Chapter 8 No.8

Gambling and its Graft.

The Gambler's Fate-The Handbook, Other Games of Chance and Their Protection-Police Profit-All Gambling Crooked-A Warning.

In the very heart of every man, woman and child is an instinct to risk the tangible and present for the intangible and the possible future things.

Since the beginning man has played some game of chance in his struggle for existence. He has counted his own possibilities as against those of his enemy, he has abided for what seemed the most opportune time and then he has risked and taken the leap. Often the goddess of Chance has been with him. More often that strange goddess has risen against him.

The boy risks his marbles against those of his playmate. The girl casts her jacks against those of her small companion.

It is the desire of risk showing itself in the immature mind.

As civilization went on and reason developed, the game of chance became a sport which had for its object a lucrative gain in some manner or other.

It became gambling:-the risking of something valuable on the basis that the risk may prove profitable to the risker.

The pages of history are dotted with evidences of gambling in every age. Gambling has passed through a million forms. In our present day life it is looked upon by the general public as a sport.

It is the purpose here not to dissertate on gambling as a moral and commercial evil alone, but to show that it is nothing today but another asset of the Vice Trust, stolen out of the not too plethoric pocket of the sucker public.

It is our purpose to show that a gambling ring, backed by millions of dollars, headed by powerful men and strengthened by the support of the members of the Vice Trust, thrives in Chicago, adding one more stain to her already besmirched municipal escutcheon.

It fattens on those men and women who have already been fleeced by the way of the social evil and on those who have not fallen victims to that sin, and whose besetting sin is gambling.

RUIN, PRISON OR DEATH, THE GAMBLER'S END.

Yearly, thousands of young men are hurled to financial ruin, sent or headed to the penitentiary because of the gambling houses in the city of Chicago that run full blast with the officers of the law walking blindly past their open doors.

The gambling vice grasps its victims in a clutch as powerful as the grip of the drug habit or as unyielding as the toils of immorality.

The gambling combine in Chicago is as strong as the most powerful house of finance. It is bulwarked by every possible protection. You cannot beat it, in the long run, no matter what your talents, judgment and experience may be.

The average man or woman would stand a fair show of winning in the average gambling game in Chicago were that game "on the square." But it is not; the entire system is crooked. That is how its profits are enormous.

The thousands of persons who play the handbooks during the day, the poker games and other forms of the gambling evil at night, have no more choice of emerging with the "long green" bulging from every pocket than has the mouse that is caught by the soft-pawed cat in a room and played with until tired and then killed. There is no escape. Everything is crooked and the gambling sucker is dubbed the "bleating sheep" the minute he enters where the chips rattle on the table or where the man with the dirty dollar smears your name on a chart with a stub pencil.

Each year hundreds of men and women end their blasted lives after they have emerged from the dens of the gambling lords, robbed of their last cent and face to face with ruin, disgrace, and punishment.

Each year, men are sent to our state prisons because they dipped their trembling hands into the gold in their employers' till to make up the money the gambling fraternity had taken from them.

Each year, hundreds of women see their homes crumble beneath them, stand with tear-stained eyes and watch their social positions taken from them, lose the love and protection of their husbands and are turned adrift to stray into the hell houses we have described, because the gambling germ was imbedded and flourished in their blood and drove them on to unnameable ruin.

There is no way of estimating the evils consequent on the vice of gambling as it exists in Chicago today.

A GAMBLER'S END.

As a specific instance of the destructive power of the gambling combine a Chicagoan recently committed suicide after dissipating a fortune in flirting with the goddess of Chance.

In his pockets, stained with blood from the bullet wound through which his life had ebbed away, was the following note:

"Several persons have the right dope on the dive, gamblers and the police. They let a victim go there until they get all and then they blackball him. Why not destroy these vicious people and close the dives and save people from committing suicide?

"This is the raving of a dying and ruined man but I know what I am doing just the same."

Do the police dare tamper with these men flaunting their violations of the law in their faces?

Even if they desired they could not do them harm. The gambling kings are in direct alliance with members of the Directorate of Ten of the Vice Trust. They turn over to it fifty per cent of their enormous income for the privilege of making the other fifty per cent.

Even in the face of a rigid and apparently sincere recent crusade against the unholy combine between police and gamblers, gambling continued to carry on its trade within a stone's throw of the City Hall and underneath the shadows of certain big police stations.

The gambling kings are even more avaricious and selfish in their wealthy combine than are the members of the combine living off the social sin.

A POWER SUPREME.

No one dares attempt to come into the chosen circle unless by direct consent of the big lords, and after he has sworn abject allegiance to the gambling chiefs. He must show the proper spirit by yielding up a large per cent of profit. If this is not forthcoming, the police suddenly and mysteriously awaken to the fact that the unfortunate man is running a gambling establishment. He is raided, arrested and put out of business, while a chosen servant of the fraternity shovels in the golden harvest from the suckers across the street, drops a few choice coins into the hands of the police who raided the opposition place and plies his trade in perfect quiet, comfort and security.

That is the power of the gambling kings. They are the high "lieutenants" of the Vice Trust. They are given big concessions and extraordinary powers because they are in position to show their fealty by the payment of thousands of dollars of tribute weekly.

GOD WORKS MIRACLES TODAY.

Copyrighted 1910 by The Midnight Mission.

Used by permission of owners of copyright.

A hardened heart softened by the appeal of a fellow man.

A drugged conscience awakened by a word picture

of men's and women's shame and degradation.

The gambling organization is so perfect today that there is no chance to beat it.

To perfect the system now in vogue it was necessary to do away with all forms of competition and opposition. This was finally accomplished after the expenditure of thousands of dollars by the gambling combine in control today.

CHICAGO'S BOMB WAR.

It was the spirit of competition and the rivalry of factions that led to the bomb throwing epoch which has left such a deep stain on the history of Chicago.

Dynamite, gun cotton, nitroglycerine and other dangerous combustibles were used to whip the enemies into line.

The bomb throwing era which was the talk of the nation, was nothing more than the outward expression of the gamblers' hate. The bombs thrown were the means of eliminating the competitor and bringing the enemies into the ranks of the favored as mere slaves.

In three years, fifty bombs were hurled by gamblers in the city of Chicago. A million dollars' worth of property was destroyed, men were maimed and families broken up in this terrible war. The first bombs were directed against the men in command of the gambling forces. These men then realizing the power of the dynamiters, employed them to destroy the enemies of the protected organization.

As a result the gambling combine today is based on dynamite and gunpowder. The police knew who threw the bombs but dared not arrest the criminals.

Every form of gambling controlled by the gambling combine can be found in Chicago. The high-priced forms are found in the loop district, the gambling handbooks are found everywhere, and the cheap forms can be met with in any part of the big city.

MEMBERSHIP OF THE GAMBLING COMBINE.

There are nine residents and property holders of Chicago in the directorate of the gambling fraternity and combine. These men control the vicious gambling situation today.

These men control one of the largest and most influential systems in the world. They employ thousands of men to do their bidding and exact thousands of dollars daily from the pockets of an unwary public.

These men as a combine, are subsidiary to the great Vice Trust. These men play directly into the hands of the Directorate of Ten which we have shown as feasting off the well laden tables of prostitution, sin and women. They derive their terrible and crushing power through the big vice masters. They divide the profits with them. They pay high protection in order to operate the thousand and one forms of gambling which they back daily, from the cheap crap games to the highest and most money yielding games of bridge or to the most lucrative, whirling roulette wheels.

One of these men controlling this terrible vice is today a member of the city council making Chicago's laws for righteousness; one is a former member of the Illinois State legislature; one holds a high place in City Hall circles, and another is a prominent business man carrying on a business as a veil to his real and disgraceful profession.

THE HANDBOOK EVIL AND ITS GRAFT.

There exist in Chicago 1,000 handbooks.

A handbook, for the benefit of the unsophisticated reader, is a record made in a local place of horse races which are being run off at a distance. As for instance, a cigar store in the loop district makes bets on races which are being run off at Jacksonville, Florida.

The handbooks are run in saloons, cigar stores, hotels, and on newsstands. Here the dollars of the sucker patrons are drawn from their pockets as by magic, turned over to the agents of the gambling trust, never to return. Clerks, stenographers, office boys, all classes of salaried men and women are the victims of the handbook habit in Chicago.

Day after day this unseeing public scratches its head of "solid ivory," puzzles its brain in desperation and goes out to "beat" the combination that never has known a real defeat.

Barnum said "there is one sucker born every minute." Truly there is. The birth statistics of the Chicago sucker, male and female, mostly male, is greater than the birth rate of innocent children. This is a queer world.

THE WOMAN GAMBLER.

In quiet and refined neighborhoods, in the rear of candy stores and even dry goods stores, women who are considered spotless by their social associates drop in daily, nervously look over the "dope sheet," pick their winner, and hurl their husbands' hard-earned dollars into the yawning pockets of the gambling combine.

THE GAMBLING VEINS OF THE COUNTRY.

These thousand handbooks daily furnishing the names of horses running on every track in the United States, must have some means of acquiring that important information.

The Vice Trust is never at loss to furnish a medium through which its graft may be increased.

The members of the Vice Trust looked about for men trained to the fine arts of separating the innocent and unwary from their dollars, and found the men who today are the leaders of the gambling combine.

These men incorporated themselves secretly into a powerful corporation,-the gambling industry, capital unlimited.

The superintendent of the strangest gambling news agency in Chicago is Mont Tennes, for twenty years associated with the gambling world in one way or another. Through a news service, which leases telephone and telegraph wires, this man gathers into his clearing houses and exchanges in Chicago, the daily news of the race tracks of the world.

This news, once gathered into "headquarters," is sold to every handbook runner in the city at prices ranging from $12 to $250 a month.

This news is the same to every place in the city to which it is sent by telephone, or telegraph. The price for that news varies in proportion to the size of the place receiving the service and the amount of the daily profits scraped from the skins of the sucker patrons.

This wire service is national, not local. It is the veins and arteries through which the gambling fluid flows daily to many cities in the country.

On the circuit, furnishing gambling news, there are twenty-nine cities that are receiving gambling information daily and paying for it.

In each of these cities, this gambling magnate has an agent selected to receive his information and to distribute to places in that city demanding it on the payment of high sums of money.

The agent pays for the right of such dissemination. This man in the aggregate receives $40,000 a month from the agents in twenty-nine cities on his circuit who reap vast fortunes from the sending of the gambling news to the handbooks in their respective territories. The "boss" is not satisfied with the swollen profit. He demands a certain percentage in the various cities from the profits of the local men using his service.

THE HANDBOOK PROFIT AND GRAFT.

Sixty thousand "pikers" in Chicago feeding the gambling goddess through her handbook mouth daily!

Is that figure something to startle you? It is true.

The "piker" plays in small spurts from fifty cents to three dollars a day. Then the bets soar up the ladder until you reach the rich sucker who shovels out as much as $500 a day on an average. Bets are paid as high as $10,000 in one day on downtown handbooks.

One man in State street has maintained a $25,000 a day business for ten years on an average. This has been actually proven.

There are twenty places downtown where handbooks are maintained that do an average business of $5,000 a day year in and year out, with men who dream and plan to beat the unconquerable combine.

Police officials who have consented to talk because they have been disowned by political masters and a former partner of the present gambling head declare that $300 is a fair and conservative estimate of the income from a horde of suckers of each of the 1,000 handbook establishments daily.

This means $300,000 per day changes hands in the race of men to exercise their gambling interests.

The betting combinations are so arranged, according to experts, that the one sucker is pitted against his brother and not against the house.

The placement of money on horse flesh is so arranged that no matter how the horses run, a profit of at least ten per cent accrues to the bookmaker. He is never the big loser. In cold cash that means $30,000 a day to the handbook men of the city.

Few of the races or the racing tips are "on the square." The sucker plays and attempts to defeat a system which is nothing more than one crooked scheme within another.

Fifty per cent of that is needed by the handbook men to operate their places. It is used in the payment of salaries to hirelings, wire service, rent, telephone service, printing and miscellaneous financial obligations.

The balance or $15,000 is split between two mighty factors. Seven thousand five hundred dollars are kept by the poolroom combination and an equal sum is paid, through members of the police force, or other collectors, as protection money to the great powers of the Vice Trust.

THE POLICE PROFIT.

The local police for their vigilance in steering reformers from the door of the gambling holes, carrying on fake raids and helping the sucker to forget the loss of his bankroll by rubbing his injured pocketbook with the salve of warning to keep away and learn a lesson, must be given their share. Then the "big fellows" who in the department are the spokesmen for the Vice combine must dig out their share. Then the remainder,-a large remainder,-must go back to the Directorate of Ten.

Stop and think how swollen and bloated this figure becomes when considered from the standpoint of an annuity.

Two million six hundred and twenty-four thousand dollars are paid each year to the Vice Trust and the big political lords for the right to rob the general public, prey upon its tempting instinct to dare a chance, and drive the individual to ruin, starvation and death.

That same amount of money is split up yearly between the handbook combination and the agents throughout the city.

OTHER FORMS OF GAMBLING AND GRAFT.

The handbook which we have described in its method of operation and its graft for police protection is the common man's expression of his gambling instinct.

There are five hundred other temples of the goddess of Chance, in which a variety of gambling games are played nightly. In some of these places every form of chance game can be found in full force each night. In others, a specialty of one kind of game is made.

The principal forms of gambling that flourish today are roulette, poker, stuss (a Jewish form of poker), fan-tan, faro, whist, craps, black jack and hearts.

In a Michigan avenue hotel at Twenty-second street a roulette wheel is spun nightly to the tune of $3,000. Hundreds of men and women crowd into the stuffy room, filled with smoke and the fumes of beer and wine, and stake their all on the whirling colors.

The man that plays to break the bank at that place is playing the same game as the man who starts out to tear the cast-iron bottom out of the bank of Monte Carlo.

It can't be done.

Behind the whir and hum of that maddening wheel is $50,000 held by the keepers of the game. Try to break into that treasury with pick, axe or jimmy and you will be caught, trapped and bled to death.

In a house recently closed because of the objectionable notoriety it had obtained, the gambling and vice powers are said to have cleaned up over $100,000 in three months. That place was located in Michigan avenue near Thirteenth street. All forms of chance were thrown into the gambling pot, melted and handed out to the "pikers" as so many gold bricks nightly.

In a famous, or rather infamous, whist club in a downtown building, whose doors open in the face of the offices of several prominent lawyers, $20,000 a night is cleaned up by the keepers.

There are a dozen similar places in the loop district where the money that changes hands in one night, averages $10,000. Men acquainted with the situation declared that $500 a day is a very conservative average of money changing hands in the various gambling holes in Chicago.

For the 500 places this means an exchange of $250,000 a day.

Oh, will a freshly awakened civic conscience save a demoralized public from itself, or will the lethargy which is upon Chicago allow the thousands of young men, men with wives and families, to hurry themselves on to ruin and to death?

The gambling houses, according to old time gamblers, on all forms of gambling, make a "rakeoff" of about seven per cent on each dollar cast by a victim before their greedy eyes.

This means $17,500 a day. Fifty per cent of that or $8,750, is retained by the gambling house keepers for expenses. The remaining profit goes the old, old way, one half-$4,375-is split between the gambling under lords and the gambling kings.

An equal amount, goes to the Vice Trust for the protection received from the police.

GAMBLING IN CONCLUSION-ITS CROOKED CHARACTER.

So greedy and avaricious are the big chiefs of the gambling fraternity and the members of the Vice Trust that after all is said and done, there is little left for the game keeper.

As a result even the little sporting instinct he may have is sacrificed and he becomes crooked in every dealing he has with the paying public.

"Ninety-eight per cent of the gambling games in Chicago today are crooked," declared a well-known gambler. "There is no money in the profession unless the public can be hoodwinked."

Science, electricity, hypnotism, sleight of hand, or other means are used to deceive the player.

Unless you can note the swift touch of the gambler's foot on the electric button, which drops the little ball into the red hole when you bet on the black, you face ruin every time you face the roulette wheel.

Can you see the invisible hand that is doping the racetrack sheet? If you cannot, stay away from the handbook or be prepared to look into the dark and murky waters of the river as a final hiding place of shame.

Do you think the friendly game of poker is on "the square"? If you do you are mistaken. The house has two men, professional sharks, fishing for your money. They are out to get it and they will succeed. They will whip-saw you back and forth until they exhaust you and tire your alertness. Then they will crucify you on the cross of your own cupidity and zeal to make a millionaire's fortune in a night on the income of a counter clerk.

The game has not been beaten. That is why the gambling combine is strong. That is why it has the support of the Vice Trust. Like the man who hopes to withstand the temptations of the crime-centers, and as the woman who ventures is poisoned unto death with the venom of sin, so the man who goes forth to tempt Fate and win a kiss from the cold lips of Chance, is enmeshed before he is aware of it and borne onward in the terrible maelstrom which hurls him into the bottomless pit of infamy and shame.

The gambling curse is a terrible one. Its stigma burns on the cheek of its victims forever. Scarcely any hope can be held out to the man who is trapped by its subtle lure.

To those young men and young women of the city and the country, we write this warning. We have shown that you "cannot beat the game," no matter how intelligently you try.

The Vice Trust has never known defeat. It will not know defeat in this enormous source of revenue pouring into its coffers annually from the favored, police-protected, bomb-throwing, life-destroying Gambling Combine.

IF HOLDUPS INCREASE.

By Courtesy of The Chicago Daily News.

STEPPING OUT TO POST A LETTER

May take the form of an armed sortie.

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