Word: john
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Touhy was removed from the scene in quite another way. In the summer of 1933, John ("Jake the Barber") Factor, a professional swindler and crony of Capone mobsters, was stopped as he drove away from a roadhouse by seven gunmen in a Duesenberg and two other cars. Twelve days later he reappeared in suburban La Grange, with a luxuriant beard and the story that Touhy and his mob had kidnaped him for $70,000 ransom. Tubbo Gilbert seconded the accusation, led the police investigation (along with the FBI's Melvin Purvis). Thomas J. Courtney, bright young state...
...came to believe his story that he had been framed. Miller, an ex-policeman who had been Factor's bodyguard, switched his allegiance to Touhy when he found what he called positive evidence that the kidnap story was fraudulent. In a 1954 rehearing of the case, Federal Judge John P. Barnes pronounced the kidnaping a "hoax," ordered Touhy released (he was jailed again after 49 hours, when a higher court overruled Judge Barnes). Ray Brennan, a Chicago reporter, gave Roger a florid assist in writing his bitter memoirs, The Stolen Years (TIME, Nov. 30). In 1957 Illinois' Governor...
Over the telephone, the editor of the bimonthly United Mine Workers Journal heard the unmistakable rumbling voice of U.M.W. President John Llewellyn Lewis: "When are you going to lock up the page forms of the next edition?" The editor said the following Monday. Replied John L.: "Well, I may have something for you. I'll let you know." Hours before presstime last week, John L. Lewis sent over a letter that gave the Journal-and most U.S. newspapers-a headline: JOHN L. LEWIS RESIGNS...
...first," Lewis wrote the U.M.W. membership with the familiar flourish, "your wages were low, your hours long, your labor perilous, your health disregarded, your children without opportunity, your union weak, your fellow citizens and public representatives indifferent to your wrongs." But John L., born in Lucas, Iowa, Feb. 12, 1880, a Welsh coal miner's son who quit school after the seventh grade to dig coal in underground pits, a union organizer with a shock of red hair and red eyebrows and a Shakespearian style, fought his way to the top of the U.M.W. to change all that...
...Wages. Over his 40 years as U.M.W. head, he battled with presidents, congresses, courts, coal owners, and colleagues. Often his battles obscured the victory. Said Lewis to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, under whose benevolent New Deal he founded the C.I.O. and deployed the sit-down strike: "Nobody can call John L. Lewis a liar and least of all Franklin Delano Roosevelt.'' He denounced F.D.R.'s first Vice President, John Nance Garner, as "a labor-baiting, poker-playing, whisky-drinking, evil old man." Of the late A.F.L. President William Green he said: "I have done...