Word: thompsons
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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This book is essentially a study in the urban workings of democracy, and a sight more informative one than most sociologists would be apt to produce. Authors Thompson & Raymond are both able and knowledgeable newspapermen. Much of what they have to tell has been known to other such newspapermen for years, but it has been left to them to pull it together. One good reason for the delay is that, until Prosecutors Dewey and Cahill finally got the goods on Messrs. Jimmy Hines, Martin Manton et al., the anatomy of gang rule in New York City could not be fully...
Gang murders like those over which the Brooklyn District Attorney has been putting on such a show (TIME, April 1) are the gruesome small change of the underworld business. Thompson & Raymond are concerned to demonstrate that underworld business would never have nourished in New York City in the '20s and '30s unless it had been an upper-world business as well-a business that became big-time with Prohibition, that became pervasive with the industrial rackets, that reached almost tyrannical power when a queer, greedy slob and gunman named Arthur Flegenheimer gave orders...
...between politics and mobs was in practice intricate and devious, but Raymond & Thompson give a useful diagram of the mechanism. Founded on Tammany use of hoodlums and floaters to get out the vote and win elections in the 23 assembly districts of Manhattan, the mechanism involved Tammany gratitude to these instruments. Tammany gratitude was partially expressed through mayor-appointed magistrates-a tie-up very shocking to good people when the Seabury investigation brought it out in 1930-31. Judge Seabury's recommendation-that the appointment of magistrates be removed from politics-has never been followed...
...richer that mobs got from bootlegging and allied rackets, the more help they could deliver in elections, the more beholden the bosses became. Thompson & Raymond draw a pretty picture of the principal gangs and gang leaders during that era, of their boyish purchases in haberdashery and chorus girls, their nights into the nightclub business and into sports ("Big Bill" Dwyer introduced professional hockey to Manhattan), their celebrated lawyers such as "The Great Mouthpiece" Fallon. They name certain such semi-criminal fixers who are still in the law business...
...mere rewrite job from newspaper morgue material, the Thompson & Raymond book purports to tell several facts never told before about the great Broad way character, Arnold Rothstein, financier to the rackets, fence for stolen jewelry, unofficial intermediary between honorable Manhattan banking houses and gangsters in need of cash. Sample: Rothstein held insurance policies totaling $1,500,000 on the lives of three theatrical producers (the insurance policy was Rothstein's customary device for insuring collection of loans: if a borrower was killed, his debt would be paid off; if he refused to pay, he knew there was a definite...