Word: rum
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...drinks for friends and strangers. They shopped for Christmas presents, clothes, champagne, even Canadian-grown Christmas trees. They dropped silver bolivars into the hands of garbagemen, messengers, menials. Even the poorest of them splurged on big hallacas (tamales made from corn, chicken, spices, meat and rice) and bottles of rum...
...kind of communal living arrangement, the men eat together, sleep in dormitories, earn $1 pocket money after the first week, $2 after the second, and eventually up to $15. There is an Alcoholics Anonymous group at the center, so that the men can fight together against the temptations of rum. There is a recreation room on the second floor with a television set, which eliminates one excuse for going to a neighborhood bar. Life's derelicts are put to work mending old clothes, fixing broken furniture and radio sets-and get back, if all goes well, on the road...
...with speakeasies running in a thousand Manhattan basements, Frank Costello threw his bankroll into the rum trade. It was an enormous and complex business which involved the systematic bribery of thousands of policemen, the timed dispatching of speedboats and trucks, the direction of sales and bookkeeping staffs, the printing of fake labels, the operation of cutting plants and the purchase of fortunes in whisky. To the tough hoodlums who were its soldiers, it was also extremely hazardous...
...European exporters, took enormous risks and made enormous profits. He also kept himself so shadowy and unobtrusive a figure that when U.S. Attorney Emory Buckner made a desperate but unsuccessful effort to smash the liquor racket, Costello was erroneously charged with being an accomplice rather than a competitor of Rum King Big Bill Dwyer...
Kastel & Costello. Long before prohibition was over Rumrunner Costello began transferring his interest and rum profits to safer fields. In 1928 he formed a lasting partnership with Dandy Phil Kastel, a dapper little enterpriser who had whetted 'his wits as manager of a Montreal restaurant and operator of a Manhattan bucket shop. Costello and Kastel formed the Tru-Mint Novelty Corp. and gave the enthusiastic New York public a chance to play slot machines. He told Kastel: "If a guy named Hershey could make all that dough on a 5? candy bar, maybe there's an angle here...