Word: shakedowns
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When he was working for them, the French dignified Le Van Vien's private army of 8,000 bloodthirsty gangsters as a "politico-religious organization," but Le Van Vien himself put it to more practical uses, including piracy, highway robbery, kidnaping, smuggling, pandering and an elaborate system of shakedown rackets. By the early 1950s, however, his chest adorned with France's own Legion of Honor for other services rendered, General Le Van Vien was a respectable servant of empire with a household of wives and concubines and a zoo full of wild beasts on a spacious estate overlooking...
...Parisian Shakedown. The contagion of violence reached to Paris itself. There the supporters of Messali Hadj's Algerian National Movement and those of the National Liberation Front formerly directed by Cairo-based leaders such as the captured Mohammed ben Bella, feuded like Chicago-style gangs over the privilege of shaking down the city's 80,000 Algerians for contributions. One Algerian objected that he did not want to take sides; his body was fished out of the Seine a few days later. Café owners who contributed to the National Liberation Front had their stocks smashed by Hadj...
...income taxes for 1946-50, sentenced to five years in prison, wailed that despite his job, he simply had not been much of a tax expert. BIR Chief Counsel Charles Oliphant resigned angrily after Witness Abraham Teitelbaum said he had been told Oliphant was a member of a tax shakedown gang. Former New York Alcohol Tax Unit Supervisor James B. E. Olson popped up on the payroll of tax-troubled companies. Massachusetts Collector Denis Delaney was convicted of bribery, served nine months. St. Louis Collector James Finnegan* had a nice way of obtaining legal retainers from firms doing business with...
Testing out his 1956 campaign, Adlai Stevenson ranged across the U.S. last week on a shakedown cruise. From Detroit, Los Angeles, San Francisco and New Jersey he fired broadside after broadside at the Eisenhower Administration. On theDemocratic quarterdeck behind him stood the strategists, watching to see which salvo would be most damaging...
...newspapers were whooping it up, but the fact is that Scotland Yard has for more than a year been concerned by a London gang war that centers around a shakedown racket involving race-track bookies...