Word: riley
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...rise of Jackpot Riley reads like a W. R. Burnett novel. He saw Shanghai first in the '20s, a sailor off a U.S. Yangtze Patrol sloop, drinking in the dives along "Blood Alley." When he finished his hitch in the Navy he went back to the U.S., soon landed in the Oklahoma State penitentiary under the name of Johnny Becker, with a 25-year sentence for attempted highjacking. Two years later he escaped from jail, headed again for Shanghai...
What the take from the slot machines was can only be guessed, but upwards of 80% of the money that went into them never came out. Riley got most of it. It was enough for Riley to buy a chain of restaurants which he called the D.D.s. These were completely respectable, but the pretty Russian waitresses would go home with any customer who had spent enough money...
...Riley's big chance came when the Japanese took Shanghai in 1937. The New Order in East Asia has been the biggest bonanza for criminals that China has ever seen. With stringent wartime blue laws at home, every out-of-work prostitute, gambler and dope peddler in Japan headed for Occupied China, where their enterprises found Army protection.* Local talent, too, found the Japanese Army and the puppet Government amenable to bribes...
With the connivance of Chinese munici pal authorities, Riley went in for really big-time gambling, joined forces with an Austrian refugee named Joe Farren to open a big, expensive roulette room in Farren's nightclub on the edge of the French Concession. Shanghai had not had an open roulette game since 1927, and the taipans and their wives and ladies jostled puppet Government officials and their concubines in their eagerness to drop their money on Riley's tables...
...Werner Hinz), molest his wife, drive him into the Boer forces. In a concentration camp his wife and children are starved, whaled with rifle butts by the sadistic British. Dead prisoners lie in open ditches while bored guards cover them with quicklime. The camp commandant lives the life of Riley with a mistress and a puffy bulldog to whom he feeds juicy steaks. Meantime Lord Kitchener announces that the war shall proceed against women & children...