I quote the following incident cited by Assistant Prosecuting Attorney Roe
in an article of recent date in WOMAN'S WORLD, illustrating some of the
schemes and plans for leading a girl into a life of ill-fame. Mr. Roe
says:
"A year ago last summer, 15-year old Margaret Smith was working about
her simple home near Benton Harbor, Michigan. The father, employed by
the Pere Marquette Railroad, was away from home a good share of the
time. One day a graphophone agent came to the house and the family
became interested in one of his musical machines. Shortly afterward
this agent brought with him to the Smith home Frank Kelly, and
introduced him to Maggie, as she was called by her folks. In a day or
two Margaret was on her way to Chicago with Kelly who promised her an
excellent position in the City. Upon her arrival Margaret was sold to
one of the worst dives in Chicago, located on South Clark Street and
owned by an Italian named Baptista Pizza. Here she learned that her
captor's name was not Frank Kelly, but an Italian whose real name is
Alphonso Citro. For a year she was kept as a Slave in this resort,
which was over a saloon, and the entrance was through a back alley.
The only visitors were Italians, who came for immoral purposes.
Learning last summer that Margaret's father, who had been hunting
relentlessly for his daughter, was on the track of her, the girl was
taken by Alphonso Citro, alias Kelly, to Gary, Indiana. When the
father came to the resort with a policeman, he found that his
daughter had gone. She was kept in Gary about two months and then
returned to this disreputable place from which she escaped finally,
the Monday before last Christmas. A young barber took pity on her
after hearing her story, and enlisted the sympathies of his parents
who took her to their home. Alphonso Citro (Kelly) looked for her
almost a week, and at last saw her going from a store to this home,
where she was staying. He went to the house and demanded at the point
of a revolver that she be given up, as he said:
"I am losing money every day she is gone."
"There was a quarrel over the girl during which some people from the
outside were attracted to the house by the commotion. Citro, becoming
frightened, fled down the street, and as he ran, threw away the
revolver with which he had tried to shoot the father of the barber
during the quarrel, over the fence into a coal yard. After running
two blocks, he was caught and arrested. Upon these facts this
procurer, Citro, alias Kelly, was prosecuted and found guilty under
the new pandering law of Illinois, and received a sentence of one
year of imprisonment and a fine of five hundred dollars. The poor
father and mother, distressed and heart-broken, were in Court during
the trial with their arms around each other, sobbing with joy because
their little girl had been found. Pizza[3], the owner of the place,
was indicted by the State grand jury, but escaped to Italy. This case
is told to show how girls leave home upon the promise of securing
employment and are in this way procured for places of ill-repute."
Chicago's Soul Market.
"O, he keeps a bunch of 'fillies' in a shanty down near the corner of
Monroe and Peoria streets, and they're not foreigners, either. They're
American girls. No wonder he can make a bet like that on a mere chance
from a roll of yellow backs."
The speaker was the madam of a Peoria street resort, the listeners, a
motley crowd of women gathered in the rear of a popular saloon and
gambling house not far from the corner of Green and Madison streets, on
the seething, congested West Side of Chicago. These women had assembled in
that screened back room to risk their hard earned or evil-gotten money on
the horses of the Louisville race track.
There sat a little 18-year old, brown-eyed milliner, her dissipated face
hollow and drawn from worry and lack of sleep and an insufficient quantity
of nourishing food, while near her a white-haired old lady in shabby black
was tightly grasping two quarters, her entire worldly possession. Just
across sat a well-dressed woman restaurant keeper, a young eastern star
and half a hundred others, above all of whom shone the yellow haired madam
of the Peoria Street resort, the star patron of that great gambling room
for women, each one of whom was eagerly beckoning the well-groomed
book-maker, feverishly anxious to get her pittance on the race-track
favorite, when a connecting door was pushed suddenly open and in rushed a
fashionably dressed, brutal-faced young Russian Jew, holding loosely an
immense roll of money. Tens, twenties, hundreds--he counted them until
three hundred dollars had been placed to win upon a "clocker tip" in that
day's last race in Louisville.
There was grim, deadly silence--eating, unbearable silence in that
gambling room as they waited the ring of the telephone and the name of the
winner. Again the yellow haired madam's voice screamed shrilly out, for
she was indeed ill at ease, her money was all on the favorite--"Yes, a
bunch of American 'fillies' peddled out at 50 cents an hour to all comers,
black or white, sick or sound. No wonder he can make a play like that on
an outside chance."
Three-hundred dollars! My heart stood still almost. The thought flashed
through my brain that that wager meant hundreds of hours of shame and
slavery and horror to those girls in the shanties down on Peoria street,
some mother's girl, every one of them. I sat still for a little while and
watched the feverish anxious throng about me. My heart kept going faster
and faster until I could bear it no longer. American "fillies" and body
and soul under a brutal Russian whore-monger! I slipped quietly out into
the street; night was coming on, and I walked down Madison and south on
Peoria. Yes, there were the shanties--poor, wretched hovels, every one of
them. Out shone the flickering red lights, out came the discordant,
rasping sound of the rented piano, out belched the shrieks and groans of
drunken harlots mingled with the curses of task-masters in a foreign
tongue, attracting the attention of the hundreds of laborers, negroes and
boys, as they walked home on Peoria street from their day's work. On I
went until I came to a little shed just north of the slum saloon occupied
by one Shellstadt at the corner of Monroe and Peoria streets, and checking
my steps, I looked around me on the squalid, wretched scene. I was in the
midst of prostitution at its lowest--the heart-breaking dregs of Chicago's
thirty thousand public women. Yes, there they were--the fair young
American girl, the stolid Russian Jewess, the middle-aged, syphiletic
harlot, living, prostituting, dying like so many hurt, broken moths around
that great red-light--Chicago's West Side Soul Market--their poor,
wrecked, foul smelling bodies sold day and night at from twenty-five to
fifty cents an hour to all comers who could pay the pitiful price demanded
by their brutal, soulless masters; and, as I looked, the burning fire of
intense pity entered my soul for these drug and drink-sodden, diseased and
chained slaves--my sisters in Christ and this great, free American
Republic, and so, with a heart-consuming desire to know more of the lives
of these scarlet women and to help them, if possible, I began at once a
thorough personal investigation of Chicago's public Slave Market, visiting
these people whenever occasion offered; talking with them, gaining their
much abused confidence, until I gradually learned the inside lines of the
saddest story America has ever known since the black mothers of our
Southland were torn from their black and white babies and with shrieks of
agony and heart strings bleeding and soul rent with blackened horror were
sold to death on the plantations of Louisiana and Mississippi, and I want
to tell you who read this and who think there is little truth in the now
much agitated question of White Slavery in America, that in the dives and
dens of our City's underworld I have heard shrieks and heart cries and
groans of agony and remorse that have never been surpassed at any public
slave auction America has ever witnessed, as these girls, many of them,
oh! so young, realizing their awful fate, with scalding tears and moans of
horror, shut out from their hearts and lives father or mother or husband
and child, and turned their sob-shaken, tortured bodies to face the years
of final, relentless wretchedness and woe, to be at last thrown out sick
and broken, to die in some alley or to be carted off to Dunning poorhouse
to gradual physical decay and a pauper's burial and grave of obliteration,
while those who sold them just a few years before go out in their diamonds
and fine linen and their great automobiles to buy up more girls (it might
be your daughter, father, mother; or it might be mine) to fill the vacancy
in the ranks of this vast army of White Slaves.
A woman said to me the other day, and it was in a lofty, sneering tone,
too: "I doubt if these women are ever coerced or even imposed upon."