Word: extorters
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...drummer in New York City, he switched from Roman Catholicism to the Nation of Islam and rose to a trusted position before he broke with the Black Muslims in 1958. In the mid-1960s he formed his own group, the Hanafi. In 1968, he was arrested for trying to extort money from a bank, but charges were dismissed after he was found to be mentally disturbed. In 1972 he attacked the Black Muslims in an open letter, an act that is thought to have led to the execution of his family...
Goon Squad. Perhaps the best that one can expect is to be picked up by the Public Safety Unit (P.S.U.), which is charged with tracking down ordinary criminals. This strong-arm squad usually drags the victim off to Makindye prison and beats him blue around the genitals, then extorts money or property before letting him go. The power of the paramilitary agents is theoretically limited, but Amin pays little attention to their behavior, so they are free to beat, extort and even kill...
...late '30s, Roselli became the Chicago Mob's man in Hollywood and was subsequently jailed for three years for plotting, with seven others, to extort $1 million from movie companies. The muscle: threatening to use a Mafia-controlled union of stagehands to close down production unless the studios paid up. Even so, the dapper, debonair Roselli remained a luminary of sorts in Hollywood. He married a starlet, got a piece of two nightclubs, and helped produce two crime films in the late 1940s, Canyon City and He Walked by Night. Says a producer who knew...
...eliminated any semblance of freedom in Uganda. Parliament was abolished (he rules by decree and was recently named President for Life), the judiciary and civil service were completely purged, and the military was given extraordinary powers of arrest and summary execution. Soldiers frequently loot shops, commandeer cars and extort money from civilians...
Under a searing African sun last July, Eritrean rebels burst into a U.S. naval radio station near Asmara, Ethiopia, and seized Steven Campbell, 27, a civilian technician, and another American, James Harrell, 41. The kidnapers' apparent motives: extort ransom from the U.S. and end American aid to Ethiopia. They dragged both men across 100 miles of desert in twelve days to a tent outpost. There the guerrillas held them virtually incommunicado on a diet of rice and canned vegetables...