Word: costelloism
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Government. It would scotch corruption not only in New York but elsewhere. He railed at Governor Tom Dewey for not investigating Mayor Bill O'Dwyer's administration. He trotted down to City Hall with ten questions for O'Dwyer. Their substance: Is Slot Machine Tycoon Frankie Costello the real boss of New York City...
Bill O'Dwyer contemptuously snorted "crackpot." Ryan was undismayed. He chirped back: "A question a day might keep Costello away." The next morning, resplendent in pearl-grey Homburg, Ryan was back at City Hall. This time he nailed to the front door of the Hall photostats of some old (and generally discredited) grand jury charges that O'Dwyer had been grossly lax as district attorney of Brooklyn. Ryan happily held every pose the photographers yelled for, withdrew the nail, and went away...
...hands and went to work. Before they were even half through they had made Clen Ryan look bad. In the dead of night Bill O'Dwyer summoned newsmen to City Hall, himself broke the wildest wiretapping story to hit the town since Justice Aurelio was overheard thanking Frankie Costello for his nomination (TIME...
Below the border in Eire, Prime Minister John A. Costello took up his coreligionists' cause with more will than wit. High-handed Costello played straight into Sir Basil's hands by calling together a committee which ordered collection boxes set up in front of every church, Catholic or Protestant, in Eire. The money was to be sent up North to help the Republicans...
Protestant churchmen were outraged. When police refused to take the boxes from his church, Canon Walter Simpson of St. Bartholomew's cried: "The law was invoked to compel me to submit to treatment which was an offense to my conscience as a citizen and a Christian priest." Costello's boxes gleaned about ?51,000, but the collection so outraged the Orangemen that they poured out to the polls as never before. Dublin's Protestant Irish Times crowed that Costello's collection was worth 60,000 votes for the Unionists in the resentful North...