Word: petrillos
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...believes "they can steal without getting put in jail" and habitually greets them with the cry of "Burglar!" He is against John L. Lewis, amateurs of all kinds, and the custom of eating lunch. He is convinced that the legislative process was conceived for only one purpose-grilling Petrillo like a frankfurter. When annoyed by an opponent, he screams: "Tell him he's nuts-he oughta run for Congress." He trusts only one man with power-Petrillo...
...with a comparatively relaxed air-something like a lion-tamer lobbing house cats into the chandelier of a Sunday morning. His real enemies are the phonograph record and its cousins, the motion picture sound track and the radio station turntable. He is mortally afraid that without James Caesar Petrillo, all the music in the U.S. would eventually be produced by one non-union musician playing a musical comb into a microphone...
Last week, in his efforts to stave off this eventuality, Petrillo had tangled himself up in the works of the canned-music business with the bellicose ingenuity of an octopus in a pea thresher...
...citizens considered him a putty-nosed Canute trying to hold back the tide of progress. The nation was full of editorial writers who swore they could see foam dribbling down his jowls and wanted him clapped forthwith into a strait jacket. There was a certain irony in this. Petrillo's carnivorous methods of "getting something for the boys" made him the natural foe of the canned-music business, but he was also part and product of it, as much a child of Edison and Marconi as the electric tone arm and the portable radio...
...made an alliance with George Browne, the notorious pandering boss of the stagehands' union-but kept the alliance only as long as it pleased him. "Browne used to be a good guy," says Petrillo, "but when he got screwy and started mixing himself up in trouble I washed my hands...