Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone by John Kobler Read Free Book Online

father and another for himself, crammed with chinoiserie, bronze and marble statuary, deep rugs, yard upon yard of unopened books bound in full morocco, rare coins, a wife and a mistress. Gamblers sometimes called him Bank because he would advance losers a fresh stake from a billfold bulging with $1,000-dollar notes. The chief sources of his annual income, which averaged about $600,000, were white slavery and a chain of brothels.
    On the lowest stratum of Levee life, at the corner of Nineteenth Street and Armour Avenue, sprawled Bed Bug Row, a malodorous cluster of twenty-five-cent cribs inhabited by Negro whores. It faced the Bucket of Blood, a combination saloon and whorehouse. Only slightly higher up the scale, on Dearborn Street, stood the California, run by "Blubber Bob" Gray, who weighed 300 pounds, and his wife, Therese. The tariff here was $1, and the inmates, wearing transparent shifts, flaunted their charms at the windows. The customers made their choices sitting on wooden benches in the otherwise barren reception room while the girls sashayed up and down before them and Madame Therese screamed at them: "Pick a baby, boys! Don't get stuck to your seats." Black May's, between Dearborn and Armour avenues, also offered Negro women, but only to white clients, and it staged "circuses" renowned for their depravity. Opposite Black May's was a Japanese and a Chinese bagnio and a few doors south, the House of All Nations which, like the famous Paris lupanar of the same name, claimed it could provide girls from every country in the world. The stretch between Twenty-first and Twenty-second streets enclosed some of the better-class brothels: French Emma's, featuring mirrored bedrooms, Georgie Spencer's, Ed Weiss', the Casino, the Utopia, the Sappho, and the most luxurious, stylish, profitable and celebrated bawdy house in the country, if not the worldthe Everleigh Club.
    Few successes in the annals of whoredom compare with the achievement of the two handsome, queenly sisters from Kentucky, Ada and Minna Everleigh. With no previous experience in the field, their private lives having been above reproach, they opened their first bordello in Omaha when Ada was twenty-two and Minna twenty. A lawyer's daughters, they had been genteelly reared and educated at a private Southern school, had married brothers who maltreated them, and had run away with a barnstorming theatrical troupe which brought them to Omaha shortly before the 1898 Trans-Mississippi Exposition. Having inherited $35,000, they decided to invest it in an enterprise likely to attract the males who visited the exposition, and close by they opened their first brothel. With their substantial profits they then moved to Chicago, where they bought and redecorated the late Lizzie Allen's bordello at 2131-3 South Dearborn, a three-story mansion of fifty rooms.
    From the day the Everleigh Club admitted its first customers, Feb ruary 1, 1900, to its closing eleven years later, it was the wonder of the Levee. In addition to the purchase price of $50,000, the sisters spent almost $200,000 on new furnishings. Twin entrances opened into hallways massed with exotic shrubbery and marble Greek deities. Greeted by Minna or Ada, gowned and jeweled like empresses, one mounted mahogany stairs to a maze of public rooms with parquets of rare woods, brocaded draperies, damask-upholstered divans, pianos, one of which, fashioned of solid gold, cost $15,000. Food prepared by a cordon bleu chef and wine at $12 a bottle were served, according to the client's whim, in the walnut-paneled dining room whose mahogany refectory table could seat fifty, in a private parlor or in a bedroom. The cutlery was gold and silver, the dishes goldrimmed china, the glassware crystal, the tablecloths and napkins of handwoven linen. Each private parlor embodied a different decorative theme. There was the Copper Room, its walls paneled in beaten copper, the Moorish and Turkish rooms, where one reclined against hassocks and