Word: racketeering
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...most of the male inhabitants of an entire Chinese village to the U.S. over a period of 50-odd years. Like untold thousands of other Chinese in the U.S., the Hueys did it by playing a game as intricate and baffling as any Chinese puzzle ever devised: the slot racket...
Bent Twigs. The racket required only money and patience. A Chinese in the U.S. would revisit the home country, say for a year, perhaps longer. Upon his return he would inform immigration officials that his wife, still in China, had borne him a child, maybe two or three. Since the self-styled father could claim that he was a U.S. citizen, his child, accordingly, was a citizen and was so registered...
Dirty Wash. The racket worked for decades in such points of entry as New York and Boston. But it flourished best in San Francisco, where noncitizens, when pressed to prove U.S. citizenship,* could insist that their birth certificates and other papers had been lost in the great earthquake of 1906. Old Huey Bing Dai, haled before federal authorities on an anonymous tip, confessed that he alone was responsible for 57 such fraudulent entries into the U.S. Along with others, he had arranged slots for more than 250 men of his clan who had lived in the Cantonese village...
...story this time is lifted from the book, The Man Who Rocked the Boat, in which William Keating described his adventures on the waterfront as a racket-busting assistant to Manhattan's district attorney. An honest pier boss (Mickey Shaughnessy), who refuses to holler uncle when the musclemen apply the pressure, is burned with half a dozen garlic-smeared slugs, and Keating (Richard Egan) is assigned to make the case against the goons who got him. He gets nowhere fast. The longshoremen, as usual, are afraid to talk. The victim himself refuses to "rat." The affable union boss (Walter...
Wear & Tear. Rodeo riding, Shoulders argues, is the roughest racket in sport. But it is not the physical danger that concerns him. "There is absolutely no money guarantee," he complains. "You've even got to furnish your own equipment, and you have to pay entry fees to compete. If you're hurt, you have to sort of scuffle around for yourself...