Word: thugging
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...head." That was Idaho's Senator Len B. Jordan reporting a personal encounter with the law-and-order issue in crime-plagued Washington, D.C. The 70-year-old legislator was on his way to a Senate prayer breakfast when he was accosted by a burly young thug in the elevator of his apartment building. The youth demanded Jordan's wallet and watch, but the crusty Republican was in the mood for dissent. He swung. "It's ridiculous that you have to live dangerously like this," said Jordan, a 200-pounder who played football as a youth...
...decade, even J. Edgar Hoover denied its existence. Its structure was a mystery, and if it had a name, no one on the outside was sure of what it was. Yet, almost unnoticed, it exerted a profound impact on American life. It still does. Small wonder that Valachi, the thug-turned-informer, doubted that anybody would believe or care when he talked about an organization called La Cosa Nostra...
Wages of Sin. The Thug modus operandi was to assume the guise of peaceful travelers. Joining parties with their victims, they would charm them right up to the moment at which one designated Thug would seize a doomed man's wrists while another Thug would strangle him from behind with a noose of white or yellow silk-Kali's favorite colors. Sometimes talented Thugs would play the sitar and coax their victims into singing, the better to expose their throats for throttling...
...only did the Thugs kill without remorse but "with pleasure," as they confessed, sanctified by omens before and prayers afterward. Thug son succeeded Thug father in the family business as a matter of course. But even after as many as eleven generations had accumulated fortunes, Thugs and scions of Thugs went on doing their thing. Shrewd appraisers of rich victims, they carefully scouted out their targets. But they had no objection to the impromptu murder of a party of four-for as little as 20 gold pieces and a handful of rupees. Whatever drove the Thugs-probably a mixture...
...Thug version of Cosa Nostra might have gone on for more generations had it not been confronted by William Sleeman, who came out to India as a Bengal army officer in 1809 at age 21. He didn't smoke, and he soon became a teetotaler. His only known thirst was for work, and that was regarded by his compatriots as unquenchable. In that wilting climate there was something of the untemptable Anglo-Saxon saint about Sleeman, as well as "something near to ruthlessness...