Word: racketeer
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...five other employes of an emergency hospital were suspended for tipping off attorneys about accidents. In New York City, after insurance companies paid $9,449,916 in automobile injury claims in 1935, an Accident Fraud Bureau was set up under Assistant District Attorney Bernard Botein. He found two widespread rackets: 1) "floppers," who fall in the street, claim to have been hit by a passing car; 2) rings, like the Hurwitz gang, which stage accidents in which driver, victim, lawyer and doctor share the boodle. New York now has the fake automobile accident racket so well in hand that last...
Chicago's ambulance-chasers not only swindle insurance companies and corporations, but also the accident victims. To the familiar varieties of the racket they added many a new angle. Sample case history: John Doe, hit by a taxi, was hospitalized. At once a hospital attendant earned $10 by telephoning the racketeers. In a few minutes their representative appeared. Denied admittance, he proved good faith by paying the patient's bill in advance. He soon got Doe to sign a contract hiring his employer and agreeing to pay him 50% of the money won from a damage suit against...
...prior a numbers runner was murdered in Washington, and a Harlem numbers collector, who was a WPA worker on the side, was shot to death by another WPA worker for welching on a 6? bet which hit. This was a fairly routine budget of blood for the biggest, richest racket in the U. S. today...
Thoroughly incensed at this climax of a long series of complaints, Police Commissioner Lewis Joseph Valentine declared war on the car-watching racket, sent 25 rookies in plain clothes into Hell's Kitchen with orders to arrest adult car-watchers, take urchins to the Juvenile Aid Bureau...
...that there was no law specifically covering car-watchers. that soft-hearted judges usually let them off in court when they pleaded that they were "only trying to make an honest living." The Board of Aldermen at once took the logical step for cities blighted by the car-watching racket, by drafting amendments to the Traffic Code and City Charter forbidding it. Before they were passed, to City Magistrate Anthony F. Burke was brought 18-year-old Negro John Preston who admitted soliciting to watch cars, pleaded that no one had to accept his services. "That...