Word: racketeer
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...from paddle tennis. The PAL instructor that year was an unemployed musician named Buddy Walker, and Buddy was impressed with the gangly youngster's ferocious skill. He went to a friend named Van Houton (a tennis buff who liked to boast that he was the only self-employed racket stringer in Harlem), bought Althea a pair of secondhand rackets, and put her to work practicing against the wall of a handball court. A few weeks later he took her uptown to some public courts, and her performance was phenomenal. The other players quit their games to watch...
...When Sydney first came to me," says Althea, "I thought, this guy can't teach me anything." But, for one thing, he changed her grip from the Continental, which allows a player to make forehand and backhand shots without rotating the racket, to the Eastern grip, which requires a slight rotation of the racket but allows a smoother, more powerful swing. Above all, he gave her confidence. "I'm a Virgo," says Althea, who takes her astrology seriously. "Sydney's an Aquarius, a guy of profound perception...
Click. Click. Click. Off North Carolina, Worthington was manning an echo-sounding receiver on a regular project when he heard a loud hammering. "Cut out the racket," he yelled. "I can't hear a damn thing." After everyone on board lad indignantly denied hammering, a herd of six sperm whales slowly broke water near...
Looking like something out of an old Warner Bros. gangster film, hulking Ted Rij, Racketeer Johnny Dio's ex-bodyguard, slurred through the Fifth more than 35 times: "Standin' on my Con'stutional right, I 'cline to answer on grounds o' 'crimination." Woebegone, egg-bald Sam Zakman provided a sharply etched picture of a disillusioned Communist and displaced labor-racket boy. Zakman also provided the rare commodity of humor in describing Union Organizer Benny ("The Bug") Ross: "There's a fellow who did everything wrong, but he organized better than all of them...
...precocious teen-age pupil of Murder Inc.'s Louis ("Lepke") Buchalter, urbane, well-tailored Iceberg Johnny Dio, 43 (real name: Dioguardi), was belatedly packed off for a three-year stretch at Sing Sing by Racket Buster Tom Dewey in 1937. The charge: extorting protection money from garment district truckers and cloak-and-suiters. Long out of stir and prospering by 1950, Dio became a smoother thug, refined his old muscle technique to set up "paper locals" (no rights, few members), shook down businessmen with threats of "labor violence" and picketing. So powerful grew "Mr. Dee" that two months...