Word: dio
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...this dragnet procedure we have caught an assortment of man-eating sharks." It was indeed as forbidding a catch of fish as John McClellan's Senate labor rackets investigating committee has yet snared. One by one last week's school of hoods-including notorious Extortionist John (Johnny Dio) Dioguardi-appeared before the committee in the Senate caucus room and rasped out their Fifth Amendment pleas. But the evidence against them was there nonetheless. It added up to another chapter of the story of how mobsters took over segments of the nation's labor movement in the same...
...Driver's Seat. Zakman got his charter to "organize the unorganized" from the United Automobile Workers, A.F.L. (no kin to Walter Reuther's U.A.W.-C.I.O.), later known as the Allied Industrial Workers. Who put up the money for office rent and expenses? Dio. Who became the local's business manager? Dio. Zakman began to feel put upon: Racketeer Dio was padding the local's payroll with his own boys, among them an organizer named Benny ("The Bug") Ross...
...them ... He would just walk into a shop and pull the switch and say, 'Everybody out on strike.' He didn't believe in elections. He was a hard worker." Predictably, the organization of cab drivers failed, Zakman was eased out of the union, and Johnny Dio finished up in the driver's seat, using the union for his own devices...
This week's star: Johnny Dio...
Looking like something out of an old Warner Bros. gangster film, hulking Ted Rij, Racketeer Johnny Dio's ex-bodyguard, slurred through the Fifth more than 35 times: "Standin' on my Con'stutional right, I 'cline to answer on grounds o' 'crimination." Woebegone, egg-bald Sam Zakman provided a sharply etched picture of a disillusioned Communist and displaced labor-racket boy. Zakman also provided the rare commodity of humor in describing Union Organizer Benny ("The Bug") Ross: "There's a fellow who did everything wrong, but he organized better than all of them...