Читать книгу Twenty Years a Detective in the Wickedest City in the World - Clifton R. Wooldridge - Страница 111

The usual beginning is a small subscription fee paid for a "matrimonial" paper. This paper contains alleged descriptions of men and women, principally the latter, who are claimed by the publisher to be seeking wives or husbands through the matrimonial agency. The subscriber who becomes interested in any of the descriptions is made to pay a fee for more detailed information and alleged record of the financial circumstances of the person. There is sometimes an additional fee for a photograph. This picture may or may not be one of the person described, but that matters little. Almost any old photograph will serve the purpose. In all the raids made on matrimonial agencies collections of photographs have been found.

That tens of thousands of otherwise intelligent men and women should either entrust pictures of themselves to an agency by which it is to be sent out to unknown persons, or should even begin such negotiations as those carried on through the matrimonial agency, is incomprehensible.

The money derived in the aggregate from subscriptions to the matrimonial paper, the fees for particulars and those for photographs and miscellaneous "services" amount to large sums. With many of the agencies the services stop at this point, but many others undertake personal introductions of lonesome maids and widows to the invariably "honest and affectionate" bachelors and widowers, and when this is done there are other fees, depending altogether on how much the victims appear to be willing to stand.

A large number have been found and suppressed in which there was but one lonesome maid or widow and one honest and affectionate bachelor or widower, the former being the woman accomplice of the manager of the agency and the latter the manager himself. They answer love-lorn correspondents of both sexes and select for victims those believed to have the most money. If the assistant to the manager is posing as the possible bride in the case the wife hunter must make satisfactory settlements with the manager for conducting the negotiations, and this amount, with that which the accomplice is able to secure from the victim, amounts often to a considerable sum. After the victim is separated from his money something happens to prevent the happy conclusion of the marriage negotiations.