Читать книгу Twenty Years a Detective in the Wickedest City in the World - Clifton R. Wooldridge - Страница 57

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This is a story of the most despicable graft extant. For, although it has been broken up in Chicago, it still flourishes in nearly every other large city in the country. It is not only despicable but it is heinous, fiendish, unspeakable. It is the sort of a thing that causes the blood of an honest man or of a manly rogue to boil, and long for a chance to clutch its inventor by the throat. It is the letter-copying scheme. Real criminals take chances on death, or the penitentiary, and on personal encounters with those whose money they unlawfully seek to acquire, but the vultures behind the "ads." promising lucrative work at home content themselves with mulcting helpless invalids, aged and infirm persons who seek to contribute to their own support and persons whom poverty has driven to desperation, and who see in the gilded promises of the cormorant an avenue of escape.

The public is familiar with the advertisements which constantly are seen in the newspapers offering employment that will not necessitate canvassing, or peddling, and which can be done in the home with great profit. Occasionally the "ads." explain that the work is that of copying letters.