Word: besting
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...clerk in a New York bookshop to volunteer political work for Robert Kennedy and Thomas Bradley, the Negro Los Angeles mayoral candidate. She had most recently been a welfare worker. Author and Artist Barnaby Conrad, a family friend, described her as "square in the best sense of the word," but others who knew her say that she had changed in the year since she took up with Frokowski...
...that prosecution is easy under the best of circumstances. The gangsters' well-paid legal corps takes full advantage of the Bill of Rights. The Mob's muscle often takes care of potential witnesses. It takes a brave citizen to call the police. Also, most of the evidence gathered by the FBI, until recently, was not admissible in court...
...money terms, the organization is the world's largest business. The best estimate of its revenue, a rough projection based on admittedly inexact information of federal agencies, is well over $30 billion a year. Even using a conservative figure, its annual profits are at least in the $7 billion-to-$10 billion range. Though he meant it as a boast, Meyer Lansky, the gang's leading financial wizard, was actually being overly modest when he chortled in 1966: "We're bigger than U.S. Steel." Measured in terms of profits, Cosa Nostra and affiliates are as big as U.S. Steel...
...LOAN-SHARKING OR USURY nets several billions?it is impossible to say how many?in revenue for the Mob. Dollar for dollar, usury is LCN's best investment; though the gross is lower than it is in gambling, profit is higher. Interest rates commonly run at 20% per week, or, in the Mob's words, "six for five"?borrow $5 on Monday and pay back $6 by Saturday noon, the normal deadline. Borrowers are frequently gamblers who have lost heavily or hope to make a big strike, but they also include factory workers, businessmen on the verge of bankruptcy...
Empires have been shaken and governments have fallen because of private indiscretion. Thwarted in love as well as politics, the bitterly frustrated young Crown Prince Rudolf, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, killed himself and his mistress at the resort of Mayerling in 1889. The royal family did its best to hush up the scandal, but rumors rocked the empire and speeded up the pace of its dissolution. Home rule seemed all but assured for Ireland until the chief advocate in Britain's Parliament, Charles Parnell, was haled into court as a corespondent in a divorce case. Because...