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dealings, such as buying swamp land for a song, having it drained at public expense through the levee district, and sellingit at a large profit. Tarlton and Canavan owned or managed hundreds of slum properties, including tenements and shotgun shacks where poor blacks lived and shady saloons, dance halls, and brothels frequented by both blacks and whites. 16
    Tarlton and Canavan had been instigators in the 1916 Democratic campaign against so-called Negro colonization in St. Clair County. But the city elections in the spring of 1917 were a different matter. After Mollman had promised to add several uniformed black officers to the police department and build a fire station in a black neighborhood, Tarlton was able to work out a deal with Dr. Leroy Bundy and other prominent men in the black St. Clair County Republican League to support Mollman for mayor. 17

    Shortly before the April 3 election, Illinois attorney general Edward Brundage made the first of several visits to investigate charges of widespread sin and corruption in St. Clair County. Mollman offered to support Brundage in any way he could to clean up the city, contending that most of the problems were outside of his jurisdiction, in other towns and in unincorporated areas in St. Clair County.
    Brundage knew Mollman was lying. Five private detectives hired by church groups, which were desperate to get the goods on the mayor, had supplied Brundage with extensive reports on illegal saloons, wide-open gambling joints, and dance halls with busy bedrooms upstairs, all within the city limits of East St. Louis, some of them within sight of city hall. The Reverend George W. Allison of the First Baptist Church, who had worked as a fireman on the railroad before going to divinity school, borrowed an army uniform from one of his supporters and spied on brothels, pretending to be a half-drunk and lecherous doughboy with two days’ leave before he was off for the trenches. The reports Allison and his private investigators brought back from the shanties of prostitution implicated prominent East St. Louisans, particularly Canavan and Tarlton, and absentee landlords as far away as New York. According to the Reverend Allison, many East St. Louis girls of high school age and even younger were being lured into working as prostitutes after being seduced by smooth-talking pimps in lowlife dance halls. “I know one mother who had three daughters ruined in three places,” he said later.
    Thwarted in their attempts to get their hands on theoretically public records showing who owned a particularly noisome downtown saloon andgambling joint, Allison’s plainclothes private detectives pretended to be potential buyers. They were given documents that proved that one building used for prostitution was owned by a man in New York, but all the rent money went through Tarlton and Canavan. The investigators ended up with a presale invoice listing the assets of the bar and adjoining “rooming house.” The assets included the names of two women. Each had a monetary figure next to her name. The women were prostitutes, and the figures represented their weekly earning capacity. 18

    On April 3, forty-seven-year-old Fred Mollman was reelected mayor by the largest majority in East St. Louis history, managing to win a seemingly paradoxical combination—the black vote, the union vote, the gambling vote, and the church vote. He even got most of the female vote. For the first time, women were allowed to vote in Illinois, although it would be four more years before female suffrage had been extended to national elections. On election day, a reporter saw Locke Tarlton drive up to a polling place and climb out of the car with a thick stack of $5 bills in one hand. Blacks who had just finished voting began lining up in front of Tarlton. Each voter gave a small piece of paper to Tarlton, and the real estate mogul glanced at it and then handed over a $5 bill. Tarlton was overheard bragging that