Word: racketeers
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Dates: during 1930-1930
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...Whence "Racket" Sirs...
Very fine and praiseworthy your insistence that ''racket" be kept a word undefiled by loose usage. But why not, while you were at it, tell the origin and specific applications of the word so that we can know how to use it properly...
...Racket" seems to have come originally from the vaudeville world, where it connoted the form of entertainment in which a performer specialized. "His racket is mammy songs." "She's got a good racket -clog-dancing and trained poodles." From this it entered general circulation to connote any method, especially an easy one, a hackneyed one, or a smart new one with an element of trickery, by which people got along in the world. Its later, criminal adaptation has two shades of meaning: 1) the whole general ''Racket" of preying on society by any and all illegal means...
Scouts of the dog racket work in wealthy neighborhoods, observing dogs and little boys. They encourage the boys to bring them stray dogs at first, paying small sums. They then offer larger sums for household pets. Sometimes racketeers pose as A. S. P. C. A. officials, snatch up dogs when they are taken out for an airing. Dogs caught in one State are often sent to another State to be sold. Purchasers asking for an expensive dog in unscrupulous shops will almost always get what they want. The pet shop owner will have a scout steal one to order...
...York. New York City's rackets and gunplay are easily in a class with Chicago's. But not until this month have Manhattan newspapers given local crime the publicity Chicago's press usually affords it. The New York Telegram, after a survey, reported that there had been 89 shootings in the city within one month. Aroused by this and other testimony, District Attorney Thomas C. T. Grain last week called a meeting of 50 such civic leaders as Owen D. Young, Seward Prosser, Thomas W. Lamont, John Davison Rockefeller Jr. Forty gentlemen attended, formed what newsmen likened...