Word: bioff
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...last week Columnist Westbrook Pegler, fresh from his investigations of California Ham & Eggery, visited the office of State's Attorney Thomas J. Courtney in Chicago. What he found in the records there made meat for two columns about meaty William ("Sweet Willie") Bioff, the boss of A. F. of L. labor in Hollywood studios and a potent figure in the U. S. entertainment industry. Sum of Columnist Pegler's findings was that in 1922 Willie Bioff was convicted of pandering, got a six-month jail sentence and $300 fine, lost an appeal, served only eight days...
...turning from liquor to labor rackets. Mild, mannerly Mr. Browne (no gangster) was a labor careerist who had just been elected president of A. F. of L.'s union for theatre no-collar-men: the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employes. His assistant and bodyguard was one William Bioff, whose record in Chicago included numerous arrests, one conviction for pandering, two efforts to muscle in on Chicago unions, several published references to him as a minor South Side gunman...
Messrs. Browne & Bioff had not long been tops in I. A. T. S. E. before it began to expand. President of a motion picture projectionists' union was a Chicago racketeer named Tommy Maloy. President Maloy was murdered in 1935. Mr. Browne took over the union. One Clyde Osterberg tried to organize a rival union of movie operators. He was murdered. Louis ("Two Gun") Alterie was doing well at organizing theatre janitors when he, too, was murdered. Mr. Browne inherited this union...
George Browne's Willie Bioff appeared in Hollywood, and soon they were mighty figures in cinema. In 1936, Mr. Browne in Manhattan worked out a deal with the Hays office whereby I. A. T. S. E. won a closed-shop bargaining contract for its Hollywood technicians, absorbed and squelched other unions and within 18 months acquired 12,000 members. Last year Willie Bioff admitted (to a grand jury) that after this bargain was struck, he received $100,000 as a loan from a prominent producer.* Willie Bioff, receiving a year's salary and effusive thanks from Mr. Browne...
...Angeles Superior Court last May, a union counsel asked Bioff if the producer was Joe Schenck. "I don't remember," Bioff said...