Word: shakedowns
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...Jarka Corp. wanted to work a new pier. The word was passed for Jarka to hire a pier boss named Tony Anastasio, brother of Murder, Inc.'s lord high executioner, Albert Anastasia.* When Jarka refused to stand for the shakedown, Anastasio's other piers went on strike. Jarka complained to Joe Ryan, and Joe blandly "recommended" Anastasio. Anastasio was hired...
...York began to erupt with one scandal after another concerning his administration. His closest political sidekick, James J. Moran, was found guilty of engineering a huge fire department shakedown of oil-burner dealers-a shakedown which netted millions. Convicted Brooklyn Bookie Harry Gross told of paying off whole platoons of New York cops during the O'Dwyer era, and charged that Moran had once called a pre-election meeting of O'Dwyer and the city's top bookies...
...Charles Oliphant, chief counsel of the BIR, resigned suddenly after a tax-troubled Chicagoan testified that Oliphant's name had been used by a racketeer in an attempted shakedown. Oliphant had admitted accepting gifts and expensive entertainment from big taxpayers with cases pending before the BIR. A close friend of Oliphant was Henry ("The Dutchman") Grunewald, who refuses to testify before congressional committees...
Sentenced last week: James J. Moran, onetime first deputy fire commissioner of New York, for perpetrating a $500,000-a-year shakedown of the big city's oil-burner contractors (TIME, Feb. 18). His punishment: 15½ to 25 years. Still a mystery: what Moran did with some $300,000 in untracked graft money, which he refused to discuss...
When his old pal, Mayor Bill O'Dwyer, made him New York's first deputy fire commissioner, Moran set out with a crusader's zeal to correct one of the city's perennial rackets: the shakedown of contractors seeking permits to install oil burners and tanks. Last week, as Moran was on trial in Manhattan, charged with 23 counts of extortion, even the most exacting connoisseur of corruption had to admit that he had done an amazing...