Word: conning
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Roughed Up. They began when a Negro woman who was arrested for trying to steal a pint of gin charged that she had been roughed up by Dixmoor Liquor Store Owner Michael ("Big Mike") LaPota, 52, a 265-lb. ex-con. Soon the story spread through Dixmoor and into the neighboring town of Harvey. A crowd of Negroes gathered in a parking lot across the street from LaPota's shop, chanting to the accompaniment of bongos, "Big Mike must go!" For hours, Negro rabble-rousers harangued the mob with inflammatory speeches. Someone threw a rock through the closed liquor...
Harlem has seceded and declared itself a nation. Barricades made of abandoned autos, Fifth Avenue buses and Con Edison signs ("Dig We Must") have been erected on its borders. Frontier guards have been posted on the subway lines and the New York Central and New Haven railroads, and tolls are collected as the trains pass through Harlem. The "numbers" have been nationalized. Harlem's Congressman Lance Huggins, the first Prime Minister, announces a policy of no-surrender: "We have surrendered absolutely to our fate which is freedom. We had this secret space in us and now we have located...
These nutritional con-men, Stare said, usually say that our foods are "Over-processed, devitalized and poisoned"; they promise quick and sure results; and they usually have something to sell...
...opening sequence that roughly sets the tone, two hoods, contracted by Con Man Ronald Reagan, show a fine flair for menace as they trail Cassavetes to a school for the blind, where they pummel a winsome blind receptionist. In another scene, they threaten to parboil a man sweating off pounds in a steam cabinet, thus warming up for the moment when they thrust leggy Angie Dickinson headfirst out the window of a skyscraper hotel room, trying to make her tell what happened to the $1,000,000 swag from a mail robbery...
...anti-hero tends to overlook this fascinating half-truth, which is the durable paradox at the core of Oedipus Rex and Othello. But Ken Kesey used it well in his short, cruelly focused first novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. McMurphy, laughing con man and indestructible alley fighter, cons his way into an insane asylum to escape the drudgery of a prison farm. His battle is with Big Nurse, the white-starched emasculator who bulls his ward, and he beats her every round except the inevitable last one. And, capering defiantly toward the lobotomist's knife...