Word: rackets
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...catered to hopeful fist fighters. (No spitting on the floor, put cigar butts in cuspidors.) There he developed a surefire system for picking winners. "Their built don't matter so much," Bobby Gleason liked to explain. "What they gotta be if they want to get along in this racket is a little stupid...
Stupid may be a harsh word for the hard-muscled men who get paid for beating each other's brains out for the television audience, but all last month it seemed a mild word indeed for the men who really cash in on the boxing racket. Managers, seconds, two-bit camp followers and big-shot promoters trooped down to the New York State Athletic Commission to put on a command performance for Julius Helfand, New York's crusading new commission chairman, and showed all the symptoms of psychosomatic lockjaw. For sheer, simple-minded effrontery, there had been nothing...
...Address. Commissioner Helfand could hardly have been surprised. A onetime racket-busting assistant district attorney in Brooklyn, he has been around long enough to know that buying a piece of a fighter is one sure way to buy underworld class-it gives a guy the taint of respectability. So when Helfand tried to find out why a slick young welterweight named Vince Martinez was getting the brushoff from matchmakers, it was not exactly news that witnesses began to mumble about a Murder Inc. alumnus named Frankie Carbo...
...same tearing roar of Meyer-Drake Offenhauser racing engines will racket above the oil-slick brick and asphalt. Once more, when the green flag drops, the wheeled buckets of power will whisk past the pace car into the first laps of the most popular sport spectacle in the U.S. Memorial Day will have come back to the Midwest with the 39th running of America's car-racing classic: the Indianapolis 500. The cars will be faster than ever this year, the drivers as daring, and the spectators will get their thrills. But for the first time in the memory...
...distributed commercially). Wiretapper is the latest and possibly most potent weapon in the arsenal of a personable young evangelist. No Collection Problems. In 1947 Jim Vaus was a Los Angeles electronics engineer in business for himself. Doing illegal wiretapping for the police to collect evidence on a call-girl racket brought him publicity, and publicity got him into the lucrative line of tapping the phones of Hollywood stars. Wrote Jim, in Why I Quit Syndicated Crime, the basis of his movie: "Men of this caliber are always after information about the private activities of their current heartbeat . . . The part...