Word: loan-shark
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...Mafia Consigliere Frank ("Bomp") Bompensiero, 71. Shortly before 8 p.m. on Feb. 10, Bomp walked from his San Diego home to a nearby public telephone booth, which he used as an office in order to avoid wiretaps. In his pocket was a notebook containing coded balance sheets of loan-shark usury payments and lists of coded phone numbers. The numbers turned out to be those of other public telephones scattered through California and Nevada. The phones constitute a West Coast Mafia hot-line system...
...officer in the Piranha Co. [a Boston loan-shark operation]. The name Piranha Co. was taken from the fish of that name, which is a maneater. We had a live one in a fishbowl in the place. We wanted to be known as a tough outfit: if anybody was slow in paying, we told him we'd stick his hand in the fishbowl. What do you think happened? The fish bit. We used to feed the thing a dozen live goldfish...
...bodyguard and chauffeur, Valachi survived shifts in power as tricky as ups and downs under the Borgias. He and a partner made $2,500 a week from the slot-machine business. Valachi also ran a numbers racket, a "classy horse room" in White Plains, N.Y., and a loan-shark operation. He bought his own race horses. During World War II, Valachi worked the gasoline black market, earning about $200,000 in three years from finagling with ration stamps. Even at that, he says, "I wasn't so big." After the war, he muscled into jukeboxes but also went respectable...
Anthony Carfano. alias "Little Augie" Pisano, 61, started out as a two-bit bootlegger in the slums of his native Brooklyn, but he came up fast. By 1930 he had become Al Capone's East Coast viceroy, specialized in laundry, loan-shark and slot-machine rackets, as well as rumrunning. He knew every hood worth knowing, was also friendly with the late Mayor Jimmy Walker (in Prohibition days, Pisano saw to it that the Tammany Hall wigwams were plentifully supplied with needled beer and hijacked hooch). But there were nasty rumors that Augie was a finger...
Each goes off to his respective misery: Miya becomes the chattel of her husband and his mistress, and Kan-ichi a flunkey for "the notorious female loan-shark Akagashi." They are reunited only after Kan-ichi loses his money and Miya attempts suicide. The world, in this case, is well lost...