Progressive Democrats Will Guzzardi, Kelly Cassidy, and Theresa Mah introduced House Bill 3518 on February 7, 2025.
The 168-page bill, titled “Keeping Sex Workers Safe Act,” would legalize prostitution in this state, returning us to the late 19th and early 20th century standards. What would that look like?
It’s hard to say exactly what would happen. Last summer, I wrote about Equity Illinois’ efforts to legalize prostitution and discussed various reasons why it’s a bad idea. Those reasons are still valid. But let’s take a different approach this time. Let’s look back and see where we were the last time prostitution was legal here.
At the dawn of the twentieth century, Chicago was acclaimed as a prominent rail and transportation center, distinguished by its manufacturing industries, the Union Stock Yards, and its pioneering contributions to modern architecture by using steel framing for skyscrapers.
The city had hosted significant cultural events like the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition and had become home to one of the most notorious serial killers of the time, H.H. Holmes, who built his “Murder Castle” on the northwest corner of South Wallace and West 63rd streets.
Chicago attracted thousands of European immigrants during that time, contributing to its cultural diversity. The city’s nightlife included the infamous Levee District, Chicago’s red-light district located in the South Loop area, initially between Harrison and Polk Streets, and later expanded to between 18th and 22nd Streets, bounded by Wabash Avenue to the east and Clark Street to the west.
The Levee District was notorious for its vice activities, including prostitution and gambling, and was controlled by corrupt politicians like “Hinky Dink” Kenna and “Bathhouse” John Coughlin.
The area attracted visitors from all over and was a hotbed of organized crime activity.
The district’s success eventually led to its downfall. Anti-vice reformers and the Chicago Vice Commission exposed the issues of corruption, sexual victimization, and other forms of exploitation.
Mayor Fred Busse and the Chicago City Council created the Commission in 1910. Busse appointed thirty prominent members of the community who had a wide range of backgrounds:
- Religious Leaders: Members included a rabbi (Abraham Hirschberg), Roman Catholic priests (such as James F. Callaghan and Rev. Albert Evers), and a bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (C. T. Shaffer).
- Educational Institutions: Professors from Northwestern University (e.g., Abraham W. Harris), the University of Chicago (e.g., William I. Thomas), and the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy participated.
- Business and Commerce: Members included Julius Rosenwald, president of Sears, Roebuck & Company, and Alexander Robertson, vice president of Continental National Bank.
- Social Service and Philanthropy: Ellen Martin Henrotin, the former President of the Federation of Women’s Clubs, was active in philanthropic work while Graham Taylor was president of the Chicago Commons.
- Healthcare: The commission included Anna Dwyer, president of Mary Thompson Hospital, and Dr. W. A. Evans, the health commissioner.
- Law and Justice: The commission included Judge Harry Olson, chief justice of the Municipal Courts, and Judge Merritt W. Pinckney, judge of the Juvenile Court.
- Community Organizations: Members were also associated with various community groups, such as the Chicago Hebrew Institute and the Hull House settlement.
The Commission’s report, “The Social Evil in Chicago,” was issued in 1911 and led to the shutdown of the Levee District’s vice activities.
One Levee District casualty of the Vice Commission was the Everleigh Club, the most famous brothel in the nation. Located at 2131-2133 South Dearborn Street, it was founded in 1900 by Ada and Minna Everleigh and became famous because of its conspicuous opulence.
The Club was accessible only to fabulously wealthy clientele. Just to get in the door, it cost $10, which would be $380 today. Dinner, prepared by a cordon bleu chef, might include caviar, oyster, capon, duck, lobster, and cost $50 ($1900 in today’s dollars). The wine with the dinner was another $12. An evening with one of the thirty “hostesses” was also $50.
The club’s interior featured leather chairs, mahogany tables, silk curtains, Oriental rugs, statuary, and gold-framed nude paintings. It also had a library with expensively bound volumes and a music room with a $15,000 gold-leaf piano.
The rooms were themed: the Silver Parlor, the Gold Parlor, the Rose Parlor, and the Japanese Throne Room. Clients included local luminaries, wealthy visitors, and even European nobility. Customers chose the room depending on their taste and preference for the evening.
Industrialist John Warne Gates, an early promoter and manufacturer of barbed wire, President of Republic Steel and President of the company that became Texaco, was a frequent patron, as was Marshall Field, Jr.
Prominent state and local politicians patronized the club and often received complimentary services. Poet and biographer Edgar Lee Masters and novelist Theodore Dreiser were clients. Boxer Jack Johnson and flamboyant businessman, financier, and philanthropist Diamond Jim Brady were good customers.
After the publication of the Vice Commission’s report, police raided all the houses of prostitution, saloons, and gambling dens in the Levee, shutting them all down. While many vice activities were not technically legal, they were not criminal either, although sex in an open and notorious manner outside of marriage was made criminal in 1905 in Illinois, in practice it was only enforced against women.
By 1911, ten statutes targeted various dimensions of commercial sex activities. Until then, the houses stayed open through bribes demanded by police and other public officials. They all operated at the whim of the powerful. They were just as easily shuttered.
After the Everleigh Club closed, sisters Ada and Minna briefly moved to the west side of Chicago but soon decided to leave the city because of their disapproving neighbors. They took their accumulated savings of $1,000,000 ($30,000,000 in today’s dollars) and $200,000 in jewelry and traveled extensively throughout Europe before settling in New York.
They changed their name to Lester and lived a quiet, uneventful life for their remaining years. Ada died in New York in 1948. Minna then sold most of her belongings and moved to rural Virginia, where she died in 1960. Still rich to the end.
House Bill 3518 would clear the way for the return of the Everleigh Club or establishments just like it. Clubs established to cater to the rich and the poor . . . depending on approval for zoning, liquor licenses, food service sanitation permit, Health Department permit, sign permit, etc., etc.
The women—and men now—will require licensing and regular STI screenings, although the proposed massive bill addresses none of these or other regulations that most certainly would become necessary.
Supposedly, the bill is intended to make legal what is already generally accepted and rampant and to make sex work less dangerous and exploitative.
Will it? That is very unlikely. It was not safe when it was legal before.
It was safe in brothels like the Everleigh Club, with madams like Ada and Minna, backed by corrupt politicians and local police for protection. The independent women were not safe, and the women in the saloons were not safe.
While corruption is not the same as it was at the beginning of the twentieth century, it is still rampant. Just look at the significant recent convictions of Ed Burke and Mike Madigan. Their convictions included charges for bribery over zoning and permitting issues. Moreover, Chicago remains the center of substantial organized crime activity. The Outfit still calls the shots on the streets. Do you think they will keep their hands off “legal” prostitution?
No. They will wind up running the show.
Strip clubs and other adult entertainment outlets used to be seedy places with limited clientele. Many of them were mob joints used as cover for prostitution and pornography, but more importantly, since they were largely cash businesses, they were useful for laundering their illegally derived income.
This changed when Harry Mohney entered the adult entertainment business in the 1960s. Mohney began as a projectionist in a drive-in theater in Durand, MI. When the drive-in where he worked failed, Mohney took over the company in 1966 and turned the drive-in into the nation’s first outdoor porn theater which he named “Sceen Auto Theater.” Why he named it “Sceen” is anyone’s guess. Locals called it the “Durand Dirties.” Mohney was 23 at the time.
The business was wildly successful, and other outdoor movie theaters that suffered declining sales around the country followed his lead. With this beginning, Mohney expanded his adult entertainment businesses, eventually buying out several hundred failing theaters, some of them outdoor theaters, which he converted to adult entertainment venues. He also expanded into adult stores. In the 1970s, he started opening a new type of strip club, which he called “Go-Go” Clubs, throughout the Midwest.
In 1985, Mohney teamed up with two other adult entertainment entrepreneurs, Roger Forbes and Larry Flynt, and opened the first “Déjà Vu Showgirls” club in Lake City, WA. Today, Mohney has over 200 Déjà Vu Clubs in the United States, Mexico, Canada, Australia, the UK, and France. He also owns hundreds of adult stores and theaters around the world.
I do not doubt that Mohney was linked to organized crime from the beginning. First, the projectionist union in the 1960s was one of the most mobbed-up unions in the country at the time, at least in Chicago. It was a different local in Chicago but the same union in Michigan, the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees.
Second, the entire porn industry at that time had heavy mob involvement. Third, Larry Flynt, who was very close to Mohney, was known to have mob ties and was even convicted of organized crime charges. However, the conviction was later overturned on a technicality.
Fourth, federal investigators reportedly learned that Mohney had ties to the Colombo and DeCavalcante crime families. Finally, several managers Mohney hired to run his operations in Michigan reportedly had known mob connections.
Strip clubs are legal. What’s going to happen if prostitution becomes legal? Don’t you think that some entrepreneur like Mohney, or even Mohney himself, will fold those operations into his already booming adult entertainment business? They already have the pretty girls, and some of them are already in the sex trade.
Is this what Guzzardi, Cassidy, and Mah want? Is this what they have in mind? Are they looking forward to another Everleigh Club? A franchise of brothels? Or like Déjà Vu, a massive multinational corporation? All with mob tentacles deeply intertwined with their operations?
There is nothing good that’s going to come from legalizing prostitution. All it will do is increase the sexual exploitation of women and girls in the state—and also men and boys, especially boys.
A little-known fact that my office discovered in our investigation into the sexual exploitation of children during the 70s and early 80s was that underage teen boys are sexually exploited in more significant numbers than teen girls. This finding was confirmed by researchers at John Jay College a few years ago.
John Adams famously said that “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Do the sponsors of this bill care about the morality of their proposed legislation? Do you?
Don’t let House Bill 3518 become law.
