Word: racket
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Irrepressible Instinct. Loeb's notions may be less radical than they seem. Already scores of countries have introduced some form of nationwide legalized gambling. New York and New Hampshire are trying to outdo the numbers racket and pick up extra revenue with their own lotteries. New Jersey is due to follow suit. Pennsylvania uses horse-race betting to help finance both private and public schools. In January, New York City will start a computerized off-track betting service that may branch into other sports as well. Last week the country's top oddsmaker, Jimmy ("The Greek") Snyder...
Menzel said that the recent drop in UFO sightings has come because news media have stopped giving them big play. "Everyone in the UFO racket-myself included-realizes that this is a bad time for UFO's," he said...
...season. He ran up debts, pawned his father's jewelry to pay some of them off, and had their home phone disconnected when hoods started calling him to demand the rest of their payment. He and a friend sold phony ads for a nonexistent labor newspaper until the racket got too hot to handle; then Elliott took odd jobs?as a rug-cleaner salesman, a theatrical-school teacher, night elevator man in a residential hotel. Around this time, things seemed to pick up. He got a summer job in Hit the Deck, which led to a chorus job in Irma...
...boys start off small, rigging prizefights and fixing horse races. Gradually they work their way up through the protection racket until they control the Marseille fish market, the Marseille meat market, most of the town's gambling and some of the town council. But Capella and Siffredi learn that their hard-earned infamy has made them obvious targets for a new generation of ambitious crooks-and for each other...
...Quackery Racket. Medical authorities generally are hostile. The Arthritis Foundation considers promotion of copper bracelets as an arthritis cure "part of the arthritis quackery racket that annually grosses upward of $400 million a year in the U.S." Los Angeles Orthopedic Expert Dr. Robert Kerlan is an outspoken opponent of the bracelet boom. "It's asinine, ridiculous and of no value whatsoever," he says, and warns that the bracelet may actually be harmful "in that it keeps a wearer from getting proper diagnosis." He admits only that "it might be a good thing for the dermatologists, though-all those wrists...