conduct Act, which carried only a $200 fine, but Roe hoped he could lobby the Illinois State Legislature to augment the white slavery laws. If his proposed bill passed, it would be the nation’s first law aimed at panders and a major professional coup.

Beside him sat Adolph Kraus, president of the Chicago-based International Order of B’nai B’rith. Kraus was equally reflective, though his concerns were more global than personal. It was a year since the muckraker George Kibbe Turner alleged that most of Chicago’s white slavers were Russian Jews, and the sting was still sharp. Kraus, during the furor that followed, toured the West Side Levee and determined that his people constituted 20 percent of the traffickers. That figure would grow, he feared, along with the Jewish population. Between 1880 and 1900 alone, some two hundred thousand Jewish immigrants settled in Chicago, many of them refugees who fled Russia after the horrific pogroms and settled in the slums along 16th Street near Halsted. Even the
American Hebrew
was casting blame, noting it was “possible” that Jews had imported white slavery to America.

“If Jews are the chief sinners,” the newspaper reasoned, “it is appropriate that Jews should be the chief avengers.”

The social worker Frances Kellor had spoken the truth when she studied Jewish participation in vice the previous year. “The Jew,” she wrote, “has been taught early in life the value of morality and decency, and does not take up this business unless he is thoroughly vicious and bad”—unlike, say, the French, who did not, on the whole, find running a brothel an immoral or shameful practice, who considered it akin to operating a restaurant or department store. It was up to Kraus and every upstanding Jewish citizen to shape the perception of their people, before it was done for them.

The House passed the white slave bill 102–0, and the unanimous vote carried an emergency clause. The Illinois Senate immediately sent it to Governor Charles Deneen to sign. The law decreed that anyone convicted of recruiting for disorderly houses would spend six months to one year in prison and pay a fine between $300 and $1,000. Also, a pander could no longer wed his victim and use the marriage as a defense. Roe was “elated” that Illinois became the “pioneer state to pass a pandering law, directed at the slave traffic in girls and women.” This battle,
his
battle, was at last stretching far beyond Chicago, and he couldn’t stop it now, even if he wanted to.

THE
ORGANIZER

I know it is repugnant to our system of government
to have any kind of espionage over our citizenship, but I
would keep such people under a certain surveillance.

—S
PECIAL
I
MMIGRATION
I
NSPECTOR
M
ARCUS
B
RAUN

I
t was time, Roe decided, to call a friend in the federal government, Edwin Sims. His fellow University of Michigan alumnus was admired for his ambition, encyclopedic memory, and pedantic attention to detail. Sims, he knew, would already be aware that foreign girls, with the complicity of Chicago’s police, were being sold into city brothels. What was considered typical Levee business was now a federal felony. The federal Immigration Act of 1907, set into effect shortly before undercover agents began infiltrating red-light districts, forbade importing women into the country for the purposes of prostitution, and mandated the deportation of any woman or girl found prostituting herself within three years of her arrival in America.

To friends, Sims was “Ed,” but to the rest of the country he was a legal wunderkind, who at thirty-four served as assistant secretary at the 1904 Republican National Convention; who a year later was appointed solicitor for the Department of Commerce and Labor by President Roosevelt; and who, a year after that, became the United States district attorney in Chicago, charged with preparing the government’s antitrust case against John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company.

“Curiously enough,” wrote the
Tribune,
“the reason of the success of Mr. Sims was identically the same as the reason for the success of John D. Rockefeller. It is expressed in just one word, ‘organize.’ There were 1,903 charges against the oil company and every one of these charges had to be verified by documentary and oral evidence…. It was a titanic task, but Mr. Sims set about it in his own way…. He had his facts marshaled in due order of their importance, each with its little budget of evidence ready to step out of the ranks at the precise moment when they should be needed. His opponents…did not know their man.”

Sims, married and the father of four, vowed to work with Roe and his Illinois Vigilance Association to rid the city of these criminals.

“I am determined to break up this traffic in foreign women,” he declared. “It is my sworn duty, and it should be done to protect the people of the country from contamination.”

The announcement was a welcome one to most native-born Chicagoans. Their city was turning on itself, relinquishing its identity street by street; there were whole blocks drenched in odd smells, conversations built with peculiar words, hymns sung to false gods. “I am one of those who believe not only that our public schools should have moral and religious training in them, but that this training should be Christian,” a Presbyterian minister wrote to one of Clifford Roe’s supporters. “This land is a Christian land. The United States Supreme Court and many of our state supreme courts have unequivocally decided that it is…. I do not believe that we need to truckle or surrender our inheritance to infidels or Jews from Europe.”

They were everywhere, these so-called new immigrants, arriving daily from Eastern and Southern Europe, most of them “undesirable” Italians, Poles, and Russians. Catholics were just as “unassimilable” as the Jews, what with their pagan customs and thirst for liquor, feeding their babies beer if the milk was delivered spoiled. Chicago’s Italian population was approaching forty-five thousand—almost three times what it was in 1900. They were overrunning Halsted and Taylor streets with their “Little Italy,” devising rackets for the gambling halls, killing in the name of the Black Hand.