Satan's Invisible World Displayed; or, Despairing Democracy: A Study of Greater New YorkStead, W. T. (William Thomas)
History
Satan's Invisible World Displayed; or, Despairing Democracy: A Study of Greater New York
Stead, W. T. (William Thomas)
New York (N.Y.) -- Politics and government; Police -- New York (State) -- New York
She was in the custody of the Deputy Serjeant-at-Arms of the Senate, who
had a party of resolute men in his train. But notwithstanding this, no
sooner had the party arrived in Jersey City than they were set upon by the
Jersey police, who treated them with the greatest roughness. They
threatened to break their faces, hustled them about, and endeavoured in
the _mêlée_ to get Madam Hermann away. The Deputy Serjeant, however,
stuck to his witness, and finally he, Madam Hermann, and all his men were
arrested, run into the station-house, and locked up.
The sensation which this occasioned can be imagined. Fortunately, the
Committee was in session, otherwise there is no knowing whether the daring
attempt to seize and remove the witness might not have succeeded. The
immediate publicity, however, that was given to the case convinced the
police that the game was up. The Chief of the Police and the Police
Magistrate refused to lend their aid in thwarting the ends of justice, and
the conspirators, led by a lawyer, who was also a senator of the State of
New Jersey, drew off their gang, and reluctantly allowed Madam Hermann to
be brought to New York. The story reads more like an episode from the
Middle Ages than an excerpt from the proceedings of a senatorial
investigation in New York State in the last decade of the nineteenth
century.
The French Madam, as she was called in the precinct, was evidently
regarded by the police as a gold mine. She had three or four houses, with
some twenty-four or twenty-five girls, and was doing a flourishing
business. She paid the police altogether in the seven years that she was
running the sum of over 30,000 dollars, or more than £6,000; _i.e._, this
woman alone yielded the police a revenue of nearly £1,000 a year. Part of
this money, it should be said, went to the lawyers, who shared it with the
police. Every time she was raided the policeman insisted upon her taking a
lawyer, and told her that if she would take the lawyer of his choice, he
would not swear against her. He would swear that he was not sure of her
identity. This she did, and she was discharged. Every time she took a
lawyer she had to pay from £35 to £80, and the lawyer always told her that
he only got part of the money, as the rest of it went to fix her
detectives. Her evidence on this point was very emphatic. Whether she paid
200 dollars or 100 dollars, the lawyer only got 50 dollars; the rest went
up to the police.
Q. Were you told by the lawyers that that must go up?
A. From the smallest lawyer to the biggest lawyer: every lawyer was
the same.
Q. And every lawyer whose name you have mentioned told you that they
had to give up to the police part of their fees they got from you?
A. Every one of them.--Vol. iv., p. 4,179.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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