Word: racketeering
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...deposits on call at building & loan societies. Catch was that enough speculative cemeteries to bury Cleveland's dead for 200 years to come had already been laid out, but the promoters glibly promised 100% profits in 60 days. Following their trail. Investigator Fritchey discovered that the cemetery racket was cleaning up some $2,000,000 a year of gullible money drawn from Cleveland and all parts of Ohio...
...good. Intelligent observers unanimously denounced his Planacea as a monstrous fantasy, but for Founder Townsend they had only pitying sympathy. He might be simpleminded, but he was also, they were sure, greathearted. Even when ugly rumors rose that the Townsend Plan had turned out to be only another mean racket, with poor deluded oldsters as its victims, such charges simply made most observers believe that good, grey Dr. Townsend was being used as a front by sharpers who had swarmed into his Old Age Revolving Pensions, Ltd. First hint that Dr. Townsend was more than a simple, pious figurehead came...
...Some political observers concluded that Pat Harrison was considerably perturbed about his coming election fight when they heard a story which angry wildlife conservationists were telling last week. Source of vast alarm to sportsmen and conservationists in recent years has been quail bootlegging, which grew up as an organized racket in Mississippi shortly after the War, has since spread to neighboring states and is seriously depleting the South's supply of its most popular game bird. Quail are trapped by farmers, bought by racketeers who sell them in violation of State and Federal laws to breeding firms and shooting...
...Bureau of Biological Survey, State Game Commissioners and conservation societies. In 1932 one M. E. Bogle, reputed originator and longtime ringleader of the racket, was indicted in Western Tennessee, fined $1,800, given a suspended sentence of 18 months. Near Addison, Ill., one night last December two brothers named Andrew and Dwight Walley were caught redhanded with 200 live quail which they were trucking from Mississippi to a nearby game farm. Happy were quail protectors, for the Walley brothers, alleged proteges of Bogle, were reputed to be topnotchers in the Mississippi racket. Jailed in Chicago on charges of conspiracy...
...worried gardener that the insects were part of a huge and famed brood-Brood X-of periodical cicadas known scientifically as Tibicina septendecim and popularly as "17-year-locusts." The entomologist said that the insects would do little or no harm to flowers and shrubs, would make a fearful racket later on when they began to mate. Meanwhile there was nothing to do. If the gardener insisted on keeping the invaders away from his flowers, he could spread mosquito netting over the beds. Periodical cicadas are not locusts at all. When pious New England pioneers found them in enormous numbers...