Word: racketeers
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Riggs played deep on Kramer's serve, Big Jake put so much angle and spin on the ball that his opponent landed up in the bleachers trying to get his racket on it. If Riggs played in close, Big Jake blasted it straight down the middle. Usually, Kramer won his service in jig time, and then began a long drawn-out battle to crack his opponent's serve. In Memphis last week, a woman spectator began berating Riggs for his ineptness. He waddled toward her with his familiar sailor's roll, racket outstretched handle first...
...Detroit's public enemy No.1-resident boss of the city's dope smugglers, policy operators, syndicate thieves (specializing in furs and jewelry) and bookmaking ring. He wasn't the kind of man who could do it all on his own: he was, the police were convinced, Racket King Frank Costello's man-in-charge in Detroit. The police tapped Tamer's telephone wires and settled back expectantly...
...After a quick hop to Egypt and a climb up a precipitous Red Sea cliff, he discovers what he is looking for, a freshly harvested poppy field disguised as a rose plantation. And from there he follows the raw opium across the Atlantic, finally closing in on the whole racket in a tense battle outside New York harbor...
Among Manhattan sports editors, the Hearstian Mirror's mustached Dan Parker is the heftiest (260 Ibs.), the most cynical about fight promoters (he keeps needling their racket), and on good days, the poor man's Eustace Tilley.* Dan Parker had some fun with the Bronx tongue in his Dialectician's Dictionary. Samples...
...about making a dollar go far. On one of their first jobs-redesigning Los Angeles' Clifton's Cafeteria in 1933-they took out their fees in meals. When their plans won first place in a competition for the Pan-Pacific Auditorium, Wurdeman, a good man with a racket, spent his share of the fee to join the Westside Tennis Club-and incidentally to get some business from its Hollywood members. Soon Wurdeman & Becket were building actors' homes by the dozen. From then on, as Wurdeman says: "The graft has gone up steadily...