Word: old
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Last week, greying, hoarse-voiced, 58-year-old Frank Costello was fast becoming a figure of U.S. legend. Millions of newspaper readers considered him a kind of master criminal, shadowy as a ghost and cunning as Satan, who ruled a vast, mysterious and malevolent underworld and laughed lazily...
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...
...Old court records describe the dark little drama-how the defendant ran from two suspicious policemen and threw his pistol into a lot, how he was caught, dragged back, and how the weapon was found. They tell of his pleas for mercy, made at first in Italian through a court interpreter, and finally in English, and they repeat the words of a forgotten judge...
After that just about everyone forgot Alfalfa Bill. He wandered between Tishomingo and Oklahoma City-a skinny, bent figure almost lost in a bundle of mufflers and disheveled coats, a cigar stub still sticking out from under a now straggly old mustache. He spent his time writing long and scholarly books on politics, history, and economics, and peddling them to his friends...
...Rifles Ride Again. If impoverished Bill Murray remembered the $4,000, he never mentioned it publicly. But recently some of his old enemies and admirers did. Irvin Hurst, ex-reporter on the Oklahoma City Times, which had fought Alfalfa Bill bitterly when he was governor, got together with some of the capital's citizens. The Squirrel Rifles was mobilized again. It was a joke, but once again a joke with a point. Commissions in the brigade were offered for a price: $10 for colonelcy, $5 for a majority. Over $1,000 had been collected by this week...