Word: racketeer
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...have begun to hear rumors of an ugly thing new to Cuernavaca-blackmail. Stories of rich foreigners being framed on phony charges of misconduct and blackmailed for large sums soon spread to the capital. 40 miles away. Last week federal agents were in town, eagerly hunting victims of the racket...
...World in the Evening starts with a racket at a drunken Hollywood party; the sound comes from the hero's fists hammering on the roof of a children's doll house, inside which his wife is committing adultery with a movie actor. The book ends in a New York bar with the hero downing his fifth Martini and saying to his now exwife: "Do you know something . . . I really do forgive myself, from the bottom of my heart...
...incomplete wire service report on Scott Field, Baldwin discovered that several of the contractors had the same reason for refusing to build in the St. Louis area: "We just can't afford the payoff." The payoff was to corrupt A.F.L. building-trades union bosses and business agents. The racketeers, often in league with local subcontractors, concentrated on jobs where there was a fixed completion date, held them up with featherbedding, slowdowns and jurisdictional disputes until the completion deadline got close. Then they made themselves "available" to "fix things up" for the builder-at a price. Frightened contractors told Baldwin...
...stink began to rise three months ago when a Korean confidence man named Masutomi Ito was arrested for bilking thousands of small investors of some $3,000,000 in an investment-trust racket. Swindler Ito spent part of his plunder on such delicacies as broiled eels in Tokyo and an expensive mistress in Kyoto. He admitted that he had continued to solicit funds even after his investment company had gone bankrupt, blandly told police: "If this constitutes fraud, I'm afraid there's nothing I can do about...
Instead of using a behind-the-scenes voice for narration, the producers of Operation Ivy employed Television Actor Reed Hadley, star of Public Defender and Racket Squad, to saunter through the picture in khaki uniform, lighting his pipe, leaning negligently against bulkheads, and standing against the tropic sky. Actor Hadley (who was whisked secretly to the Pacific in 1952 and who was not allowed to let even his wife know where he had been until last week) could hardly be blamed for doing his conscientious best in the role assigned him. But a great deal of his job was devoted...