Word: ganges
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...rainy evening in 1945, she and her street gang moved into a deserted club on the Left Bank. When the club reopened several months later as Cabaret le Tabou, the new owner encouraged Greco and her band to continue to make it their headquarters. "The proprietor saw in us a sign of the era," says Singer Greco. So did some of Tabou's guests. To Le Tabou came the existentialists and their friends-Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Christian Berard, Albert Camus and Jean Cocteau. They dubbed Greco and her band "Les Rats des Caves," fed and clothed them. Cocteau...
...with wet sponges, used to hang around the race tracks, erasing the chalked odds on the bookie's tote boards if they failed to pay protection money. After holding onto their franchise in the face of attacks by some of the toughest tearaways in The Smoke, the Sabini gang at last gave way to the Black Brothers, who in turn were muscled out by Jack Spot. Born of Polish-Jewish parents in a Whitechapel tenement in 1912, Jack Spot (né Comer) was a shrewd operator with a taste for custom-made silk shirts, big black cigars...
...newspapers were whooping it up, but the fact is that Scotland Yard has for more than a year been concerned by a London gang war that centers around a shakedown racket involving race-track bookies...
...worked him over. At week's end, fingered by Falco, Jack Spot was in jail on charges of "causing grievous bodily harm," and Scotland Yard breathed slightly easier. "If we can just get Spot sent up for a couple of years," said one official. If there must be gang wars at all, in the British view, monopolies are ever so much better...
...Neanderthal 18-year-old, around whom the family and its impending tragedy pivot. A stint in his father's boots as the family's wartime disciplinarian, plus the lure of easy money, has turned Hank into a small-time mobster. He wields a mean cosh in a gang that includes sister Katie and two of his brothers. On one night's prowl he kills an old caretaker. From that moment on, the life of the bunker family disintegrates with melodramatic velocity...