The law was on their side. They walked the streets flaunting their
immunity in the very face of the police. "Wire-tapping" became an
industry, a legalized industry with which the authorities might
interfere at their peril. Indeed, there is one instance in which a
"wire-tapper" successfully prosecuted his victim (after he had trimmed
him) upon a charge of grand larceny arising out of the same transaction.
One crook bred another every time he made a victim, and the disease of
crime, the most infectious of all distempers, ate its way unchecked into
the body politic. Broadway was thronged by a prosperous gentry, the
aristocracy and elite of knavery, who dressed resplendently, flourished
like the green bay-tree, and spent their (or rather their victims')
money with the lavish hand of one of Dumas's gentlemen.
But the evil did not stop there. Seeing that their brothers prospered in
New York, and neither being learned in the law nor gifted with the power
of nice discrimination between rogueries, all the other knaves in the
country took it for granted that they had at last found the Elysian
fields and came trooping here by hundreds to ply their various trades.
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