Word: racketeer
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...with a brown mustache had come forward to champion him and thousands upon thousands of reputable New York businessmen who had been similarly terrorized and mulcted. The new champion was Thomas Edmund Dewey, 34, for 18 months the head and heart of New York City's famed Dewey racket investigation. Tweed to Walker, Ever since the State Legislature in 1853 stripped police-appointing powers from the city's Common Council (called "The Forty Thieves") and set up a Board of Police Commissioners, the history of New York City has been studded with drives against crime and corruption...
Lehman, demanding that the district attorney be superseded by a special prosecutor of rackets. Impressed, Governor Lehman named four well-known lawyers, including Charles Evans Hughes Jr., asked that one of them take the job. Unanimously they turned it down, unanimously told the Governor that the man he wanted was one the grand jury wanted, young Thomas Edmund Dewey. Governor Lehman hesitated. Lawyer Dewey had made a brilliant crime-fighting record as Chief Assistant U. S. Attorney, capped when he sent notorious Irving ("Waxey Gordon") Wexler to prison for ten years on income tax charges. But he had since retired...
Slot machines originated in penny arcades and ended up in gangland. Chicago's boisterous Mills Brothers made a $10,000,000 business of their Mills Novelty Co. partly by making slot machines which became the instruments of a $150,000,000 racket (TIME, May 13. 1935). Since U. S. Courts began to take the fun out of this form of gambling, U. S. manufacturers have been busy taking the gambling out of this form of fun. In the last three years they have made 5? bagatelle a national craze, filled the land with glass enclosed, pin-studded playing fields...
...have a less carefree air and a more preoccupied look. But whether from Sargent or Radcliffe, any group of girls is bound to mean trouble for an usher. Girls may be quiet when they come in two's or three's, but a crowd of girls makes a greater racket than any group of male adolescents...
...futile gesture, for the bigtime numbers bankers simply shifted to other figures. Butter, egg and stock sales are used in combination for the game in Winston-Salem, N. C. Every important newspaper takes elaborate precautions to see that any figures likely to be used for the numbers racket are printed correctly, the composing room foreman sometimes making a last personal check...