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REAL DETECTIVE MARCH 1937
EXPOSING NEW YORK’S SEX MAD SOCIETY FLOGGERS.
by JANE FRANKLIN
“HIGH PRIEST” Aleister Crowley (above), sports the eerie vestments of his cult, which he called the Thelemites. Society was anxious to discover the secrets of his group
Dr. Menas S. Gregory, former head of Bellevue Hospital, New York City, and one of the world’s most famous psychiatrists, has this to say: “Thousands and thousands of maniacal perverts roam the streets of New York. There is no way to determine their actual number, because their vicious practices are carried on secretly and, to all outward appearances, they are normal.”
It sounded like the low, throttled moan of an animal in agony! Patrolman John Newman, of the Headquarters Confidential Squad, in plainclothes, shuddered as he heard the queer sound again, for he knew that this smart brownstone building at No. 8 West 70th Street, in the heart of one of the most exclusive residential sections of New York City, housed no four-legged creature.
He stealthily mounted the stairs to the second floor, where he stood in the hallway again listening for the nerve-wracking moan. This time it sounded closer. He tiptoed down the dimly-lighted corridor on the thick-napped runner, dropped to one knee and peered through the keyhole of an adjacent room, just in time to again hear the soul-harrowing sob.
He recognized it now; it was the low cry of a tortured woman! And one glance through the tiny aperture in the door verified his worst imaginings.
Bracing himself, the officer seized the knob and was prepared to throw his full weight against the door, smashing it, if necessary, but it proved to be unlocked and swung open readily.
As he leaped into the room, he pulled his service revolver from the holster at his side, anticipating any possible emergency. But what he saw caused him to stop, paralyzed in his tracks, for an instant, so greatly was he surprised.
A delicate blonde, Doris Taylor, twenty-three, still whimpering with hurt and fear, cowered, nude, in one corner of the luxurious chamber. Triumphantly over her, crouched a swarthy man of forty-five, his eyes almost starting from his head with lust; his lips drooling the sensual slobber of the sadist.
The policeman seized the squat, repulsive human beast by the wrist, forcing him to drop the heavy blacksnake whip with four broad, rawhide thongs, with which he had been belaboring the terrified girl.
Then, the brute, snarling like a tiger cheated of its kill, sidled to a far corner of the rich room. Newman knocked him to the floor with a slap of his open hand. And there he groveled, panting, as the officer turned to the hapless girl, still huddled on her knees, wretchedly trying to cover her face and her slim white nakedness with her arms.
The victim’s tender back and velvet thighs were a mass of broad red welts, livid from the human monster’s beating. And to this, she had consented, for a paltry thirty dollars, half of which was to be claimed by the Madame of the strange establishment, to appease the pudgy sadist’s unnatural sex desires.
Downstairs, meanwhile, there was pandemonium. Officer Newman’s partner, Patrolman Walter Hogan, was struck on the head by a heavy French mirror, wielded by a frantic girl who was attempting to escape.
Other policemen, headed by Deputy Inspector Louis F. Schilling and Sergeant Andrew Ryan, placed under arrest seven other girls and the proprietress of the godless brothel, Dr. Anna Swift, redheaded and forty-four, the supposed physiotherapist and chiropractor, who, unmolested, had operated the queer establishment for sixteen years as the “Danish Massage Institute.”
Fortunately, for Society, it will be many months before Dr. Swift is again at liberty to ply her nefarious trade. For on December 10, 1936, three justices of the Court of Special Sessions, sentenced her to spend three years in prison.
But apparently, she will not be poor when she again returns to freedom. In secret vaults, “Dr.” Swift has hidden a fabulous fortune, money viciously attained through the efforts of hundreds of Doris Taylors.
That this hard-faced redhead has wealth, was evidenced when, following the raid, she was taken to Police Headquarters. In the bodice of her fashionable white satin evening gown, she had cached $15,000 in cash!
Placed behind bars with her at the time were the girl inmates of the “massage institute,” the brutish flogger, who fictitiously identified himself as John Wolfe, forty-five, a music student, and three other men in the house of evil when the raid was made.
“Dr. Swift was not at all cowed by her arrest. Haughty and defiant, she cursed the officers, and vigorously denied that she had presided over a disorderly house.
The men too, insisted they had visited the somber brownstone for legitimate purposes, and as usual under New York’s antiquated vice laws, which decree that women only can lapse into immorality, they were freed.
Even the flagellist lover of the Taylor girl was released!
But four of the girls, all lured form their small-town homes into lives of shame by convincing cadets, sobbed pitiful confessions of the real nature of “Dr.” Swift’s massage parlors into the ears of the prosecuting authorities.
The girls were Irmagert Raechel, twenty-two, a gorgeous redhead, from Darlington, Maryland; Jean Egolf, twenty-four, a voluptuous brunette, of a Philadelphia suburb; Emma Bond, twenty-four, and Irene Carroll, twenty-three, the last-mentioned two from upstate New York villages.
The Bond girl had kept the books of the strange institution, writing down the wealthy patron’s names and addresses in code, and the sums they had paid, for their hideous pleasures, in adjacent items.
All the girls talked freely, once their resistance had been broken down.
They related tales of torture rivalling Middle Ages’ accounts of the Inquisition. They told of perverted visitors, clients who insisted that they be beaten with whips, and who demanded that the girl of their choice, likewise submit to similar thrashings. Some of the frequenters of the establishment paid substantial sums for their pleasure—ranging from $20 to $2,000—sometimes prolonging their visits to as long as four days!
At least two of these queer
patrons enjoyed only the atrocious torture of being lightly
stabbed with sharp knives, after which lighted matches would
be used to sear their wounds, the girls related.
They cited one instance in which two Oriental “gentlemen,” carrying a large bankroll, had had quarts and quarts of expensive champagne emptied into one of the seven bathtub in the place, forcing the girls of their choice to bathe in it before they could enjoy its bouquet.
Upon hearing their stories, the police, accompanied by Federal Agents of the Department of Justice, again raided “Dr.” Swift’s perverted love emporium. They found the “Institute” was indeed, a palatial affair; its walls were hung with extravagantly expensive art panels and tapestries, nearly all depicting naked women.
The bedrooms displayed the artistic wares of the city’s most expensive decorators, but yet there was a note of strangeness about them, an unholy atmosphere lent by dozens of formidable implements hung on the walls. At first, these were believed to be instrument used by “Dr.” Swift in whatever legitimate practice she had, but later they were identified as tools of torture for her patrons.
Other of the monster-men had preferred to draw the blood form the bodies of their girl victims by the use of their belts and belt buckles, police were told.
Immediately, the officers remembered the hideous experience of beautiful Violet Anderson, model and actress. Violet, pursued by a millionaire suitor, rejected his overtures when she learned he was married.
Little did she anticipate that he had planned a hideous revenge when, a few night later, she consented to drive to a Westchester night club with two young men of wealth.
En route, they stopped the car suddenly, and dragged the astonished girl into a lonely field. There they stripped her of her gown, and whipped her with their belts and belt buckles until she was bleeding and unconscious.
WHIPPED! Beautiful Violet Anderson, was the victim of a lashing at the hands of sex mad perverts in Westchester outside New York City.
Subsequently, the two wealthy youths were picked up in Montreal and indicted by a Westchester County Grand Jury. But before the case reached trial, Violet withdrew her charges, unable to face the ordeal of a public recital of her humiliation at the hands of the pair.
Shamed before all her friends, she was forced to sacrifice her budding career and seek haven in a small Ohio town, where she has found sanctuary from everything but memory under an assumed name.
Only a few months before her death, Alma Rubens, the famous movie star, told of having visited an establishment similar to “Dr.” Swift’s. She told of how, amid lavish, sound-absorbing draperies, dope and sex-crazed man and women practiced their queer rites. But police investigators, acting on her tip, were unable to find the well-hidden den, and deprecated her story as the fantasy of a drug-crazed mind.
Dope Victim Gorgeous Alma Rubens, movie star, died after she had fallen into the drug habit. She first exposed the existence of the Society floggers cult.
But Alma Rubens spoke the truth, they have since learned
Devil worship, with its unholy rites of shame, has been followed for years in greatest secrecy by a thrill-jaded coterie of New York’s ultra sophisticates! Degenerated into atavists of the lowest type, these gin-soaked, sex and dope crazed blue bloods have flung aside the religious scruples of their Puritan forbears and gleefully wallow in viciousness!
Well may these misguided worshippers of His Unholy Satanic Majesty have lived in the untutored dark ages, when civilization nearly succumbed to the superstition armed racketeers of the time; easily they may be imagined as the members of some lost tribe in black Africa, with a heritage of Voodooism or Oriental eroticism.
And yet, New York is not alone in the current cult plague. Not only Satan worship, but other equally demoralizing teachings have become not only nation wide, but world-wide.
Practical little Tulsa, Oklahoma, oil capital of the world, gives an outward appearance of iron-fisted morality. Still in the high schools of that city, peopled with the scions of staunch pioneers, we find love cults, and even worse!
We learn there are the children of the rich and social, banded together in a ring of crime; boys and girls of adolescent age, addicted to dope, booze, and promiscuous love.
Only a short time ago, Phil Kennamer, son of a Federal judge, one of Tulsa’s leading citizens, was tried and convicted for the thrill murder of his erstwhile best friend, John F. Gorrell, Jr., member of another prominent family. And into the mess was dragged the name of beautiful Virginia Wilcox, since married, daughter of Tulsa’s proudest oil czar.
In staid old Mineola, Long Island, too, recently, a most vicious love cult membered by high school pupils of fifteen and younger, was exposed by Nassau County authorities.
These children, just learning the intricacies of algebra, were already wise in the use of gin and whiskey, and in the practice of free love. Because of their tender ages, none of the names of these misled children were made public, but REAL Detective is able to state unequivocally, that they came from among the first families of the island.
Similar colonies flourish in virtually every section of the country. Paradoxically, they are not among the poverty stricken, the uneducated, but in the ranks of the affluent and socially-important.
There were only millionaires, and their sons and daughters, in the membership list of the New York Satanists whose rites the dying Alma Rubens graphically described.
“These New York Satanists, as they call themselves, are of mature age,” the actress scribbled in her notes. “They flourish right in the heart of the biggest, the wealthiest, and supposedly, the most cultured surroundings on earth, practicing their weird rites and seeking their revolting thrills in the age-old worship of the Evil One, almost within the shadows of New York’s most beautiful and inspiring churches, the Protestant-Episcopal St. Thomas’ and St. Bartholomew’s, and St. Patrick’s Cathedral, on the city’s most splendid and conservative thoroughfare—Park Avenue!
Their shrine is a penthouse in a sedate and expensive apartment house, whose correctly-attired doorman has no idea that the beautifully-gowned women and the handsomely dressed men he assists from their limousines two or three evenings a week, rise to the tall roof in the elevator, and convert themselves into semi-savages, discarding all that civilization has given them and abandoning themselves to an orgiastic ritual in worship of the Cloven-hoofed One!
The lovely brunette actress, who so pitifully dies at the height of her career, gave minute details of the strange cult’s practices, which are retold here for the first time.
Does this coterie of evil still flourish? Who knows! They are shrewd, and move their temple a dozen times a year, so that it is impossible to keep track of their whereabouts without the assistance of a constant detective watch.
The High Priestess of the cult, a wealthy divorcee, who has travelled extensively in the Orient, is a woman to whom few doors in New York would be closed, should she choose to enter. She and her known disciples, mostly from the ranks of the celebrated “400,” have sworn themselves to secrecy regarding the passionate ceremonies they perform in honor of their “Master.”
In Satanism they find a new thrill? A horrible, revolting thrill with which they torture their bodies to excess in the most debasing ceremonies.
Orgies such as one might imagine in the palace of some depraved Persian Shah, or in that of a cruel, harem-keeping Turkish Sultan, are tame compared to the accepted ritual in the Temple of Shame atop this Park Avenue mansion!
The entire atmosphere of this morbid Devil’s Tabernacle reeks of vice.
Gold dragons play across the rich black velvet drapes, committing strange, erotic acts with lascivious creatures, half women, half animals. The metal gleams dully in the flickering glow of the tall black candles which stand about the room emitting a disturbing, pungent odor as they burn, according to Miss Ruben’s story to police, following a visit here.
The perfume drifts toward the mirrored ceiling and joins the heavy cloud of incense. In the center, at one end of the salon, stands a black dais, and on it, is an exquisite Hindu altar, magnificently carved out of solid ebony and inlaid with mother-of-pearl and gold.
Suddenly, a gong sounds, the curtains shiver mysteriously, and the fog of incense drifts lazily across the chamber.
The drapes part in the center of the platform, and through them glides a handsome woman. Tall, willowy, she poses a moment, completely nude, except for a soft black chiffon scarf, which floats down between her hips and lingers over her toenails, enameled black—gleaming black!
Her slim white arms are raised over her head in a gesture of imperious aloofness; the tips of her breasts are stained with henna. Her hair is so black that it seems a part of the inky drapes before which she stands.
Again the gong sounds its curious notes, like the throaty sigh of a woman in ecstacy.
So stood the High Priestess, immovable, while nude men and women on their hands and knees, crept slowly over the velvety black rug toward her.
The incense floating over them in heavy waves of scent was their only cloak, and the mirrored ceiling reflected their nakedness.
Slowly, the High Priestess moved forward to the altar. She drew forth a drawer from the back, and raised a horrible, writhing black snake high above her head, holding it with both her hands.
Sinuously, she played the hideous serpent in circles. Three times she passed it over the sea of her dark hair. Then she touched its vilely-spitting, forked tongue to each breast, and permitted the evil mouth to linger on her navel.
The prostate men and women raised their hands three times, and chanted softly: “Satan is our Master, he is our Lord; and we are his Disciples!”
The woman on the dais coiled the hissing snake about her waist, and moved to the front of the platform.
“Oh Satan, our Master, our Lord, we, Thy Disciples, worship Thee,” she invoked. “We pledge ourselves to the performance of every evil Thou hast ever conceived, promising to shun every act that might be construed as good. We will follow faithfully thy thirteen commandments, and will carry out each instruction contained in the seven books of deadly sins. This, we promise, oh Satan, our Master, our Lord!”
Again the gong sounded, and the bowed fanatics raised their heads and then touched them to the floor three times. Suddenly, from some unseen corner, the shrill voice of a Negro rang out, high, loud, savage, in some mad jungle song.
The worshipers rose, padded up to the altar, and knelt again at the edge of the dais. Then the High Priestess came toward them, carrying in one hand a goblet, in the other, a dish, both wrought of gold.
To each celebrant, she extended the dish and the cup. Each naked man and woman, in turn, took a sip from the cup, and a small, thin wafer from the salver.
Then, with her hands extended over the worshipers, as though in benediction, the High Priestess feverishly began her chant again.
“Oh Satan, oh Devil, our Master, our Lord, these wafers have been made unholy to Thine enemies. We will bring them to Thee, and make them the pledge of our love for Thee, and our faithfulness to Thy evil!”
Again, the gong sounded—but before proceeding further with a delineation of the fearful sacrilege, the writer will endeavor to explain the mysterious something which enables persons of good breeding, of wealth, of cultured antecedents, to revert to lower than animal passions.
Society’s seeking love, confession and other queer cults, or engaging in shocking opium orgies to relieve the tedium of their gilded lives is unfortunately no new story. But no other cult heretofore uncovered in New York, the center of civilization supposedly, engages in such revolting and shameful tactics as this recently-discovered group of Park Avenue Satanists.
Oom the Omnipotent enjoyed the patronage of wealthy and prominent followers, such as Lady Paul Dukes and the former Barbara Hatch, now ex-wife of Winfield Nicholls, former associate director of the lowly-born but apparently magnetic Oom.
Starting out in his career as a San Francisco barber, Oom—prior to his advent as a master cultist, one Pierre Bernard, a ne’er-do-well—found that by draping one’s figure in a sleeveless Hindu robe, and founding a cult, one can make plenty of money in America.
Hiring a luxurious suite of offices in mid-Manhattan, Oom, who by that time had knighted himself as the Loving Guru of the Tantriks, quickly established himself in the good graces of society—no one but he knows how, apparently—and got financial support.
He then turned an abandoned farm near Nyack, New York, into a fashionable country club. Still new members, unaware of his warm friendship with well known persons, were loathe to pay high fees for memberships.
For the time being, he withdrew from that project, opening up three love sanatoriums in New York City, until eventually he was requested by the District Attorney to promote his rituals elsewhere.
The Manhattan phase of his career came to a close when two pretty young women, stenographers, complained to the police that they had been held captive in the headquarters of the cult, by that time known as the Tantrik Order of America.
One of his ancestors was Zelia Hopp, and at the court hearing Oom nobly offered to marry her—an honor which she declined. The complaint was eventually dismissed when both girls told the District Attorney they didn’t care to prosecute because of publicity.
Shortly after that, the Loving Guru’s assistant, Nicholls, married the beautiful Barbara, youngest daughter of Mrs. Vanderbilt, and society with a capital “S” began to sit up and take notice. Oom returned to Nyack and re-established headquarters of his cult there.
He built a grand mosque in which, to carry out the rituals of his group, which included the midnight dancing of semi-nude young women on the lawn. Those fortunate enough to be invited to these festivities, reported excellent views of the revelers when the moon beams filtered through their diaphanous robes.
Among his patrons appeared “Baron” William Droste von Knoblauchs, who created quite a bit of gossip when it was learned he had deserted his wife and two children to follow the philosophies of the Loving Guru and his Tantriks.
The “Baron” was ordered off the place. He came to New York and started teaching the principle of Oom to all who would listen, but owing to the fact that he had never been admitted to the real “inner circle,” he met with little success.
And then “Baron Willie” as he was familiarly called, threw Oom’s headquarter’s staff into a panic when he exposed” them to a New York newspaper, intimating that some of the queer rites engaged in by the Tantriks bordered on orgy.
About that time, too, Barbara Nicholls, worn to a frazzle by the ordeal of Tantriking, suffered a nervous breakdown, divorced her husband, and deserted the cult. So much for Oom and his “omnipotent” ways.
Fashionable Long Islanders a few years later joined the Sayville, Long Island flock of “Father Divine,” until his cult orgies disturbed the good burghers so thoroughly that they had the Negro who proclaimed himself “God,” ejected from his colony. Subsequently, he established himself in Harlem, with branches throughout the city.
And his “business” didn’t seem to fall off when, haled to court some time ago “Father Divine” was forced to admit that personally, he didn’t believe himself the Creator. Nightly, as he preaches, elegantly-mannered Fifth Avenueites mingle with his black followers, and join in their paeons of adoration. Like a sheathe from a dagger their thin veneer of culture slips away and they become like their savage forbears.
Buchmanism, as expounded by Frank Buchman, gives his wealthy followers absolution for past sins and vicarious thrills by a “share your sins” program. Each convert to the cult must gain admission by confessing all his or her sins, and the blacker they are, the better.
He holds stag sin sharings, and mixed ones; mild ones and wild ones.
At the last “American houseparty” held by Buchman at beautiful Briarcliff Lodge, swankiest resort in Westchester County, the climax of the meeting was reached when a sixteen-year-old High School girl confessed to intimacies with seven different boys in her class.
Some of the finest families in the county, which is reputed to be the richest per capita in the world, were represented by members of either sex at the gathering while the hapless little girl poured out her troubles to Buchman and his “high priests.”
Were they shocked? By no means. They were thrilled! And the orgiastic ecstasies they felt at hearing her sordid tale, which involved the imminent bringing forth of a new life into the world, were too sweet to be kept secret.
The word spread around, finally reaching the District Attorney Frank H. Coyne, who following a lengthy investigation, quietly passed the word on to Buchman and his “disciples,” that their disappearance with all their cult paraphernalia would be appreciated.
Of course, many of the hundreds of Socialites who patronized the Buchman Soul Surgery Soirees, were unaware of the “goings-on” of the favored few who qualified as the “father” and “mother” confessors. Many merely went to one gathering, became disgusted with the whole proceedings and walked out.
Society too, formed a large fraction of the group which followed the Black Mass rituals of Aleister Crowley, who proudly refers to himself as the High Priest of Evil, and signs his letters, “The Worst Man in the World.”
“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law,” he proclaimed, in a book which he swore Satan dictated to him in the shadows of the pyramids in Egypt, in 1904.
Only a couple of years ago, Crowley, whose cult preachings earlier had shocked America, and who was virtually exiled from this country because of his indiscriminate violation of the laws of morality and common decency, became involved with the English laws and was tried in London’s celebrated Old Bailey. The British are not nearly so lenient with violators of the moral code as we Americans are.
Among the more horrible of the Satanic worship rituals invocations of Crowley, as adduced by the evidence in the London court, were these:
These ceremonies, degrading enough in themselves, may well have inspired the wicked orgies of the Satanist group in their penthouse tabernacle on Park Avenue.
But the bestial, lascivious horrors expounded by Crowley in his preachings, writings and nightmare paintings—an art which involved him in a brawl over the red-haired, green-eyed Kitty Reilly of Greenwich Village more than a decade ago—form only what might be called the “midstage” in the devil worship of the Park Avenue devotees.
They have added to their rites perverted and animal-like practices heretofore only observed in rendezvous of the degenerate in Marseilles, which with Port Said, holds the doubtful honor of being the most degenerate city in the world. Paris, Havana, and other European cities, all have districts catering to the absinthe-heated passions.
Like students in a “prep” school, the High Priestess’ followers, before their initiation into the “inner circle” of the Satanists, were instructed to visit such dens of vice and depravity nightly until they had witnessed all that might be seen and mastered each shameful practice that the sub-normal inmates of these secret chambers might teach,
Right in New York they saw women and men debasing themselves, women betraying their sex, men who could not remember they were men. They saw cruel mockeries of the act of love, men and women whose sensibilities were so eroded by drugs and alcohol that they caressed multitudinously without sense of shame.
They saw young girls with white, smooth skins lie upon a couch, and arise, ten minutes later, a quivering, ecstatic mass of bleeding flesh, beaten to rapture with a knotted leather whip.
They saw Chinese, hissing with passion, performing excruciating tortures with two-inch fingernails upon dull, sodden-eyed women steeped with anaesthetics, and Negroes and whites mixing their sweating flesh into a disgusting mass of twisted limbs.
They saw, and they learned, and they worshiped the devil, and dedicated to him their lascivious thoughts, their bestial reactions.
And then they were permitted to take the pledge, to announce, as they held the sacred serpent.
“We pledge ourselves to the performance of every evil Thou has ever conceived, promising to shun every act that Thou might construe as good.”
Park Avenue itself has only a whispered knowledge of the existence of this degraded group. And, of course, the real identities of these Devil Worshipers cannot be revealed here. Even the police, who have known of its blasphemous presence—(a felony under the New York laws)—for many years were unable to obtain legal proof against the “Big Name” participants in these infamous revels.
As a matter of fact, scathing gossip which has arisen since the formation of these sadisti
In this connection, an amusing story may be told. A young man, whose name is firmly fixed in the Social Register, and whose father’s name is as definitely printed in Dun and Bradstreet, became engaged to a very attractive debutante, whom he loved devotedly.
Having heard rumours of naked festivals on Park Avenue, and realizing that his marital bonds would forbid his indulgence in such ceremonies after his wedding, the young man confided to an intimate his desire to see first-hand once, before he was married, one of these nude parties of which he had heard.
“Why, that’s easy,” said the friend. “Doing anything Wednesday night, Bill? No? Fine. I know one of those places, and although I’ve never gone myself, I’ve had a standing invitation to come and bring a friend any time I want to.
“Remember, no backing out. Once you’re in the place, you’ve got to stay, whether you like it or not. And I can’t tell you what’s going to happen exactly, because I’ve never been there. But ANYTHING is liable to happen.”
“Gee, that’s swell,” Bill said gratefully. “You do this for me Buddy, and I’ll never forget it.”
“I’ll be you won’t,” said Buddy, ominously.
Wednesday night came. The two youths met, and Bill was in a fever of excitement.
“Whatever you do, don’t tell Loretta, for goshsakes,—ever,” he whispered in tones of awe. “She’d break the engagement or even leave me after we’re married, honestly. But gee, I’ll bet it’s going to be exciting!”
“You bet it is,” said Buddy dryly.
He drove his friend to an apartment in the East Sixties, just off Fifth Avenue, and together, they entered the elevator.
They got out at an upper floor, and a man, in ministerial robes, opened the door.
“Well, here we are,” said Bill, nervously, already regretting a bit, his desire to see life in the raw.
“Yes, sir,” said the robed man. “If you’ll just come with me please?”
He took Bill into an anteroom and said, “You may undress in here, sir.”
“I—I only came to watch,” Bill stammered in protest. “I’m not in the show.”
“No one may enter Beyond unless completely disrobed,” he was told.
Being there, the lad decided he might as well go through with it, especially because of Buddy, who supposedly had been taken to another undressing room. He stripped to the skin, while the attendant waited.
“Now, just follow me, please,” the slavey directed.
And Bill, his heart beating like a clock with a weightless pendulum, followed him to the door of a heavily curtained room. He stood, hesitating a moment, but the lackey pushed him through.
Shrieks of laughter greeted him! He was the only nude person in a room filled with his friends, fiancée, Loretta, and her sister!
He’ll never live down the story of the night he set out in his quest of the Tree of Knowledge.
But, to return to the Satanists, and their sacrilegious ceremonies! . . . The resonant notes of the gong vibrated and reverberated throughout the worship chamber, despite its velvet hangings. . . .
After the communicants had taken the wafer and accepted the wine, they arose from their knees, and casually strolled to an adjacent room in the apartment. An ordinary table stood there, and on it, bottles and glasses.
The bottles contained a clear aqueous fluid, and the Satanists, spellbound by the lachrymose tones of the Negro, which followed them into the other chamber, did not speak to each other as they filled huge tumblers with the “unholy water.”
But water was not the drink they chose. What they took was the forbidden absinthe, the true Devil’s drink banned by almost every civilized nation on earth.
Constant habitues of this licorice-like wormwood extract become completely mad. Normal persons, chancing its evil influence once, find themselves the victim of horrors, of lewd and lascivious thoughts to which they had believed themselves strangers.
Flesh and its celebration, appear paramount.
Clutching their bottles and glasses, the Satanists returned to the temple chamber. From behind the black drapes, which in themselves appeared to exude the bittersweet smell of the candles and incense, they drew long, eiderdown pallets, fringed with the softest white fur.
These they piles together in the center of the floor, and then knelt around them in a worshipful group, as the Priestess descended from her altar and sank into their midst.
As she did so a narrow drape which hung directly across the rear of the altar, dropped as though released by a magic hand. And there, glaring down upon the naked disciples who squirmed and wrestled and even fought for the privilege of caressing the naked High Priestess, sat HIS EVIL MAJESTY in all his red splendor,
Naked too, his cloven hoofs were widespread. And the idol-maker had left nothing to the imagination. In the eerie light it could be seen that He grinned diabolically. His eyes, cleverly contrived and fitted with synchronized, crimson-hued eyes of electric-lighted glass, roved and blinked incessantly, as though winking knowingly at the follies of the naked ones who worshiped him.
Eventually, the passions of the High Priestess were sated by the ministrations of her thirteen naked disciples, all of whom, men and women alike, had contributed to her debasement. Sighing ecstatically, she waved them aside with her hand and then withdrew to one side, where she lay down and propped herself up with one arm so she could watch the contortions of her followers.
Then, indiscriminately, the others resumed their vicious carousing in conformance to the tenets of their shameful creed. There was no distinction as to sex. There was no one of the acts which the disciples had witnessed in the Hell holes of Marseilles, or elsewhere, that they did not imitate. None was immune. And, absinthe-crazed as they were, none wanted to be.
And, all the time, the Devil, mindful of his privilege, stared and blinked and leered.
Eventually exhausted by their emotions, one by one the Satanists sank down upon their downy pallets to rest. Instantly, the black lackey was at their side with another tumbler of the “unholy water,” or a pinch of heroin—both of which efficiently revived their sated passions.
The piece de resistance of the wild soiree followed. Another naked white woman, a mere slip of a girl, was escorted in by the colored man, himself nude. Her blonde hair hung down over her shoulders, her head was bowed in shame. It was obvious that she was frightened. The High Priestess reassured her with a gentle caress.
The High Priestess signaled to the nude colored man, himself in a high state of passion. He grinned, even as did the Devil-idol.
And like the High Priestess, the others sat up with reawakened interest.
The Negro reached behind him and seized a broad leather strap from an ebony velour settee. He raised it high overhead. It descended across the girl’s back. Lightly at first, he increased the weight of his blows until he back was a welter of vicious red streaks. He beat her across the buttocks, until the blood oozed. She screamed, and subsided in a faint.
Eventually, even the Devil must have been sated in his lust. For the High Priestess again waved her hand, the Negro disappeared, and the entire group gathered around the blonde girl, fondling her, caressing her. . . .
“Dr.” Anna Swift’s trial started on November 16, 1936, before Special Sessions Judges William R. Bayes, Frederick L. Hackenburg and Max Salomon. Crowds jammed the courtroom to get firsthand information as newspaper accounts obviously were sketchy because of the particularly hot testimony.
Two of the women inmates of her establishment, Irmagert Raechel, the beautiful redhead, who testified in her native German, and Emma Bond, a prim-looking brunette, who had worked for “Dr.” Swift for eleven years, were among the principal witnesses.
After Miss Raechel had told of various occasions when she spent the night with patients at local hotels, she was asked about “Mr. Sara,” a most popular patron who liked to have plenty of girls around when he was relaxing at the institute.
“I saw him with Miss Carroll, the nurse,” she said. “Dr. Swift asked me to find out whether Mr. Sara wanted to be with Miss Carroll or whether he wanted a different girl. He said the same girl should stay.”
In response to a question from Justice Hackenburg, the witness said that Mr. Sara had on a yellow kimono with a blue dragon on it and Miss Carroll had on a chemise.
Assistant District Attorney Louis J. Capozzoli asked, “Did you ever drink champagne in Mr. Sara’s room?”
“Yes,” she replied. “There were the Misses Liebold, Kurz, Taylor, a Miss C., Miss Baum and myself.”
Where did you get the champagne?”
“The mistress of the house offered it.”
Then she told of removing the patient to her room because he wanted to listen to a prize-fight broadcast.
“Did you have to carry him?” Justice Bayes inquired, getting one of the biggest laughs of the show.
Mrs. Bond, bookkeeper at the institute, as well as a massage operator, continued the story of the high jinks in the dive. She said that most of the patients were known only by their nicknames—“Fresh Fish,” “Red Gloves,” “Nice Fish,” “the Englishman” and “Suburb.” The Englishman was always avidly welcomed because he handed out ten-dollar tips. Once, she testified, four operators were assigned to him and he got a complete treatment in forty minutes.
Miss Swift, who wore a different costume every day during the trial, denied every accusation. If the nurses were intimate with patients, then they performed those extra services without her knowledge. She denied that she had ever sent girls to hotels for purposes of prostitution. She denied she had split fifty-fifty with them after they returned from such assignments.
What about the whips which the police said they found in the place? She insisted these had been solely for the purpose of cowing a German shepherd dog and two bulldogs. At the time of the raid, she said, the dogs were away in the country.
Summed up, her defense was that the whole thing was a frameup.
The three judges found little to deliberate over. On December second, just eight minutes after her counsel finished his plea for dismissal, they convicted her on four counts named in the indictment accusing her of maintaining a house of prostitution.
The court paroled Miss Swift in the custody of her lawyer until March first, to answer two other “informations” accusing her of making false state income tax returns. The State had already obtained a $42,960 judgment against her.
Meanwhile she also faces charges of compulsory prostitution, an offense which is punishable by as much as twenty-five years in prison. |
