Word: costelloe
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...making love to his wife three and four times a night was jailed for vagrancy because, as a social worker explained, "the magistrate couldn't think of anything else, and he couldn't leave him there with that poor girl." In Manhattan two weeks ago, Gambler Frank Costello was arrested for vagrancy while dining in a theater-district restaurant, Dinty Moore's. Costello's lawyer challenged the charge, and a judge quickly dismissed it after the arresting officer admitted that he had not heard anyone offer 73-year-old Costello a job and Costello refuse...
...lunch with his friends any more-not if the place is a Broadway chophouse, the friends are eminent Manhattan bookies, and the guy happens to be onetime Rackets King Frank Costello, 73. Poor Uncle Frank. (That's what the doorman at his Central Park co-op calls him.) The feds cut in at the gefilte fish, hauled the bookies down to the courthouse for failure to buy their $50 gambling stamps, brought Costello along on a vagrancy charge, being, as the law says, "without visible means of support." Fortunately, his attorney explained that he was "retired," and even...
...Supreme Court disagreed. It held that the Government mistakenly applied the law retroactively to cover crimes committed while Costello was still a citizen. The "relation-back" concept, as Justice Potter Stewart called it in his majority opinion, was "a legal fiction, at best." If it applied in Costello's case, said Stewart, it could also apply to someone whose original naturalization "was not fraudulent, but simply legally invalid upon some technical ground...
...Court's determination to deal strictly with the law, not with personalities, surprised Costello, who had worried for years that his reputation as the ex-prime minister of the underworld would weaken his appeal. "If my name was John Jones I would be a 1-to-40 favorite," he said. But the Court was not concerned with gamblers' odds; characteristically, it simply treated Costello as if he were indeed John Jones...
...Costello heard the news from his attorney, Edward Bennett Williams, whom he had anxiously telephoned from Manhattan every Monday morning for months on Supreme Court decision day. "I don't know what I'm going to do," said Costello later. "I feel naked without a lawyer...