Sin in the Second City

by Karen Abbott

  “How a woman like Julia Van Bever can retain so much that is womanly in appearance and so little that is womanly in nature,” he wrote, “is a mystery.”

  Maurice Van Bever’s trial was first, on November 10, 1909. The defendant sat “sphinx like and brazen” as Roe delivered his closing argument.

  “He kills his victims body and soul when he gets them into his dens,” he said. “I cannot imagine a worse fiend than one who makes good girls bad and bad girls worse, and this man Van Bever is one of them.” Roe knew the value of a dramatic pause. “I hesitate,” he concluded, “to call him a man.”

  Roe expected Van Bever’s attorney, Daniel Donahoe, to be relentless. The prosecutor sat at his table, bracing himself.

  “Sarah came to Chicago of her own free will and accord,” Donahoe said, one hand chopping the palm of the other for emphasis. “She came on the train alone. Mike Hart says that he met her at eleven o’clock in the street in St. Louis.” He tweaked his delivery, then, invited the jury to marvel at the lunacy of it all. “Eleven o’clock at night on the street in St. Louis, this innocent little Jewish girl. God help us and God help the Jews. If they were all innocent as little Sarah, we would soon be able to pay off our mortgages.”

  He continued for a long time, citing legal precedents, quoting a member of the British Parliament, adding the occasional witty aside. Roe let his eyes scan the jury—trouble. “Van Bever’s lawyer,” he noted, “had made a deep impression.” Roe would have to readdress. The prosecutor rose and strode toward the jury box.

  “Gentlemen,” he began, “when you come to defend a man when there is no evidence upon which you can predicate an argument, it is one of the—I won’t say ‘tricks of the trade’ of the lawyers, but it is one of the ways of lawyers to try to make the prosecutor the defendant by trying to embarrass him.”

  And Roe, as usual, talked his opponent down.

  At the November 27 sentencing, the judge gave Maurice and Julia Van Bever the highest sentence under Illinois law for the first offense: one year in the Chicago House of Correction and a $1,000 fine. But the pander vowed that neither he nor his wife would ever go to prison and immediately appealed his decision to the state’s supreme court.

  Van Bever had an impressive defense fund—“thousands of dollars,” Roe wrote, “probably a large portion of it contributed by the ring of slave traders who wanted to see the Pandering Law smashed into pieces”—and was able to return to the Levee. There was nothing the prosecutor could do to stop him, at least for now.

  His only recourse was to make Van Bever’s freedom as unsettling as possible. Roe would circle around him, remind the pander that lawyers, too, had a wide web of associates and were skilled at setting traps. In fact, just as Van Bever’s trial closed, Roe’s detective scored a lead on the Frenchman’s partner, Big Jim Colosimo.

  “We have positive evidence that the agents who obtained women for the Colosimo resorts not only plied their trade in St. Louis, but conducted a traffic between New York and Chicago,” Roe announced on November 28. “The details of this organization’s methods and its treatment of the women victims have been found to contain all the repulsive features revealed in the evidence produced against the Van Bevers.”

  But Big Jim was even more elusive than Van Bever. They couldn’t find him loitering at depots or slinking between carriages or in the back room of any Levee saloon. No one seemed to know his face or recognize his name. It was as if this obese man in a seersucker suit and boater hat had simply vanished into the murky Levee air.

  Colosimo, the official report conceded, “could not be reached.”

  “Time will show that great good has been done,” Gypsy Smith insisted after the march, and why not let him think so? The Levee leaders knew what they saw after the last torch was extinguished, the last prayer offered. They knew twenty-five thousand men had come and knocked on their doors, guzzled their wine, and groped their women—the busiest night in the history of the district. And they sang their own hymns of praise: “I haven’t done as much business in a single night since I have been located in this district,” said one madam. “We had to shut our doors because we didn’t have room for any more patrons,” said another. “Greatest business we ever had!” said a third. A Negro resort keeper fired three celebratory shots in the air. “You’da thought it was the militia coming back from the war,” Vic Shaw added, “and that was the night that we all had the biggest business we’d had in years.”

  For once, Minna agreed with her nemesis. “We were certainly glad to get all this business,” she said, “but I was sorry to see so many nice young men down here for the first time,” her tone so sweet and unaffected it seemed possible she meant it.

  IMMORAL PURPOSES,

  WHATEVER THOSE ARE

  Edwin Sims.

  I deplore the Mann Act as lending itself to a dreadful pun, the revenge that the Gods of Semantics take against tight-zippered Philistines.

  —VLADIMIR NABOKOV, Lolita

  Early in December 1909, Ernest Bell found himself in Mayor Busse’s office, standing between Arthur Burrage Farwell and Bathhouse John Coughlin. Since the summer, in the midst of editing his anthology, Bell had assisted Farwell in his efforts to defeat the First Ward Ball. After the 1908 fiasco, which reformers and First Warders alike agreed was the most depraved—and the most successful—in history, Farwell had begun his anti-Derby campaign early.

  Unlike last year, when Busse insisted the aldermen had gotten a license fair and square and sent Farwell on his way, the mayor now appeared receptive, weighing the political ramifications of both sides.

  Bell turned to Bathhouse John.

  “You,” said the reverend, “are leading yourself and others to damnation.”

  The alderman shrugged. “It’s not worse than other balls.”

  “But you run it for your own profit.”

  Coughlin’s lips twisted into a smirk. “Well, don’t you make your living off the people down there in the district?”

  Bell was not privy to the later exchange between the mayor and the alderman, but the 1909 Ball, held on Monday, December 13, was nothing more than a concert. A band played to empty rows of chairs, and the dance floor was dry and deserted. Three thousand people did not a Grand March make, especially with no Everleigh sisters in attendance.

  Rather than credit the reformers, Bathhouse John blamed the Ball’s “fizzle” on the “hoodoo” of the number 13.

  “If the day had been any other except the thirteenth,” he argued, “the ball would have been given, and it would have been a bigger success than ever before.”

  Bathhouse John produced a list of combinations of words, all the letters adding up to thirteen, that had jinxed him:

  Leroy T. Steward

  Chief of Police

  Twelfth annual

  First Ward Ball

  At the Coliseum

  Monday evening

  Dec. Thirteen, ’09

  The Grand March

  John J. Coughlin

  First Ward Bard

  Alderman Kenna

  Kenna-Coughlin

  Bathhouse John

  Reform Has Come

  That same week, Senator William Dillingham, Republican of Vermont, submitted to Congress several partial reports regarding the Immigration Commission’s investigations. Female agents discovered corrupt aid societies that knowingly sent immigrant girls to brothels. Anthropologist Franz Boaz had posed the theory that immigrants experienced physical changes as they assimilated and concluded that “the head form, which has always been considered as one of the most stable and permanent characteristic of human races, undergoes far-reaching changes due to the transfer of the races of Europe to American soil. The East European Hebrew, who has a very round head, becomes more long headed; the South Italian, who in Italy has an exceedingly long head, becomes more short headed; so that both approach a uniform type in this country, so far as the roundness of the head is concerned.”

  The most important—and anticip
ated—report was titled Importation and Harboring of Women for Immoral Purposes. On a Saturday morning, people from Syracuse to Indianapolis to Oakland, California, sat down to breakfast and read the wire service dispatch from the nation’s capital.

  “In explanation of the act of laying bare to the public the horrible details of discoveries by its agents,” it began, “the commission says that the ‘white slave traffic’ is the most pitiful and the most revolting phase of the immigration question. This business has assumed large proportions, and it has been exerting so evil an influence upon the country that the commission declares that it felt compelled to make it the subject of a thorough investigation.”

  Owing, in part, to the decorous tenor of the times, the article omitted talk of battleships and portholes, of cigar euphemisms and million-dollar teeth, and focused instead on what might be done to “blot out” the traffic. The federal government, it surmised, should forbid the transportation of persons from one state, territory, or district to another for the purpose of prostitution.

  The government was already on the case. On December 6, Congressman James R. Mann of Chicago, motivated by the Maurice Van Bever case, introduced a bill titled the White Slave Traffic Act. Referred to the Interstate and Foreign Commerce Committee, of which Mann was chair, it quickly became known as the Mann Act. Within days, President Taft, in his annual message to Congress, expressed verbose approval.

  “I greatly regret to have to say,” he began, “that the investigations made in the Bureau of Immigration and other sources of information lead to the view that there is urgent necessity for additional legislation and greater executive activity to suppress the recruiting of the ranks of prostitutes from the streams of immigration into this country—an evil which, for want of a better name, has been called ‘the white slave trade.’” Taft allocated $50,000 for the employment of special inspectors and declared Mann’s bill “constitutional.”

  A new branch within the U.S. Department of Justice called the Bureau of Investigation—the “Federal” to be added later—would be charged with tracking down Mann Act violations. The Bureau, at this point, employed only twenty-three agents, but James Mann’s law launched its transformation from a small office concerned with miscellaneous minor crimes to the government’s most recognizable and powerful legal arm.

  The congressman took all the credit for his eponymous act, but Edwin Sims, still the master organizer, was its true author. A longtime friend of Mann’s, Sims drafted the bill in the fall, advising that persons found guilty of transporting in interstate or foreign commerce any woman or girl for the “purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose” be fined a maximum of $5,000 and spend up to five years in prison.

  Neither Sims nor Mann explained exactly what sort of behavior might constitute “any other immoral purpose.”

  On December 6, as the Mann Act was making its legislative debut, Sims contacted Ernest Bell:

  “Personally I feel that, having drafted the bill, the matter of securing its passage devolves upon workers like yourself,” Sims wrote. “I firmly believe that if the associations and individuals interested in the suppression of the White Slave Traffic organize some sort of effective campaign, they can speedily secure the passage of the proposed law.”

  Bell was delighted to receive the letter. When it was going well, this battle against the Levee moved like high tide, pushing in farther each day, eroding, claiming fresh ground before it crested back. The Gypsy Smith parade left a mark. The victory against the First Ward Ball surpassed it and left another. His book, on its way to selling seventy thousand copies in seven months, drew the boldest yet, and the Mann Act was right behind it, gathering force, waiting to advance.

  And then the Lord called a troubled young man home one night, leaving a mark in the Levee of His own.

  PART THREE

  FIGHTING FOR

  THE PROTECTION

  OF OUR GIRLS

  1910–1912

  MILLIONAIRE

  PLAYBOY DEAD—

  MORPHINE OR MADAM?

  Madam Vic Shaw, 1910.

  I was the pet of Chicago…now, if they’d only bring back the good old days.

  —MADAM VIC SHAW

  The young man listed through the Everleigh Club parlors, steadying only when his hand found the curve of a girl’s shoulder, a boat tethered momentarily to its dock. Minna watched him, wondered how much champagne he’d drunk. There he went, unmoored again, sliding along the wall for support, raising his empty glass to signal for another. He was handsome, pretty almost, with fine, elegant features; only his ears, protruding like teacup handles, marred the symmetry of his face. The high collar of his white shirt grazed his chin, and a matching tie, cinched tight, disappeared down a black double-breasted sack coat. A gray bowler hat, the latest style, perched atop short blond curls.

  He was Nathaniel Ford Moore, only son and heir of James Hobart Moore and a frequent guest of the Club. The elder Moore, a close friend to J. P. Morgan, was a capitalist with a controlling interest in National Biscuit (the forerunner to Nabisco), Continental Can, Diamond Match, and the Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific Railroad. The younger Moore inherited his father’s money but not his ambition. Only at the age of twenty-six did Nat, as he was called, deign to consider working for a living.

  “I know it will mean getting up pretty early in the morning and a lot of other inconvenient things,” he’d said, “but I’m ready to stand for all of them. Loafing makes one very tired, you know.”

  But on this night, January 8, 1910, Nat Moore appeared to have dismissed his resolution. The boy was a drunk and an addict, known to inject morphine into his arm with a solid gold syringe, but his money and willingness to spend it compensated for such unseemly habits. On his twenty-first birthday in 1905, he came down to breakfast to find a check for $100,000 tucked under his plate. Two years later, he threw a legendary dinner at Rector’s in New York for thirty couples. It was Nat’s birthday again, but his friends opened the gifts—diamond sleeve buttons for the men and specially made pearl necklaces for the ladies. For his next party, he instructed servants to spread a cache of $20 gold pieces across a bed of ice. One by one, Nat, a married man, stood behind the chair of each female guest, dangled a chilled coin before her face, and dropped it into her décolletage.

  Watching him now, Minna wondered if he’d indulged in anything besides champagne. Earlier in the evening, a Levee morphine salesman had asked at the door for a courtesan named Katie. The harlot spoke with the visitor in the alcove for a few hushed minutes and then proceeded to tail Nat Moore around the Levee parlors, hoping to entice him upstairs. Katie, before becoming an Everleigh butterfly, had been a common pickpocket and thief, so adept at snatching watches and wallets that she could have done it full-time. But she was beautiful and stately, possessing an eloquent grace that belied her trashy mouth and scheming mind. The Club’s clientele loved her.

  Katie certainly wasn’t above rolling the young scion, dropping some poison into his glass. And after the Diamond Bertha tragedy, the sisters wanted to be especially vigilant, with clients and courtesans alike.

  The harlot named Diamond Bertha was equal parts lady and bruiser: She had no problem crashing a bottle of champagne over a man’s head if that’s what the moment called for. She draped diamonds on every available inch of her body, even outjeweling Minna. The sisters loved her dearly but had to let her go. They weren’t bothered by her use of bubbly as a weapon, but her necklaces and bracelets and rings were attracting a bad element—violent robbers.

  So Bertha packed up and set off not for Vic Shaw’s dive, thankfully, but for New Orleans. Within six months of her arrival in the Storyville district, she was killed, found in an alleyway, her hands, adorned with every bracelet and ring she owned, sliced off at the wrists. The sisters were questioned—the harlot had “Calumet 412” scribbled all over her notebook and calling cards—and they told the police the truth: They knew the thieves in Chicago, but not in the South. If only Bert
ha had called for help before whatever was threatening her touched down.

  Just to be safe, Minna decided to cut him off. If Nat couldn’t drink, he couldn’t be drugged.

  She gave word to Edmund: No more champagne for Nat Moore. Katie realized the edict had been issued as a preemptive measure on her behalf. Cheeks pinking, mouth pursed into a button, the girl stomped around the dancing couples and bowing servants. She clasped Minna’s arm, spinning the madam around.

  “So damned suspicious,” Katie spat. “You and your holy manners. Who the hell are you to tell any of us what is right and what is wrong?”

  Minna kept her voice low, her words smooth. “I want no stains on this house.”

  “As though it hasn’t got plenty already,” Katie said, moving in closer. “To hell with you and your lily white bunk.”

  Minna returned the girl’s stare, the two of them resolutely still inside the Saturday night chaos. Then Katie whirled on her heel and stormed out.

  The girl walked north, shivering, mounds of blackening snow crunching beneath her heels. She knocked on the door of 2014 South Dearborn Street, Vic Shaw’s place.

  A half hour later, at 1:00 in the morning, Minna bade good night to her boy and made sure Nat Moore was escorted to a cab. But he did not go home.

  Vic Shaw made it her business to know when any man of prominence stepped inside the Levee. Saloon keepers on her payroll called her with sightings, and drivers delivered them to her door. Nat Moore, as fallible as he was wealthy, always lurked on the periphery of her senses. She knew he was in the district ten days ago and nearly overdosed in a resort—whether it was hers, she’d never say—and that a team of doctors pounded his chest and drugged him back to life. She knew he was in the district four days before that, and collected from him a $1,500 check that he owed toward his account. And she knew he was in there tonight. Katie, the girl who’d stormed down from the Everleigh Club begging for a job, confirmed it.