Word: hoodlum
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Joseph Gesualdo was angry. A veteran hoodlum facing murder and robbery charges resulting from a holdup in Long Beach, Calif., he had decided to dispense with a lawyer and conduct his own defense. After losing one ruling after another on the admissibility of evidence, Gesualdo gave up in disgust and announced he was resting his case. "What do you want to do with the remainder of your exhibits?" inquired the judge. Gesualdo shot back: "Give them to the Salvation Army...
...Given the chance to tell all about himself, he elects to tell almost nothing. "I'm constantly play-acting," he says with unusual self-consciousness during an interview with Ivy Compton-Burnett. "Here, with you, I begin to talk like you. When I'm with a Chicago hoodlum, I talk like him. I'm a chameleon." This free-floating identity comes with the territory that Terkel long ago carved out for himself. Through sheer unobtrusiveness, he has become a man after Henry James' dictum: one on whom nothing is lost...
Goldwater aside, there is no question that crime can be traced to the highest levels in the state. Bolles' killer, a small-time hoodlum named John Adamson, turned state's evidence to avoid first-degree murder charges. He implicated a land developer and a plumber in the plot and said that the man who ordered the murder was Kemper Marley, 70, a cattle and liquor baron who looks as if he just stepped out of the pages of Zane Grey. Crusty and brusque, Marley has a reputation for getting what he wants any way he wants...
...care for our own elders, why should a hoodlum? If psychiatrists and advice columnists refer to old parents as a plague to keep at a distance and call men who love their mothers sick, how can we persuade the young to respect them...
Goodbye Embrace. Seven days after the kidnaping came women's lib: Graziella turned up unharmed, even though a $1.5 million ransom demand had not been met. That night, acting on a telephone tip, police found the body of a tortured hoodlum, his face burned and battered beyond recognition, his death caused by strangulation. The next day a Monreale jeweler was murdered in his shop-only five minutes after Giuseppe Quartuccio had been seen giving him the Mafia's classic goodbye kiss on each cheek. Asked about the ominous embrace, Quartuccio said sadly, "My friend? He had the courage...