Word: racketeered
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...Racketeer. The essential step in the working of an industrial racket is the formation of an association which all the local operators in the industry are invited to join. Thus a dry cleaner might find himself invited to join a local dry cleaning association, paying this association an initiation fee and annual dues. Should he refuse to join, his house might be bombed, his place of business wrecked, his person assaulted, his life taken. Minor forms of pressure would be the hurling of stench bombs, or the introduction of acids or explosives into his cleaning fluids. Should the dry cleaner...
Chicago. With a soil fertile for racketeering, Chicago offers an excellent recent specimen of a well-grown and perfectly-formed dry cleaning racket. An organization known as the Chicago Master Cleaners' and Dyers' Association had acquired almost a monopoly in Chicago dyeing and cleaning. Members paid a $500 initiation fee and put up a $5,000 bond as a "guarantee of good faith." Bombing, slugging, sabotage, strike-fomenting and other standard methods were used to secure membership; eventually 92 members were lined up. They paid the association a general levy of 2% of gross business. There was also a subordinate...
...that irks a dyed-in-the-wool fan. Gene Tunney found this out, and it is this jealousy, perhaps, of men who have acquired the stamp of education conferred by a college degree that has brought many a heavyweight champion of the Intercollegiate Boxing Association to grief in the "racket" of professional boxing...
...sporting traditions of a hundred years ago by buying, for his personal amusement, an interest in a professional fighter. The fighter was René De Vos, Belgian contender for the middleweight championship; sports - writers laughed merrily for days at the notion ot a respectable person engaging in the fight racket and of a decently dressed and wellspoken person undertaking to pat and rub a bloody pugilist between the rounds of a fight...
...whose income from tips was $15,000 a year, whose valet was Thomas Crossley Earnshaw, who had a wife and a cottage in Southampton, England, and who had been a Cunard employe for 20 years. On the Berengaria, he had managed a glee club as well as his smuggling racket; when accused of the latter he broke down and wept piteously, asserting that he had received $100 for each packet and had carried only twelve in the last two years. Overjoyed, the customs men hauled him off to prison...