The Girl That Disappears/Chapter 9
IX
BOY AND GIRL MEMBERS OF GANGS
PRACTICALLY always these street gangs sooner or later add girls to their membership. These girls, when they are not too young to be employed, are factory operatives, cash girls or packers in department stores, or workers in other unskilled low-waged trades. To them the gang members are heroes, and they are proud to be taken into the gang's confidence and to share the proceeds of its petty thievery.
Sometimes each member of the gang has his girl, sometimes two or three girls are given the honor of quasi-membership in the gang and are the sweethearts of the gang's leaders. In either case immorality develops. Occasionally seduction is accomplished through the medium of the dance hall and its attendant drink evil, but in cases of this sort that is seldom necessary.
In any event the girl who falls, rarely attempts to reform. To her simple mind the one evil act has completely changed her life and character. She has acted the part of an immoral woman, and she believes that she has thereby joined the ranks of the permanently immoral.
In the history of this particular boy the girl was a sixteen-year-old telephone operator. The boy was seventeen, and he was already acquainted with the ways of vice. Although he professed, not insincerely, a sort of an affection for the girl, he began very soon to use her as a means of profit. He did it only occasionally and at periods of financial distress.
This went on for several months, when one day the young girl, with a girl companion of her own age, were arrested on the street, and taken to the night court. Frightened half out of his life the boy and the fellow gangster who was responsible for the second girl's delinquency, fled to Jersey City, where they waited in fear and trembling the result of the girl's examination. They might have spared themselves both the terror and the flight, for with the loyalty which girls of this class often possess, they resisted the questionings of the judge and the persuasion of the women probation officers. No amount of cajolery, reasoning or threats were able to induce them to reveal the names of their seducers.
That settled the matter as far as the boy of the incident was concerned. His career once started continued in consistent fashion. As time went on he graduated from the street gang into a district political club. The politicians in command of the district learned to know him as a faithful henchman, and at election times a conscientious repeater and strong arm man. They paid him for his services by protecting him and his "business interests" with the police.
He was now a full fledged "cadet." In the seven or eight years since he met and ruined the little telephone girl he has acted as a procurer of nearly fifty girls. For in this particular case the "cadet" found it more profitable and more temperamentally congenial to sell his victims to others for a stated price, rather than to hang on to them himself and share their earnings.