Word: racketeered
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Lisbon (Republic) boasts one of the year's most sadistic openings: Super-Criminal Claude Rains begins his morning by scattering crumbs on his windowsill, then brains one of the feeding songbirds with a tennis racket and hands it to his cat for breakfast. Besides birds and cats, Claude's posh villa is equipped with an English butler, an Iberian cutthroat (Francis Lederer), a bevy of nubile females who soothe his cares with piano solos and poetry readings. He also employs Smuggler Ray Milland, "who is a criminal too, but a nice one, since he is in the racket...
Gaudy Pitchmen. The show was the joint effort of some of the most gaudy pitchmen in the fight racket. There was ancient Jack Kearns, owner and groom to seven whilom world champions, the man who took so much money out of Shelby. Mont, when Jack Dempsey beat Tommy Gibbons in 1923 that he almost broke the town. There was fat Jack Solomons of London, the ex-fishmonger, determined to give the brawl some real English class. There was a Canadian mining promoter named David Rush, a talented sport with an improbable aptitude for turning penny stocks into folding money...
With a great flurry the A.F.L. ousted the racket-ridden International Longshoremen's Association in 1953, then set out to sweep the New York docks with its own substitute, the International Brotherhood of Longshoremen. Twice the I.B.L. exerted full and expensive (more than a million dollars) efforts in bargaining elections, lost out to the entrenched I.L.A...
...Vatican officials discovered a new racket flourishing under the noses of the Swiss Guards: forged tickets to papal audiences. Normally issued free by the chief chamberlain, the forged tickets omitted the stamped-on word Gratis, were sold for a pretty tourist penny. Commented the official Demo-Christian newspaper Il Popolo: "This activity is more than illegal. It is ignoble...
...Sponges. Barby Sabini, a shifty Italian from the unsavory Saffron Hill district, started the racket way back in the 1920s when he and his brothers, armed with wet sponges, used to hang around the race tracks, erasing the chalked odds on the bookie's tote boards if they failed to pay protection money. After holding onto their franchise in the face of attacks by some of the toughest tearaways in The Smoke, the Sabini gang at last gave way to the Black Brothers, who in turn were muscled out by Jack Spot. Born of Polish-Jewish parents...