"By expanding the ranks of the Invisible Empire in the Midwest, Stephenson amassed a personal fortune of more than $3 million from his cut of dues and merchandise sales In short order he owned a lavish mansion outside Indianapolis, a yacht on Lake Michigan, a private railroad car, and an airplane. Backed by his own private police force-the Horse Thief Detective Association-Stephenson virtually took control of Indiana’s state government. “I am the law in Indiana,” he liked to brag. In his public speeches he defended Prohibition and the sanctity of womanhood. In private he was an alcoholic and a womanizer. BUT TH WEALTHY ORGANIZERS at the top had a problem. Rank-and-file members in cities and towns across the country were taking the vicious, antiblack, anti-Jewish, anti-Catholic rhetoric to heart. As had happened during the first rising of the Klan after the Civil War, violence was drawing negative attention to the organization. Klan raiding parties flogged black political candidates in North Carolina, harassed Jewish businessmen in New Jersey, attacked Catholics in Oregon, and used acid to burn the initials KKK into the foreheads of victims in Texas. And not all the victims were black, brown, Jewish, or Catholic. KKK members also targeted white protestant families for alleged immoral behavior or supposedly betraying their race or gender. In Alabama perpetrators flogged a white divorcee with two children for the crime of remarrying. In Oklahoma Ghouls lashed teenage girls for riding in cars with young men. When newspapers exposed the violence, public support began to wane. Political leaders condemned the attacks, and antimask laws went on the books to deter hooded gatherings. By the late 1920s Klan membership was falling as fast as it had risen But the kiss of death proved to be the hypocrisy of their leadership. Newspapers were having a field day with stories o the duplicity. After all, how could a fraternal organization that stood for law and order resort to vigilante violence? How could a handful of promoters become rich while the rank and file worked for nothing? How could people with questionable morals run a militant enforcer of strict morality? That question arose following news accounts of sexual escapades by Klan leaders. Even the intrepid Clarke and Tyler, the PR duo who had sparked the membership spike, made salacious headlines. The two were arrested-with alcohol on their breath and their clothes on the floor-in a suspected house of prostitution. The most infamous sex scandal involved the high-flying Grand Dragon in Indiana, David Curtis Stephenson, who had not responded well to a young woman’s rejection of his marriage proposal. Stephenson had his thugs kidnap the woman from her home and deliver her to his waiting train. As the train sped toward his hideaway in Chicago, Stephenson viciously beat, raped, and mauled her. Then his henchmen took her, near death, back home to Indianapolis. Two weeks later, the battered woman died from an overdose of pills, and Stephenson was charged with murder. In a highly publicized trial he was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison. KKK membership went into a nose dive."