Word: racketeer
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...popular young hero appeared last week in the flesh of Thomas Edmund Dewey, 36, who, unlike his counterparts in Hollywood and elsewhere, has as his chief asset not theatricality but thoroughness. Thoroughly for three years he went about smashing the prostitution, restaurant and poultry rackets of New York City (TIME, Aug. 15, et ante) while his files on the "numbers" or "policy" racket, most lucrative of all, slowly accumulated. And last week, when his big numbers racket case finally went to trial, there was only one defendant, the biggest single political boss remaining in Tammany's battered machine...
...paid a share of their take to Dutch Schultz. In the early 1930's, numbers grossed some $60,000 a day, $20,000,000 a year. To make it more profitable, Schultz used not Federal Reserve figures but combinations of pari-mutuel race-track odds, which the racket had ways of rigging. To preserve his monopoly, Schultz bought political protection. He bought it, said Mr. Dewey, from Jimmy Hines. To deliver it, Jimmy Hines elected Mr. Dewey's predecessor as district attorney, William Copeland Dodge. Mr. Hines, said Mr. Dewey, described Mr. Dodge as "stupid, respectable...
...George Weinberg, a sleek Schultz henchman whose brother and onetime associate Bo is reputed to lie on the bottom of the East River enclosed in a block of cement, said he was the business manager of the racket. "The Dutchman [Schultz]," said Mr. Weinberg, told him to pay Hines $500 a week. Sometimes, added Mr. Weinberg, Hines...
...Brunder described a racket sideline: the sale of dream books. Said he: "You subject to go to sleep tonight and dream that you were fishing. There is certain dream books if you look up-and look them up you will see fishing gives 736. Well, you will play...
...Dewey insisted that the State had no "star witness," but the highlight of his Wigwam party was expected to be Witness Dixie Davis, chief counsel for the racket. To squelch insinuations that Lawyer Davis had been blandished into turning State's evidence by permits to leave jail and visit his red-headed friend, Showgirl Hope Dare. District Attorney Dewey declared: "He got a change of clothes. . . . He had his clothes there. . . . There were two detectives and the mother of Miss Dare present, so that anybody who has been reveling in ideas that the District Attorney was conniving at adultery...