of 8,000 men gathered to witness the Jack Thompson-Sam Langford prize fight. There were twenty agents of D. J., two hundred A. P. L. members and one hundred Philadelphia police. They examined over 2,000 men between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-two, and held one hundred and forty-one as deserters or evaders.
The eighth raid, August 15, 1918, was set at Atlantic City, N. J., and is considered the daddy of them all. At that time four pleasure piers were raided, and more than 60,000 men, women and children were handled without commotion. Preparations for this raid were left to Mr. Gaskill, since he had done so well with other raids. In the call for the assembly the members did not know where they were going—they got sealed directions. At 10:00 P. M. sharp, the entrance and exit guards took up positions and refused to allow any males to leave the pier without showing classification cards, if within draft age. The other squads of from fifty to seventy-five men were instructed to proceed to the ocean end of the pier, form a solid line and sweep all men within the above mentioned ages, found without papers, to a point at the board walk end of the pier where they were detained until the work had been completed, after which they were transferred to the armory for further examination. There were about seven hundred men apprehended in that raid and sixty real slackers. It was an all-night job, the members from Philadelphia arriving home about seven o'clock as quietly as they had slipped out of town.
On November 6, 1918, the Olympia Athletic Club was raided, and out of the 8,000 men who had gathered to witnessed the Dempsey-Levinsky prize fight, more than 1,000 were detained, thirty-six of which proved real draft evaders. This bunch of fight fans was handled by one hundred and twenty-five A. P. L. members, forty police, and twelve agents of the Department of Justice.
The signing of the armistice on the eleventh of November ended the slacker raids, but having its hand well skilled by this time, the A. P. L. went on with vice raids and picked up a great many people who had not complied with the draft laws. On November 20, 1918, Chester, Pa., was again raided and an additional forty-two prisoners
