Word: portlands
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Sports Page. Taking the offensive, District Attorney Langley called a grand jury investigation into Portland rackets. The first to be served with subpoenas were Reporters Turner and Lambert and the Oregonian's Editor Herbert Lundy. Before they could be called, Oregon Governor Elmo Smith summarily took the investigation out of Langley's hands and put Attorney General Robert Thornton and the state police in charge...
SecurityMeasures.Gangling,sharp-nosed Reporter Wally Turner, 35, and his partner, thick-spectacled Bill Lambert, 36, are such familiar prowlers along Portland's corrupt trails that the underworld knows them as "Fishface and Bugeyes." The latest trail took them over thousands of feet of magnetic tape-70 hours of eavesdropped conversation-supplied by Underworld Kingpin James ("Big Jim") Elkins, an ex-convict who bankrolls Portland gambling and after-hours drinking joints...
...reporting team labored for three months transcribing the recordings, going to San Francisco and Seattle to check the information in the tapes. As security measures in Portland, they kept the recordings in a bank vault, worked in hotel rooms that they frequently changed, rode in rented cars that they switched almost daily...
...Moral Code." When the Seattle plotters approached Racketeer Elkins to join them, said the paper's account, the Portland underworldling fell in with the scheme to organize gambling and bootlegging but balked at prostitution ("It's against my moral code"). Fearing that they planned to freeze him out, Elkins took the precaution of "bugging" the Portland apartment of the Seattle emissaries with a microphone hooked to a tape recorder. On the playback he heard them plotting "to get rid of me." Elkins told the Seattle boys about his tapes and threatened to use the recordings to expose...
...first thing you know, them guys will be up there wanting 10 or 15 cents an hour, and the Oregonian can't afford it." Day after day, naming names and quoting conversations, the Turner-Lambert series produced fresh sensations. The paper charged that two officials in Portland, Multnomah County District Attorney William M. Langley and Sheriff Terry Schrunk, were mixed up with the racketeers who were plotting to "open the town." Among other accusations, the Oregonian reported that the plotters had threatened Portland Mayor Fred Peterson with political reprisals by the Teamsters...