by Brad Ricca
The next day, the district attorney summoned several other Columbia and NYU students to interviews. They stood in the hallways in their sweaters and hats, shuffling their feet and slightly afraid. Dooling also called in Ruth’s sister, Christina, even though he had heard she was more or less an invalid. He came away from their short interview with the impression that Ruth Cruger’s home life was rather restricted and that it would have been irksome for an adolescent girl to spend so much time and attention caring for an ill sister, even though he found no evidence that Ruth had complained of it. She didn’t attend dances or musical plays as much as someone her age usually did. The only activity she partook of seemed to be ice-skating. Ruth also liked riding in automobiles. She told her friends that she wished she had a car so she could take them all away. Helen Cruger, Ruth’s other sister, was also questioned briefly and without friction.
Finally, Dooling summoned Rubien, the cab driver, to ask if Butler was the mysterious man in the trench coat who got in the cab with Ruth.
The driver said no, the man was not Butler.
A stenographic record was made of the stories told by Richard Butler and Seymour Many and turned over to an expert to examine for inconsistencies. The results were inconclusive. The district attorney said they had another man under surveillance for several days who was “not a college student.” They said this man met Ruth several times without the knowledge of her parents. One paper reported that Ruth forsook her normal route home from school along Morningside Park—which she had followed for three years—to meet someone in secret.
Another man who said he understood ciphers claimed that a secret communication was going on in the newspapers between the men responsible for Ruth’s disappearance. As police tracked down these new leads, it was revealed that Richard Butler had been on a trip to Wellesley College to see a girl he had fallen for over the Christmas holidays.
* * *
A cop in a dark blue uniform stepped cautiously onto the tar-paper floor of the rooftop. His gun was drawn. The sky was gray and spotted. Below, at the front door, a pile of policemen put their shoulders to the front door and caved it in as if it were cardboard. They ran up the carpeted stairs.
In an ornate room above, the man with the whip paused. He could hear the commotion on the stairs. In front of him, strapped to a chair, was a beautiful young woman with black hair. She was alive, but her head was rolling awkwardly to one side. The man threw the whip down and ran into the hallway. Seeing the police coming up the stairs, he pulled a pistol and fired twice. His gun, made of wood and metal, kicked back with small clouds of white smoke. The man ran up the next flight of stairs as the cops burst into the room. They freed the woman and covered her in a policeman’s coat. She didn’t seem to know what was happening. The police looked upward, hearing more gunfire. The slaver had been trapped and lay shot, dead, on the roof under the gray sky.
The police captain took a good look at the woman’s face. She smiled as her eyes grew peaked. She had obviously been drugged. But it was really her. Her sister had been right this whole time. She—and the girl’s heartbroken father—would find this welcome news, indeed. The man took the girl to the hospital in a fast-moving police car. Her father and family met her there.
The girl died in the hospital. It had all been too much for her. As her father wept over her, she looked like an angel lit by white light.
By the time the movie ended and “directed by George Loane Tucker” appeared on the screen, audience members were stunned. Traffic in Souls was a remarkable film, not only because of its edgy subject matter but also because it was an unprecedented ninety minutes long. When it premiered in 1913 at Joe Weber’s Theatre—an eight-hundred-person venue—more than one thousand people were turned away on the first night alone. In its first week, twenty-five thousand New Yorkers saw it. The audiences who bought their tickets from the small white cupola at ten cents each were largely male, some of them seeing multiple showings per day. Sitting in the sea of chairs propped up on thin, iron legs, they watched the story of Mary Barton, a pretty girl who worked in a candy shop with her sister Lorna, who was flighty and always late to work. One day, Lorna went out to lunch with a handsome, mysterious man who drugged her and forced her into working at a brothel. The pimp worked by day as the founder of the International Purity and Reform League, campaigning against white slavery with a haranguing fist as a public cover for his unspeakable crimes. Traffic in Souls was such a sensation that at one point it was playing in twenty theaters in New York City alone. The film was the nation’s first legitimate blockbuster.
After the lights came up and the long rows of eyes blinked back to life, people wandered out into Times Square in a daze, thinking about the dangers depicted in the film, which now felt so bracingly real. Once Ruth disappeared, newspapers reminded readers:
NEW YORK SEES FIGHT TO VANQUISH SYSTEM THAT GOBBLES GIRLS!
Search Begun for one Thousand Girls Who have Disappeared in Three years—“Port of Missing Maidens” Combed!
Gotham, the Gobbler of Girls, is to see a great spring drive against the port of missing maidens, in which society will attempt to salvage 1000 girls who have disappeared from their homes in the past three years and never have been found!
So serious has this problem of the metropolis become police and pulpit are about to unite in a mighty effort to kill the system that is dragging young women away from their families and friends. 3500 are reported missing fully 800 never are found. Fully half those permanently missing are girls. In 1916, the DA office successfully prosecuted five white slavers.
All across the boroughs, doors closed in hallways and dead bolts clicked in wobbly locks. Fathers watched their daughters, even during the day.
What the papers called white slavery filled every parent with dread. Almost every day there were stories in the papers of girls being stolen, drugged, and sold into lives of prostitution by evil men, both local and abroad. The papers never said the word itself, the word for girls being sold and trafficked for their bodies without agency, but everyone knew what it was. Books like Reginald Wright Kaufman’s The House of Bondage—which was an immediate bestseller in 1910 and a source for Traffic in Souls—were understood quite well by readers without having to be explicit. The Times reported that “1,000 to 1,500 Girls Disappear Yearly in New York.” In the shadow of such towering numbers, it was easy for the police to say that Ruth Cruger’s case was, unfortunately, not very remarkable.
In 1914 in New York, there were 4,035 people reported missing, of whom 3,240 were found and returned to their homes or otherwise accounted for. In 1915, 1,439 women and girls went lost. At the end of that year, 1,229 of this number had been accounted for. A detective who was familiar with searches for missing persons opined that most of those who disappeared were persons who “wanted to be lost.” “In the case of missing girls,” he said, “it has been found by the police that many of them left home after slight disagreements and went to live with relatives or friends in some other place.” By “other place,” he meant with men.
Henry Cruger, though of a heavy visage, refused to believe that his daughter was one of these numbers of women lost to an invisible system. But he couldn’t help the thought from appearing in his mind. He could see her there, clear as day, and it filled him with great rage.
On January 4, 1910, John D. Rockefeller Jr. walked up the stairs of the Criminal Courts Building in New York City. He had been asked to head a grand jury investigation into white slavery. He hesitated in agreeing to do so but soon began the process of abandoning his post at the mighty Standard Oil, his father’s company, and J. P. Morgan Steel, in an effort to “purify” his philanthropic efforts from corporate interests.
“If these stories are true,” said Rockefeller, “the truth about them should be definitely known; if they are false they should be silenced.” The Rockefeller Commission on White Slavery was called to investigate these crimes in the same year as the passing of the Mann Act, which was designed to prohibit the t
ransportation of prostitutes across state lines. When the commission’s final report emerged in 1913, it concluded that there was actually no vast network of slavers at work on American soil.
“We have found no evidence,” the Commission declared, “of any organization or organizations, incorporated or otherwise, engaged as such in the traffic in women for immoral purposes, nor have we found evidence of an organized traffic in women for immoral purposes.” All over the city, people breathed sighs or felt vindicated. But those who read further than the lede found disturbing news. The marrow of the report revealed that although there didn’t seem to be a rigid organization of slavers, they still very much existed as an individualized, decentered evil:
It appears, on the other hand, from indictments found by us and from the testimony of witnesses that a trafficking in women does exist and is carried on by individuals acting for their own individual benefit, and that these persons are known to each other and are more or less informally associated.
People still stared at women who walked on certain streets, their perfume trailing out into the air behind them. On these same streets, New Yorkers heard taps on dark windows as businessmen lingered on the sidewalk. People read the papers and saw the films. They knew what was happening even if they shied away from the actual words. A man imprisoned in the Tombs named Yushe Botwin claimed that he had operated a white slavery ring with over three thousand girls over the last ten years. “Sometimes we get the girl from the school,” he said. “Her parents are hard on her. She runs away.” He shrugged his shoulders. “Sometimes they find her in a dance hall and there is something put in her soda water.” He sat there, looking at the detectives. “The younger they are, the easier the work, and the greater the value.” The papers were wondering if Ruth Cruger too had become lost to this “army of the vanished.”
* * *
Ruth Cruger wasn’t the only person in the case who was being spoken of in terms of white slavery. In late February, Mrs. Cocchi returned to Fourth Branch to complain that private detectives had broken into her home at 75 Manhattan Avenue at one o’clock in the morning.
“They threatened my life!” Maria Cocchi said. “They demanded I admit that my husband was a white slave agent! They wanted to know where Ruth Cruger was.” The rumor was that these detectives were working for Henry Cruger. He dismissed the accusation but also said that he had no doubt that Mrs. Cocchi could aid the police a great deal if she cared to do so. He pointed out that if Alfredo Cocchi had merely been frightened away, as Mrs. Cocchi said, he would have taken the first opportunity to write and reassure her.
The district attorney disagreed. Seventeen days after Ruth Cruger disappeared, authorities announced that they were certain she had voluntarily left her home.
“Ruth Cruger will be found yet,” Edward Swann, the district attorney, said. “The thoroughness of the police search indicates that she is alive. The wide publicity which has been given to the search is the thing that will eventually lead to her discovery.”
That afternoon, in front of reporters, Henry stood with his two other daughters, his friend Mr. Brown, and a middle-aged woman dressed in mourning, who was standing off to the side. The reporters thought she might be the grandmother. They were surprised at her dress and immediately wondered if there was going to be an announcement about Ruth. They got ready. Henry told the reporters that, even though none of the recent clues had borne fruit, the Crugers had no intention of abandoning the search for their missing daughter. Henry reiterated that his reward of $1,000 for any information still stood and that he hoped someone would come forward. The only other news was that Henry had hired a new lawyer.
The woman stepped to the front and announced herself. She was the Crugers’ new lawyer, Mrs. Grace Humiston. In a firm voice, she asked that all letters to the paper, from this point forward, be signed so as to help with their evaluation. She promised the strictest confidence. Low whispers began to course through the crowd. Why was she interested in clues? She seemed more like a detective than a lawyer. Who was this mysterious woman in black?
“Mrs. Sherlock Holmes,” someone may have said.
* * *
That night, in the north Bronx, at the border of Westchester, residents noticed flashlights in the woods. They saw policemen walking in slow formation around the lakes and ponds that the young skaters favored. They kicked through underbrush and thickets still white with late snow. They looked deep into the night and feared every potential moment when they might see a girl’s dead face flashing back at them. Van Cortlandt Park Lake, one of Ruth’s favorite haunts, was still iced over, though authorities were being pressured to go ahead and break it up with dynamite. At night, Ruth’s mother thought of the black water beneath all that shimmering ice and it turned her blood cold.
There were clues and people being followed and scrutinized like signs in the stars. There was still Butler and Many, but also the cab driver, Rubien. There was the queer photographer, Mr. Lee, and the mysterious passenger he saw get into the cab. There were also the little mysteries of scrawled notes and sightings—perhaps the police had missed something there. Perhaps Ruth was somewhere—and with someone—where she did not want to be found. Or perhaps she was already dead. They were still seeking the Italian, Cocchi, for more information on why he had run off. There was also the unsettling feeling that there was a darker, more sinister evil that they had yet to fully see.
After the initial spark of Cocchi’s disappearance faded from the papers, some of the reporters remembered having heard of him before. Last winter, people had been talking about a man on Broadway who, after a mammoth snowstorm, rode a strange black machine up and down the empty, white streets. When the neighbors went to investigate, they saw a single floodlight opened and blurry on one end of the street. It sat there, as the sound behind it revved and burned. Once the spotlight began moving toward them, slowly, then swiftly, they could see it shake as the snow fell cold and quick.
As the light passed, people saw a man in goggles who looked like he was laughing as he held on to a black vehicle as it roared across the snow-covered street. Friends and neighbors stood watching and cheering, their faces hidden under layers of coats and scarves. It couldn’t be a motorcycle, not in this snow, but it sounded just like one, rumbling and spitting in the dark winter night. The machine powered up and turned off, skimming across the streets. It was a motorcycle sled, one of the men said. Cocchi had invented it. He is good with machines, they said. He is smart.
Two weeks after the DA’s announcement that Ruth had run away, Maria Cocchi read in the newspapers that Mrs. Cruger was confined to her room because she couldn’t stop crying. Maria walked to the DA’s office and sat for hours on a hard bench before someone would see her. When someone finally came up to her, she asked, through her own tears, what she could do to help.
7
The Mysterious Island of Sunny Side
July 1907
The sun was so bright that Charles Pettek could only keep one eye open as he stared up the Mississippi River as it curled out ahead of him. He turned away from the July sun and eyed the green plants on the banks, draped and dipping into the cloudy water. Even here, on the river, it was hot as the hinges of hell. Pettek knew they were somewhere close to Greenville, Mississippi, though he thought they were probably still in Arkansas. This far up, the lines between things got lazy.
As the river began to draw left, their boat creaked and headed for a rude landing on the western bank. Pettek could hear the water splashing against the dock with a hollow, wooden sound. He knew they must be at Sunny Side. On the maps he had studied, the plantation sat on a big green peninsula. But as he stepped onto the dock, it seemed more like an island, floating within the main channel of Chicot Lake. He looked again, attempting to take in the whole swell of the land. There was something white and ghostly that was slowly floating over the surface of everything.
Cotton.
Pettek then took a dummy train—a coach car that moved on its own—straight
into Sunny Side. He floated his cover story to a man in coveralls and took off for the fields. As the cotton swirled around him, he saw the fields interrupted by ramshackle cabins. Farther up, he finally saw the men swinging away in the grass. Pettek saw their dark skin but knew they were not Negroes. They were thin and hot and looked like wrung-out, dirty rags. They wore clothes—white shirts and baggy pants—that made them look like peasants. Checking his watch, Pettek saw it was only ten o’clock in the morning. He walked over to talk to one of the farmers. Pettek was a translator of the Italian tongue, so they spoke of many things until the man in coveralls appeared and pointed in their direction. Another man in coveralls, who looked related, also sprang out of the crop. They approached Charles Pettek with fixed eyes. He couldn’t tell who was who.
Pettek quickly reached for his credentials. The men pinned back his arms. They grabbed him and took him to the company store, located in the middle of the plantation. The men were Tom and Shelby Wright, the plantation bosses. Their behavior did not seem to surprise the farmers, who tried their best not to stare. They diverted their eyes to the green curved leaves in front of them.
Inside the store, the air was cooler, but not by much. Pettek kept trying to explain who he was, but stopped when he realized it didn’t matter. The two men made Pettek sit until 4:30 that afternoon, dripping in the heat of the wooden room. Finally, the door opened and a loud man stomped in. He identified himself as C. B. Owens, the manager of Redleaf, the neighboring cotton plantation. Owens was sweating profusely through his jacket as he pointed at Pettek and formally charged him with trespassing. Owens explained that he was also the local justice of the peace.
Another man walked in, a plantation engineer, whom Owens pointed at and shouted that he was immediately deputizing him as a sheriff. This man, named Kennedy, laughed at the very action. Pettek couldn’t believe his eyes. Owens drew out a warrant on an affidavit that Shelby signed and gave to Kennedy, who, on Owens’s insistence, served it to Pettek, who was now officially arrested in the great state of Mississippi. Pettek, who knew he was standing squarely in Arkansas, might have felt like laughing. But he knew better because his life was still in danger.