Word: thugs
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Designed to dent the labor-union corruption and thug rule exposed by Arkansas' John McClellan's labor-management racketeering committee, the Kennedy-Ives bill required unions to 1) hold periodic secret-ballot elections, and 2 ) submit to the Labor Department full reports on their financial and other dealings. Tough-minded John McClellan himself endorsed the bill as a ''first step" that would "give important protection to the rights of workers, of management and the public...
...measure that only recently seemed an election-year impossibility seemed possible: a meaningful law to clean up corruption and thug rule in labor unions...
Peanuts & Promises. Dio, who made a name for himself in his 20s as a strong-arm thug when he and an uncle muscled into the garment trucking industry, worked his way (after a stretch in Sing Sing) up into the labor rackets in a queer way. First he ran a few little dress-manufacturing shops. Then he took over a New York local of the foundering United Auto Workers (A.F.L.). With help from Jimmy Hoffa as well as the union's International Secretary-Treasurer Anthony Doria, Dio surrounded himself with mobsters who had grown tired of robbery, bookmaking...
...real name: Dioguardi), was belatedly packed off for a three-year stretch at Sing Sing by Racket Buster Tom Dewey in 1937. The charge: extorting protection money from garment district truckers and cloak-and-suiters. Long out of stir and prospering by 1950, Dio became a smoother thug, refined his old muscle technique to set up "paper locals" (no rights, few members), shook down businessmen with threats of "labor violence" and picketing. So powerful grew "Mr. Dee" that two months ago, when U.S. attorneys attempted to hale him before a trial jury as the mastermind behind the acid-blinding (TIME...
...plan. He was going to take all three of them to the bank, said the bandit, and hold the boy and Mrs. Kuhel hostage while the father fetched out $75,000 in greenbacks. As his father, stalling for time, pointed out flaws in the arrangement, Bobby had asked the thug if he might go to the bathroom. Too busy arguing with the father to care about the boy, Wally waved him away. That was when Bobby got the gun. When Bobby came downstairs a moment later, Wally marched all three of them out to the family car, ordered Kuhel...