The Girl That Disappears/Chapter 6
VI
HOW WHITE SLAVE TRAFFIC IS CARRIED ON
FAIRLY well established prices are maintained for women, and they are referred to in letters that have been found as "stock." Few of these women are ruined or clubbed into submission after they reach the United States. London is known throughout the under-world as "the great breaking-in ground" for white slaves.
The majority of the men engaged in the traffic also are foreigners. One of the principal members was a Frenchman, Alphonse Dufaur, living in Chicago. His books of account showed that his earnings as an importer exceeded $100,000 a year. After he and his wife were arrested they fled and forfeited bonds in the sum of $25,000.
Another man, high in the ranks of the chain was Henry Lair, who ran a flourishing establishment in Chicago and San Francisco. One of the chief New York members was Louis Paint, both of these men were apprehended and are now serving penitentiary sentences.
In Chicago, where the most dramatic revelations were made, United States District Attorney Sims appointed one of his assistants, Harry Parkin, to make a detailed report on conditions in the so-called Levee district of the town. In the worst quarters of the town Mr. Parkin found houses where women were kept veritable prisoners. The windows were stoutly barred in these houses, the doors were padlocked, and the miserable inmates of the place were practically without clothing. Parkin found plenty of proof not only of the sale and barter of girls, natives as well as foreign, but he found evidence that the sales were carried on under the protection of the police.
The agitation resulting from this report was so great as to shake up the entire police force and to destroy for the time being at least an organized system of graft which reached pretty high up in police and political circles. The notorious Gingles case was given the widest publicity of all these graft cases.
The Gingles girl was an Irish lace-maker. In Chicago she fell into the hands of a notorious group of women procurers, and, according to her story, was tricked into going to a Wabash Avenue hotel. By her sworn statement she was horribly mistreated by certain politicians. She was found gagged and bound in a bath room of the hotel. After she made her charges against the women and the politicians, one of the women, a dealer in lace, had the girl arrested on a charge of stealing lace from her.
The young lace-maker was warmly defended, and the money for her maintenance and her legal expenses was provided by clubwomen of Chicago. Perhaps this is the first instance in which a woman of the underworld was defended by an organization of women of high social standing. Members of the Chicago Club and a number of outside club women, led by Mrs. Ellen M. Henrotin, a society woman, raised money for the girl's defense, insisted upon a fair and impartial trial, even attended the hearings, in order to give moral support to the case.
But the case was simply a mass of contradictions of every kind, and one couldn't get head or tail of the thing. Everybody was found "not guilty," including the girl. It was simply hushed up, and the only thing that anybody seemed to want to prove was that no politicians were involved. The girl was sent back to Ireland after it was all over.
I could go on endlessly detailing the breadth of the white slave traffic. I would stake my reputation on my ability to take half a dozen conscientious investigators, and within a year to show five hundred specific cases of women lured from their homes in France, Hungary, or some other European country; taken first to London and there subjected to terrible forms of cruelty; and then brought to this country as slaves in every sense of the world.
Even with all this, white slavery is only a small part of the great social problem. The most important thing about white slavery is that it demonstrates the vast network of energy and skill spent in forcing and artificially stimulating the hideous evil of prostitution.