Word: taxes
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...TAX DODGERS (288 pp.)-Elmer L Irey, as told to William J. Slocum-Greenberg...
...printer), Elmer Lincoln Irey was coordinator of all Treasury law-enforcement units. He wasn't a lawyer, he wasn't a detective, and he wasn't physically tough. But he had a genius for ferreting out the sources of gangsters' income and jailing crooks for tax evasion. Elmer Irey and his T-men put the finger on such arrogant law-flout-ers as Al Capone, "Nucky" Johnson, Moe Annenberg and Tom Pendergast...
...months before his death, Irey (who had always discouraged publicity) was persuaded by a publisher to tell his story to William J. Slocum. The Tax Dodgers points up one of the unpleasantly ironical facts of political life in the U.S.: that pimps (like Bioff), murderers, political racketeers and mobsters can work at their trades with impunity, and are seldom brought to book for their most serious crimes...
Except for the Lindbergh case, in which Irey got Hauptmann by tracing registered ransom bills, the technique was always much the same: to determine the size of the gangster's loot, then match it against his income-tax returns. By 1940, Irey had uncovered $476,573,129 in tax deficiencies (the Philadelphia Inquirer's late Publisher Moe Annenberg made the largest single contribution to the Treasury: $8,000,000). At one time nearly two-thirds of all federal prisoners were men jailed as a result of Irey's patient, adding-machine methods...
...Tax Dodgers should be required reading in civics and political science classes throughout the U.S. Few books provide such detailed proof of the breakdown of political morality in the face of bribery and corruption. Irey, who wasn't greatly surprised by the rottenness he uncovered, found "something impressive about Mr. Truman's devotion to his larcenous constituent," Missouri's Tom Pendergast. Says Irey flatly: "Mr. Truman, then Senator Truman, used every bit of pressure that his office legally permitted to keep Pendergast out of jail...