Word: bergen
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...larger cities are traditionally Democratic, and the state has been Republican for ten years, but politicos of both parties have been remarkably astigmatic toward venality great & small. When New York's Mayor Fiorello La Guardia threw "punks and gamblers" out of town, they migrated, almost as one. to Bergen County, N.J., and for almost ten years no politico seemed to know that they were there...
Disturbed Currents. Horse rooms and sawdust-joint crap games grew almost as common as gas stations. The pleasant back country blossomed with ornate gambling hells, which boasted thick rugs, fine food and limousine service to Manhattan. Hundreds of Bergen County citizens rented their phones to bookies at $50 a week, opened their houses to furtive characters known as "sitters," who crouched near the receiver eight hours a day taking bets from the Big City across the Hudson. But after the Kefauver committee blabbed the tale to the world on television, New Jersey's Republican Attorney General Theodore Parsons went...
Incautiously, perhaps, he did more-sent a fire-breathing young special prosecutor named Nelson F. Stamler into Bergen County with orders to wipe it clean as a peeper's telescope on a summer evening. Last week-31 months later-this abnormal development was still having an intensely disturbing effect on the turgid currents of Jersey politics...
Spectacular Complaint. Stamler carried out his orders with tactless vigor. He slammed 100 gamblers, including Big Shots Frank Erickson and Joe Adonis, into jail, and got indictments against a score of others, including three highly placed cops and a former Bergen County prosecutor. Amidst this furor, Bergen Gangster Willie Moretti was mysteriously killed (at the orders, according to Stamler's hints, of politicians who were afraid he would talk). But Willie, according to testimony, did not die before making one spectacular complaint: he had given $286,000 to a smalltime statehouse aide named Harold John Adonis...
Onetime Bigtime Gambler Frank Erickson, the bookies' bookie, released after serving 16 months for making book in Manhattan, went across the river and into New Jersey state prison to start a 12-to 14-month sentence for masterminding Bergen County gambling...