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73 SIN IN THE CLASSIC CITY mayor ralph sno of Athens sounded highly agitated when he telephoned me one day and asked if I would come over and look into how prostitution, illegal gambling, and liquor sales were victimizing some of the sixty-three hundred students at the University of Georgia. Athens billed itself as the Classic City and was especially proud of the university, the nation’s oldest state-chartered university, founded in 1875. The mayor was particularly upset about four houses of prostitution he said were catering to students, including many minors. He told me he had been offered a four-hundred-dollar-a-week bribe to allow the houses to continue to operate. “I rejected the bribe and informed the man who offered it—a prominent Athens businessman—that I would do everything in my power to keep the houses from operating,” he said. And then he added, “We’ve also got a slot machine factory over here and slot machines at private clubs and other places that are taking a lot of money from our students. I can’t trust my own police department. Can you come over here and write about what’s going on?” That commercial vice was flourishing in Athens in 1960 was not exactly a secret. In fact, the Athens political establishment had winked at illegal gambling and prostitution for years, and some of the city’s most prominent citizens, including university officials and faculty members, were members of private clubs where minors drank liquor and played slot machines. But what worried Snow—and what much of the public apparently didn’t realize—was that Athens had become the slot machine center of Georgia and that gambling, prostitution, and liquor sales increasingly were aimed at students. Nor did the public know that Snow had been offered a bribe to let the houses of prostitution operate and that an Athens businessman operated an illegal slot machine factory and distributed the devices to private clubs in many other counties across the state. Chapter 12 74 sin in the classic city Snow felt that if the Constitution exposed these facts the public would support his efforts to clean up the situation. I told him I would do what I could, not realizing at the time that I would wind up having to talk myself out of what you could say was a potentially compromising position in a whorehouse. Bill Young, a Constitution photographer, was assigned to accompany me on visits to private clubs where university students were playing slot machines. Using a concealed camera he photographed students gambling and I interviewed several who had suffered substantial losses. He also photographed a policeman in uniform conferring with a mechanic working on one of the slot machines. We followed the mechanic back to the Chambers Music Company and found it was a front for a slot machine factory. I checked federal records in Washington and found that W. A. Chambers, the high-living head of the company, had registered with the Justice Department under a law which required all manufacturers and dealers of gambling devices to register if engaged in interstate transportation. A confidential source gave me an affidavit swearing that as many as five hundred to six hundred slot machines were stored at one time in the factory and that hundreds of others were stored in Chambers Music Company facilities in several other counties. Since I also had an affidavit from the mayor about the offer of the bribe and interviews with a couple of students who had patronized one of the whorehouses, I telephoned Bill Fields and told him I was ready to write a series of articles and planned to return to Atlanta. “Have you been in one of the whorehouses?” he asked. “No, but I’ve interviewed a couple of students who’ve been there and I’ve got an affidavit from Mayor Snow about the bribe he was offered to let them continue operating,” I said. “But if you haven’t been in one you can’t say for sure there’s a whorehouse ,” Fields said. “You’d better go in one and make sure.” Bill Young and I were less than enthusiastic about taking on that assignment. If we went into one of the houses how could we leave without becoming entangled in a business proposition we might have trouble getting out of? Bill was particularly worried about that...

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