The 'Messenger' Drug Ring Exposed
Detectives charge that a Tacoma messenger service was a front for a widespread cocaine and morphine trafficking operation.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Making the startling charge that Grant Bilton, Jack Wells, Arthur Wilson, R. Stanley and Paul Schultz, of the 'City Messenger Service' company on lower Commerce street—who were arrested in Tacoma last week on suspicion of having been implicated in the murder of Harry Joseph Helossis in Seattle—have been trafficking in cocaine, morphine and other narcotics on an extended scale and have sent many young men and girls of Tacoma and Seattle to their ruin by selling them the drugs, detectives created a sensation in the Tacoma police court yesterday afternoon when the five suspects were arraigned on charges of vagrancy. The charges were made by Detective William Fackler of Tacoma and Detectives M. R. Hubbard and H. J. Keefe of Seattle, who declared that the 'messenger' company with which the young men have been associated was merely a pretense and was originated solely for the purpose of dispensing the poisonous drugs. They said the young men had conducted a similar so-called messenger service in Seattle and had been run out of that city after their illegitimate practice had been disclosed. The court imposed the maximum penalty for vagrancy: 30 days on the city wood pile. Detective Fackler said every member of the gang was a cocaine fiend and had been instrumental in ruining the lives of young girls and boys. To substantiate his statements, the detective produced several packages of cocaine which he said the 'messengers' had been peddling at 25 cents each.
“The extent of the gang's depredations in Tacoma society will never be fully realized, as the opiates had been distributed among the better classes of people as well as among the degenerates.”
The 'messenger service' front remains a common tactic in urban illicit markets, though the substances and the scale of the police response have evolved. This 1909 raid illustrates the early intersection of moral panic regarding 'youth corruption' and the criminalization of drug use in the Pacific Northwest.
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