Word: hoodlum
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Rumor clung to him like filings to a magnet. Wise guys whispered knowingly that he had ordered the Beverly Hills murder of his old friend Bugsy Siegel, the shooting of Los Angeles Hoodlum Mickey Cohen and dozens of other cases of violence. In three months he had been charged with influencing politics in New York, Kansas City, Los Angeles and New Orleans. Crime commissions speculated feverishly that he owned gambling houses and nightclubs from Florida to California, controlled race wires across the nation, ran the baleful Unione Siciliana (i.e., the U.S. Mafia) and financed everything from narcotics smuggling to jewel...
...Chicago Hoodlum Roger Touhy, serving a 99-year term for the 1933 kidnaping of John ("Jake the Barber") Factor, won a $15,000 settlement in his $500,000 libel suit against 20th Century-Fox for its movie, Roger Touhy, Gangster. Roger charged that the film had maligned him grossly. He planned to use the $15,000 in his "fight for freedom," i.e., to beat the kidnaping rap, plus a concurrent 199-year sentence for his role in a 1942 jailbreak...
...Angeles, Crime Entrepreneur Mickey Cohen (TIME, Aug. 1) went a long way toward proving himself the first U.S. hoodlum with an uncontrollable gift of gab. Instead of preserving a sullen silence when it developed that the cops had been eavesdropping on him through microphones hidden in his house, Mickey submitted to interviews. To impress Newshen Florabel Muir he even let one of his retainers, a Johnny Stompanata, win a couple of hands of gin rummy. Astounded, Stompanata asked: "Why do you do that?" Said Mickey, airily: "Noblesse oblige!" Stompanata asked for a translation, but was cut off. "How," asked Mickey...
Singing Canary. Squint and Cockeye made a good pair. Together, they slugged and killed their way up until both were minor officers in the union. In 1947, in company with a third hoodlum named Danny Gentile, Squint and Cockeye murdered a waterfront hiring boss. The killers were careless and the victim lived long enough to identify them...
Bombs & Bombast. The campaign began just before the monsoon. Dhoti-clad Calcuttans left their steaming houses, clustered in the streets to drink lime squash, chew pan (made from the betel nut), and talk politics until tempers gave way and fists flew. Hoodlum gangs raced through the city, pasting posters, tearing down opposition signs, breaking up each other's soapbox meetings with shoes, brickbats, incendiary oil bombs, bursting bottles of nitric acid. A city ordinance banned loudspeakers, so electioneers shouted instead through megaphones, day & night...