Word: swindlers
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Touhy was removed from the scene in quite another way. In the summer of 1933, John ("Jake the Barber") Factor, a professional swindler and crony of Capone mobsters, was stopped as he drove away from a roadhouse by seven gunmen in a Duesenberg and two other cars. Twelve days later he reappeared in suburban La Grange, with a luxuriant beard and the story that Touhy and his mob had kidnaped him for $70,000 ransom. Tubbo Gilbert seconded the accusation, led the police investigation (along with the FBI's Melvin Purvis). Thomas J. Courtney, bright young state...
...than a book titled The Stolen Years, Touhy's rip-roaring life story, was published by Cleveland's Pennington Press. The hot volume, co-authored by Chicago Newsman Ray Brennan, is chiefly devoted to protesting Touhy's innocence of the wacky 1933 kidnaping of Swindler John ("Jake the Barber") Factor, a crime for which Touhy served 25 years of a 99-year stretch. The complaint against the book: it alleges that Factor committed wholesale perjury to railroad Touhy to the big house. Last week Jake the Barber, now a well-to-do Beverly Hills philanthropist, sued Pennington...
...oxlike simplicity. "Words are not for him what they are for me," the invalid muses, "thin protective capsules that enclose noxious germs-but hard, solid objects . . . it's useless to open them up . . we should find nothing." Gradually, the young man detects-or invents-complications; is Martereau a swindler? He forces subtleties on the unyielding surface of reality; an adulterer, perhaps? Having posed her enigma, the author of this excellently written novel disappointingly leaves it for the reader to solve...
...young Associated Press reporter in Chicago, the whole business had an odd smell-or rather, lack of smell. It was during the blazing summer of 1933, and Ray Brennan, then 25 and covering one of his first big stories, was facing Swindler Jake ("The Barber") Factor, who claimed before reporters and the police that he had been kidnaped, held for twelve days in a basement and just released. Factor said he was still wearing the same clothes in which he had been kidnaped-but his shirt and suit were clean and only slightly wrinkled. And there was another strange thing...
Expatriate Nostalgia. With more vodka came wistful recollections of Birrell's fieldstone showplace in fashionable New Hope, Pa., where he once kept a shiny, vintage fire engine, and reportedly entertained such celebrities as his friend the master swindler Serge Rubinstein, and some of Mickey Jelke's choicer, $100-a-night call girls. "I always took a big interest in the volunteer fire department in New Hope," said Old Fire Buff Birrell. "Volunteer firemen are a great thing in rural America." He also liked the autumn hunting. But "my house and nine-acre farm are in litigation now. They...