Word: spotting
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...tote boards if they failed to pay protection money. After holding onto their franchise in the face of attacks by some of the toughest tearaways in The Smoke, the Sabini gang at last gave way to the Black Brothers, who in turn were muscled out by Jack Spot. Born of Polish-Jewish parents in a Whitechapel tenement in 1912, Jack Spot (né Comer) was a shrewd operator with a taste for custom-made silk shirts, big black cigars and 40-guinea suits. It took a fat wad of track-protection money to buy these luxuries for Jack...
...they took to writing their memoirs. Announcing his retirement last year, Billy hired a ghostwriter and turned out a book called Boss of Britain's Underworld. Jack produced a rival series of articles for the Sunday Chronicle, describing in glowing terms his own rise to power. The Jack Spot memoirs hit their high point with the boast that he had mustered an army of 1,000 hoods armed with Sten guns, hand grenades, British service revolvers and German Lugers, to maintain his own rule. So long as the rivalry was literary, the Yard did not seem to mind...
Grievous Harm. Last week razors were out again at the entrance to a nightclub off Berkeley Square. This time the cutting scrape involved one Tommy Falco, known to be a close friend of Billy Hill, who was just leaving the club, and−once again−Jack Spot, who, according to Tommy, jumped out at him from a darkened doorway and worked him over. At week's end, fingered by Falco, Jack Spot was in jail on charges of "causing grievous bodily harm," and Scotland Yard breathed slightly easier. "If we can just get Spot sent...
...hours of waterskiing on Schroon Lake, N.Y. He was dog-tired, but before he settled down he asked one of the two girls in the boat, Allene Beck, if she could swim; when she shook her head, he traded places with her so she would be in a safer spot. Minutes later the speeding boat bounced on a wave, and both of them, the 50-year-old man and the girl, shot into the water. He swam to her and held her head above water until the boat could circle back and she was hauled aboard. But as hands reached...
...Trotman bought a large, luxurious ranch at Colorado Springs and turned it into a national headquarters and free vacation spot for Navigators. But Daws Trotman did not rest; he got up early to pray and read and stayed up late to talk to would-be converts, until a heart ailment several years ago forced him to slow down and take more than his customary five hours' sleep...