Word: bunco
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Public Record, As a prosecutor, he swept up shoals of bootleggers, con men, grifters, oil stock swindlers, bunco artists; jailed the county sheriff for gambling graft; jailed the Alameda mayor, city manager, and councilmen for bribery and theft of public funds; became the recognized legislative spokesman for the state's 58 district attorneys. None of his convictions was ever reversed after appeal to higher courts. His most famous case: the 1936 dockside murder of the nonunion chief engineer of the freighter Point Lobos, for which three union officials and one fingerman were convicted. The trial was conducted amid cries...
Stephen Dutton was always considered a very fast man with a dollar - preferably someone else's dollar. But in his prime, in the dim, goldbrick, 0. Henry era of gentle grafters, patent-medicine fakers, conmen and bunco artists, Steve the Swindler was regarded as especially expert in talking himself into funds and out of trouble. He ranked with Grand Central Pete and Paper Collar Joe, who were tops in bilking the rubes; for a time Steve Dutton was partner of the old master, Perrin Sumner, who was known in the Gay '90s as The Great American Identifier...
...cities among metropolitan cities of the world. We have never had racketeers or gangsters here; we have not had a kidnaping for ransom since the turn of the century; sex crimes of violence are lower per capita of population than any city of comparable size in the U. S.; bunco-men and pickpockets fight shy of San Francisco; robberies and burglaries are constantly decreasing; in short, no less an authority than Director J. Edgar Hoover has described San Francisco as the "white spot of the nation," so far as crime is concerned...
...both Bulls & Bears and Jury Box is realism, which recurs in parlor sports at 30-year intervals. Monopoly, based on real-estate tradings, and G-men, invented by onetime G-Man Melvin Purvis, were the first non-escapist parlor sports since just after the turn of the Century when Bunco and Pit, based on Chicago's wheat trading, were highly fashionable. Bulls & Bears, played on a parcheesi-like board, concerns stock purchases, pools, dividends and taxes. The object is to acquire corners on as many stocks as possible, force other players into bankruptcy. Dice determine stock prices...
...Bonanza Creek in Canada's Yukon Territory, Skagway became the port of entry for the trek up over White Pass toward sudden wealth. Friends warned Soapy Alaska would be a tough proposition, but to Soapy it looked like his big chance. With his time-tested crew of bunco-steerers, con men and cappers he started a saloon in Skagway, set out to captivate that leaderless town. He did it, but it was hard going. The thugs and strong-arm men he could not control gave Skagway such a bad name that the law-&-order element grew restive. Finally, when...