Word: apalachin
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...rainy November day in 1957, droves of sleek cars with out-of-state license plates swept through the tiny (pop. 280) upstate New York town of Apalachin (pronounced apple-achin') and converged on the secluded hilltop estate of Joseph Barbara, a beer distributor known to be high up in the underworld. His curiosity pricked by the procession of strange Cadillacs and Imperials, an alert state cop called agents of the Treasury Department's Alcohol Tax Unit in Albany. Surrounding the 53-acre estate, policemen halted 63 carefully tailored men-some at a roadblock, others fleeing through dense woods...
Last week, in Manhattan's U.S. District Court, a jury found 20 of Barbara's racketeer-guests guilty of conspiring to obstruct justice by lying to grand juries about their reasons for coming to Apalachin.* Facing them in mid-January: maximum sentences of five years and/or $10,000 fines. In what U.S. Attorney General William P. Rogers hailed as a "landmark" verdict, the Government in an ingeniously based prosecution won its biggest courtroom victory against organized crime since the conviction of Al Capone. For without proving that the defendants had assembled for a "crime convention," youthful (36) Special...
...their similarity they clearly proved a conspiracy to thwart the law in a reasonable inquiry. In the early afternoon of Nov. 14, 1957, he contended, the racketeers spotted police around Barbara's place and promptly put together their common alibi; each just happened to be driving through Apalachin (from as far away as Los Angeles or Dallas or Cleveland) and just happened to drop in on ailing Pal Joe Barbara...
Twenty-two men are currently on trial in New York for "conspiring to obstruct justice" by concealing the purpose of their 1957 "underworld convention" at Apalachin. By the normal standards of American morality, the majority of them are undesirable creatures, suspected, and possibly guilty, of assorted crimes from murder on down the scale of turpitude to petty larceny...
...from any sound legal basis, but from a good and wholesome desire to get some disreputable characters out of circulation. There is little or no case against the "convention" delegates, especially when government officials confess that it still has no conception at all of what was discussed at Apalachin...