Word: rackets
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Fast Payoff. "Numbers" is the poor Negroes' reach for the pot of gold, and 100,000 of them slip nickels and dimes to "runners" each day in the hope that their three-digit number will come up for a 600-to-1 payoff. Otherwise known as the policy racket, the numbers game drains Harlem of $50 million a year, but it also provides a living for 15,000 runners and controllers. Negro stores abound with code books advising that if you have dreamed about the police you should bet the number 782; about cats, 578; about adultery...
Once, Negroes controlled Harlem's numbers racket. But, so the story goes, one Harlem policy banker was hit hard during the 1930s and went to Racketeer Dutch Schultz to borrow $5,000. So quickly did he pay it back that Schultz became interested, and before long the big-time mobsters moved in. Now Negroes complain that Italian and Jewish racketeers, protected by the police, control the game, and a Black Nationalist has drawn cheers by calling for "black control of the numbers...
...NOISE. Electronic racket raisers, says the colonel, "will project high-intensity, variable-pitch sounds, blatting, shrieking noises, etc., in such volume that they will be almost intolerable to the human ear." Another promising device: "A revolving, car-roof-mounted, flashing spotlight of such brilliance that it will temporarily affect the vision of rioters...
...news of the spring term was the sustained attack on the tutoring schools. The CRIMSON initiated the campaign charging that the tutoring schools were an organized vice racket which violated ethics of the University. Its front page editorial began "Lined up on Massachusetts Avenue, grinning down over Harvard Yard, there is a row of intellectual brothels." The paper denounced the "cram parlors" and called for the Administration to "force the lids off the sewer holes, to shine the light of day on the putrefaction within." Within three years all the tutoring schools were closed...
...lost continent of economics. It has ignored all the rules, maintained a giddy inflation of 40% to 80% per year, built up a foreign debt of $3 billion, and seemed to be operating on four basic Brazilian principles: 1) God is a Brazilian, 2) confidence is a good racket, 3) paper is the stuff money is made of, and 4) the Americans would always bail them out anyway...