Sin in the Second City

by Karen Abbott

  Suspicions first fell upon the city’s gambling factions. But a police inspector, after arriving on the scene, offered another scenario.

  “You can draw your own conclusions,” he said, “as to who might have had a hand in the work. Reformers of a certain type have turned heaven and earth in their efforts to prevent the ball from being held.”

  Bathhouse John and Hinky Dink remained undeterred, calling for a late afternoon rally at their State Street headquarters. The Ball had to have “tone,” as First Ward forces called it, which meant meticulous preparations and careful selections. Round up the burliest collectors and station them by the doors. Detail the Levee pickpockets to posts outdoors—they’ll be banished from Chicago for good if there are any complaints against them. Loyal precinct captains and First Ward employees, including “First Search” Hansen (so-called because, as coroner’s deputy, he was the first to loot a corpse’s possessions), were appointed cloakroom custodians and given blue ribbons to pin to their lapels. The men, already feeling the spirit of the Ball, looped arms around shoulders and swayed, singing, “Mariutch, she danca da houtch ma coutch, down at Coney Isle!”

  Bathhouse left the meeting satisfied and rushed off to a last minute fitting for his specially designed costume—plain and drab this time, just to throw everyone off. On his way, he chatted briefly with reporters.

  “Seems to me,” he said, “that it would be better for the preachers to put in their time trying to get men into the church in the same proportion as women. They would be in better business than attacking our dance.”

  The preachers, meanwhile, gathered at the Church of the Covenant at Belden Avenue and Halsted Street. They held hands and swayed and lifted their faces, offering furious denunciations of the Ball. U.S. District Attorney Edwin Sims, still riding his popularity from the summertime Levee raids, spoke on the evils of white slavery. The discussion was more relevant than ever, he argued, with the Derby taking place that evening—that wretched, sinful gathering that recruits its “feminine element” largely from the resorts of the 22nd Street district.

  Unbelievable, this traffic. Trolleys stalled all along Wabash and State, automobiles and cabs parked askew, carriages lined in an endless chain. Fifteen thousand men, women, and children darting through the frigid December night, curious for a glimpse of this strange procession, the painted ladies in their furs and extravagant hats, wide brims circling their heads like miniature rings of Saturn. Lifted above the mass, moving slowly toward the Coliseum, the Everleigh sisters heard the cries “They’re here!” and watched the crowd part, as if by Moses’s hand, for their brougham. Behind them, and behind their thirty butterflies, followed the lesser Levee attractions.

  And they were all out tonight: Frankie Wright, madam of the Library, so-called in ironic homage to six unread books she’d stacked on a shelf. Big Jim Colosimo’s white slavery partner, Maurice Van Bever, and his wife, Julia. Big Jim himself and his wife, Victoria. “Terrible” Johnny Torrio, Big Jim’s new bodyguard, just imported from the Five Points neighborhood of New York City. Years later, Torrio, too, would import another Five Points gangster: a young comer named Alphonse Capone, whose first job entailed buzzing madams to warn them of imminent raids. Capone, like every good First Ward thug, would enroll in Hinky Dink Kenna’s Democratic Club, but he had more than voter drives in mind. Capone wrested all control of the ward from the longtime alderman, who became, as the Tribune put it, “too old and feeble to defend his empire.”

  Ed and Louis Weiss, the Everleighs’ crafty next-door neighbors, were in line, and there was Vic Shaw, her white slaver husband, Roy Jones, squeezed by her side. Policemen encircled the sisters and their girls, protecting them from groping hands as they entered the Coliseum, a sprawling urban castle with spires and turrets—Chicago’s answer to Madison Square Garden.

  Inside felt like a racing heart, thrumming and pulsing to its own erratic beat. “So close was the press,” the Record Herald noted, “that even those already drunk were forced to stand erect.” Thirty thousand people in a venue meant for half that number, lunging and thrashing, bodies colliding. Mouths screamed through nickel-store masks. Women wilted and collapsed to the floor—“Gangway, dame fainted!” was a frequent cry—and then were lifted and passed from hand to hand, crowd surf style, to a growing pile of weary bodies in a tucked-away corner.

  The air was damp with breath and sweat, the floor slick with spilled beer, ankle deep. Men dressed like women, women dressed like men, androgynous revelers dressed like jockeys, clowns, Indians, Gypsies, and page boys, madams with fur capes slung over bare shoulders, harlots in slit skirts, peekaboo waists, bloomers, and even bathing suits (“mighty little suit of any kind,” quipped the Tribune), one notorious magdalen dressed like a nun.

  Minna knew what came next: The band struck up the Everleigh Club’s theme song, “Stay in Your Own Back Yard,” in honor of the sisters’ arrival. This was the one night of the year when the parameters of their own backyard shifted and stretched, when they took to the same dance floor as the pimps and white slavers and cretins who would never be permitted past the Club’s doors, when any ignorant observer who knew nothing of Levee hierarchy might fail to distinguish them from the rest. It was a reminder, panting quietly in her ear, of how low they once were, all those indignities that had to be wrapped in lie after lovely lie—wrapping too thick, now, to ever tear open.

  Every eye beamed on them, and Minna and Ada pushed through the writhing crowd with leisurely grace, heading for their private box on the north side of the room. Reserved for Levee leaders and rich slummers, the boxes ran all the way around the dance floor and a step above it, similar to those at a horse show. Hundreds of men crowded the Everleigh box, waiting for the sisters and their butterflies.

  Here came Bathhouse John Coughlin, not looking at all like himself, dressed in a funereal black suit and shoes, the only dash of color his vivid lavender cravat and a red sash laced around his bosom emblazoned with the words GRAND MARSHAL. Where was his usual costume—the violet trousers, the spit-shined yellow pumps, the white waistcoat brocaded with red rosebuds and carnations, the pink gloves, the silk top hat, the swallowtail coat forked in back like a shark’s fins, deep green and large enough to cover a billiards table? Surely he had his reasons for the subdued attire, but this was not the appropriate moment to ask what they were.

  It was midnight, time for the Grand March.

  Bathhouse arched his back and held his arms aloft, looking like a 250-pound capital Y, and then folded, as deeply as his girth would allow, into a deep bow. Minna and Ada rose and stood on either side of him, snaked their arms through his. Vic Shaw fumed from her box and would later claim she was the madam queen of the Ball—co-queen, at the least—and that she took turns with the Everleighs in leading the march.

  “It was usually me,” she insisted, “though I never went much for those purple pants the Bath wore. Hink had better taste. He always wore a tux.”

  But Vic Shaw was lying—she hadn’t been queen of the ball since the Everleighs came to town.

  Bandmaster Erlinger cued the musicians and flourished his wand. Minna, Ada, and the Bath skipped to the south end of the hall, and anyone still capable of standing, or at least leaning on a nearby body, lined up behind them. Tens, dozens, hundreds, thousands, following the alderman and the sisters in a wobbly procession, singing the First Ward Ball anthem until their throats were raw:

  Hail, hail, the gang’s all here—

  What the hell do we care; what the hell do we care—

  “I intend to stay until it’s over,” Dean Sumner fumed to a reporter. “Six o’clock in the morning, if necessary. I want to know what goes on here.”

  As the dean spoke, a harlot stumbled over to him. She winked and beckoned, curling one finger down at a time, a slow-motion invitation. The dean’s jaw took a slow stroll southward.

  Bathhouse John pranced and twirled an Everleigh sister beneath each arm.

  Hail, hail, the gang’s all right—

/>   What the hell do we care now?

  “Why,” Hinky Dink exclaimed to a reporter, his normally paper white skin flushed pink from champagne, “it’s great! It’s a lallapalooza! There are more here than ever before. Those reformers tried to blow up th’ place, an’ look what they got for it. The Tribune thought people was gonna stay away. Well, look at it! All th’ business houses are here, all th’ big people. All my friends are out. Chicago ain’t no sissy town!”

  The parade was as thick now as it was long, at least twenty thousand strong and still growing, picking up stragglers as it turned the corners of the Coliseum. Thousands more outside, lacking tickets and clout, beat on the doors. The tuba stuttered, the trumpet wailed. Bathhouse signaled one more lap.

  “The Hon. Bathhouse Coughlin and the Hon. Hinky Dink Kenna,” the Tribune would write the next morning, “gave the social event of their lives last night—and the event was the crowning disgrace of Chicago. They packed the Coliseum so full of gentlewomen of no virtue and gentlemen attached to the aforesaid gentlewomen that if a great disaster, thorough in its work, had befallen the festive gathering there would not have been a second story worker, a ‘dip,’ thug, plug ugly, porch climber, dope fiend, or scarlet woman remaining in Chicago.”

  The last marchers stumbled off the dance floor, and the wine merchants set to work, stacking champagne bottles in tall pyramids on tables. College boys elbowed for room next to street bums, shaking cups in the air, heckling for free drinks. A woman draped herself over a box, her body limp as laundry on a line, and gave an order:

  “Pour champagne, cul, pour champagne into me mout’.”

  A cop hauled her away. Another woman, dressed as a five-year-old boy, wielded a sand shovel and guzzled champagne from a tin pail. Courtesans lay facedown on the floor amid broken glass. Men tore at gowns and got stabbed with hat pins. A harlot swung a whip across the exposed buttocks of five drunks lined against the wall.

  Back at their box, Minna and Ada welcomed the young rakes who crowded around them. Could they have a sip of champagne from an Everleigh girl’s slipper, just as Prince Henry of Prussia did during his visit all those years ago? The madams obliged, refilling glass after glass, spending at the rate of $50 an hour, faster than anyone else. Empty wine bottles piled high on their table and spread throughout their box. One of Farwell’s men from the Law and Order League stood nearby, struggling to hold his pen steady.

  “We saw as many as thirty fights in the course of an hour,” he wrote, “and there were always six or seven going at once at any time. This was particularly true of one corner of the hall, where the proprietors of a notorious house in Dearborn Street had a box, over the railing of which they were handing out free wine and champagne. The crowd fought around the box like wild beasts to get the liquor, the women swearing as loudly as the men.”

  Ike Bloom, too, noticed the fury of business at the Everleigh box, the glasses touching in spirited toasts, the slippers lifting to eager mouths.

  “Keep it up, Minnie!” he yelled to Minna, tipping his derby. “You’re the only live ones here!”

  She waved back, but the thought, temporarily dormant, roused itself and fluttered inside her mind: There was no way to tell how long being live ones would last.

  DISPATCH

  FROM THE U.S.

  IMMIGRATION COMMISSION

  Correspondence captured in raids instituted by agents of the commission shows some of these methods of recruiting. These letters are extremely valuable “human documents” relating to persons of the class in question. The men seem to feel affection for their children; they talk tenderly with reference to the fortunes or misfortunes of their mothers or relatives; they send polite greetings to one another and to their friends. At the same time they discuss the characteristics of the women in question with the same coolness that they would name the good points of a horse or a blooded dog which they have for sale.

  DEAR FRIEND:

  I can assure you that I have found a woman the like of whom you can never find; young, beautiful, and who fully decided to leave…. I could send her by the first mail steamer, so as soon as you get this letter send me the ticket or the money…. I will send you her photograph. Her beautiful teeth alone are worth a million.

  MY DEAR MRS.—

  I have just been to see the cigars; they are fine, young and good-looking; she has four of them, but it seems that they are in debt here to the extent of $300 each: that is for their fare and other expenses for bringing them from Japan…now, if you feel like advancing them $300 each, they are ready to go at once…this money you will get back as soon as the cigars earn it.

  FRIEND ARTHUR:

  …For your friend who was just arrested I am very sorry. Well, this will cost him a lot of money. It is very dangerous, this kind of business. A person has to be mighty careful. I have seen it coming. Here in Chicago the trouble is not over yet.

  JUDGMENT

  DAYS

  Belle Schreiber, Everleigh Club butterfly and Jack Johnson’s paramour.

  I am not a reformer. I am trying to make reform unnecessary.

  —ARTHUR BURRAGE FARWELL

  On Saturday, March 13, 1909, Minna, accompanied by her two maids, climbed into the Everleigh Club’s automobile. Painted a cheerful yellow, with a boulder-size arrangement of artificial flowers affixed to the hood, the machine had replaced their carriage as her chosen mode of transportation for jaunts downtown. But instead of directing her driver to the First Dearborn Bank for the usual daily deposit, Minna requested the Municipal Court Building. The car headed north to the Loop, cold needles of rain rapping the windows, as she prepared for her date in the courtroom of one Judge Cottrell.

  The charge: selling liquor without a license.

  Arthur Burrage Farwell had been exceptionally busy lately, gathering evidence about licenses (or the lack thereof), sending undercover Law and Order League detectives into dives—even on New Year’s Eve—to see what transpired after the 1:00 a.m. closing law. He also convinced fifty ministers to coordinate a day of sermons against the “trade in rum,” a ploy that guaranteed headlines. The whole city had gone mad lately; the health commissioner was arresting people for spitting, of all things, and proposed an ordinance against smoking on elevated trains and streetcars as a way to combat the “spitting evil.”

  Minna remembered the advice an Illinois congressman once imparted to Bathhouse John: Stick to the “small stuff” and let the “big stuff” alone. The approach worked quite well for the alderman, politically as well as financially, and its reversal was equally successful for the Everleigh sisters. Since their graft fees and friendly relations with the police allowed the Club to remain open, why demand protection against the reformers’ pettier attacks? This court date was bothersome, sure, but inconsequential in the scheme of things, and the jury proved as much with their verdict: a fine of $25.

  For all the agitation over the First Ward Ball, the bomb throwing and threat slinging and churlish back-and-forth, the Levee showed no signs of submission. Business had been brisk despite the visiting firemen’s nightly vigils outside their doors. The most recent damage, in fact, had been wrought not by the Bible brothers but by the Weiss brothers, Ed and Louis.

  The Weisses’ old ploy of paying cabdrivers to drop off drunken revelers at their resorts instead of the Club was more lucrative than ever, owing to the advent of the automobile. Even worse, Ed married a former Everleigh Club girl, Aimee Leslie, who helped him run his place, using her impressive bordello pedigree to lure potential clients too foolish to distinguish an imitation from the original.

  “They have us in the middle,” Minna joked to Ada. “But they’ve yet to get us in a corner.”

  One night in April, a few weeks after Minna’s court date, two men appeared at the Club’s door knowing exactly where they were and what they wanted. For once, the madam yearned to escort clients—and wealthy clients at that—to the Weiss brothels herself.

  Jack Johnson and his manager, George Little.


  As his name implied, Little was short and squat, with a face that invariably looked as if it had just been slapped, flushed and tinged with shock. Once the stable manager at the Palmer House, Little had worked his way up, making the right connections and a few real estate acquisitions in the Levee. He now owned his own saloon, the Here It Is, on the West Side, and ran a combination bar and brothel called the Imperial on Armour Avenue, next to one of Maurice Van Bever’s dives.

  Most important, Little was the “Levee czar”—the man sent personally by Ike Bloom to collect protection payments for Bathhouse John and Hinky Dink. Minna and Ada gave Little nearly $800 a month, the most of any house on the line, which didn’t include occasional emergency contributions to thwart harmful legislation in Springfield.

  But that night, George Little wasn’t there to collect. By his side stood a man, six feet two and two hundred pounds, his frame overwhelming the doorway. A $1,500 diamond ring, a gift from Little, gleamed atop the knuckle of one long finger. He was a boxer—the new heavyweight champion of the world, no less—and he was famous not principally for his skill inside the ring but for the color of his skin.

  His name was Jack Johnson, and he wanted in.