Word: mobsters
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After a month of underground parasitic life, the witchweed makes a partial reform, like a successful mobster who buys a legitimate business and joins the church. It sends a shoot above the ground, unfolds green leaves in the sunlight, and manufactures its food by photosynthesis like any respectable plant, while still getting its water and minerals from the host's roots. Soon its little red flowers bloom and its myriad dustlike seeds poison the soil around...
...extort his spending money by tipping over pushcarts until harried street peddlers paid him to lay off. Payoffs got bigger later on, but essentially Johnny Dio remained a pushcart upsetter. Many a New York City 'trucking firm decided that it would be cheaper to slip a Dio mobster a few grand than to get stink bombs hurled into trucks or emery powder sneaked into motor oil. In recent years, armed with "paper local" labor-union charters obtained with the friendly conspiracy of Teamster Big Wheel Jimmy Hoffa, Dio collected wads of cash from employers in return for promising freedom...
When he showed his baggy-eyed cine-mobster's face on TV (TIME, Aug. 19) as a 140-time Fifth Amendment pleader before the Senate labor rackets investigating committee, arrogant, carefully tailored Johnny Dio, 43, seemed to have made crime pay pretty well: society had not managed to pin a hard rap on him since he served three years in Sing Sing for extortion back in 1937-40. Last week the law pushed over Johnny Dio's well-stocked applecart. In Manhattan, a General Sessions Court judge sentenced Dio and two of his henchmen, Max Chester and Samuel...
...Tony Ducks snarled out advice to his hoodlums. Item: he ordered one of them to get Jimmy Hoffa, or Hoffa's St. Louis henchman, Harold Gibbons, to settle one of the many New York Teamster problems. The committee heard enough to conclude that Tony Ducks, as well as Mobster Johnny Dio, helped rig the key Teamster election in Joint Council 16, and that he even planned to offer beleaguered President Martin Lacey $10,000 a year to move over and leave the spot for Hoffa's man, Johnny O'Rourke...
...idol. Older Brother Jack, member of the committee, made a winning supporting character. "Just Plain Bill" was Committee Boss John McClellan, who scowled formidably behind his plain-as-rain, legalistic rumblings. Before them paraded a motley collection of sullen ex-Communists, pudgy labor pariahs and Vitalis-smooth lawyers. Unlike Mobster Frank ("Hands") Costello, this year's gallery was relentlessly exposed to the viewing public under an unprecedented ruling by Senator McClellan denying "uncooperative" witnesses the privilege of remaining off camera...