Minna and Ada Everleigh didn't have a history that anyone could trace when they arrived in Chicago around 1900. Their ambition, they said, was to become the first 'œdebutantes' to operate a bordello. Customers entering the sisters' stately double row house were immediately struck by how much the Everleigh Club differed from its competitors. Admission was $50, or roughly 20 times that in today's dollars. A fountain in the ballroom sprayed perfume. Imported oil paintings adorned the walls of 12 sumptuous reception rooms. To bring one of the establishment's begowned 'œbutterflies' upstairs to one of the mansion's mirror-ceilinged bedrooms, a gentleman needed a letter of reference, plus another $15 if he wanted to bring along a bottle of wine.
Not surprisingly, Minna and Ada always had enough revenue pouring in to cover bribes and comp services for politicians and the press, said Jonathan Yardley in The Washington Post. For most of their 12 years in business, the scheme worked beautifully. The Everleighs became rich and so well-known that their invented surname helped earn the word 'œlaid' a lasting place in American slang. But a broad cultural war was brewing, as Karen Abbott's deeply researched new book makes clear, and the world's most famous brothel provided a ripe target. Tapping into fears about the new immigrants entering Chicago and other cities, reformers claimed that brothels were fueling a burgeoning white-slave trade. Congress responded with a human-trafficking law that eventually led to the creation of today's FBI. One morning, Chicago's mayor decided he had no choice but to order the Everleigh Club shuttered.
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