Word: racket
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Coast executioner. When the Gambino and Chicago mobsters decided in 1975 to move into the West, they tapped Fratianno as their point man. With their blessing, he recruited Rizzitello, now 50, a handsome stickup artist who migrated to Los Angeles in the early 1960s because he wanted an easy racket and the respect that he had never got from the hoodlums back home. Both were a long time coming, but now he is rising quickly in influence and power. Says a West Coast lawman: "Rizzitello sounds like he is the boss and running things...
...Tech's promises for the future, far from being welcomed as harbingers of Utopia, now seem too often to be threats. Fears that genetic tinkering might produce a Doomsday Bug, for example, bother many Americans, along with dread that the SST's sonic booms may add horrid racket to the hazards (auto fumes, fluorocarbons, strontium 90) that already burden...
...signal, according to some radio operators who have heard it ratcheting over their headsets, sounds like a buzz saw. Others have compared the racket with the sound of an electric mixer or the continuous firing of machine guns. Since July, short-wave radio operators in Europe, the U.S. and elsewhere have been tormented by a mysterious radio beam that Western intelligence sources say emanates from what is probably the world's most powerful transmitter: a 2 million-watt Soviet military radar station near Kiev...
...student who wonders every day why in hell I'm in this racket, I must tell you that joy is a very bad choice. Try despair...
Legal gambling seems to have had little impact on the multimillion-dollar illegal numbers racket, even though New Jersey, Maryland, Massachusetts and Rhode Island have introduced their own numbers games to compete with the illegals. The most successful of these, run by Maryland, has closely patterned its game after the illicit version. Players choose a three-digit number and can bet on it daily in multiples of 500; the payoff is 500 to 1 in cash, up to $600. It is a more honest game than the numbers rackets. Winners are always paid, which is not always the case...