Word: trunkful
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...counterfeiter and gambler, who was shot twice and dumped into a West Side alley. Testa was a friend of the late William ("Action") Jackson, a 300-lb. "juice man" (a collector of loans for gangland usurers known as "juice dealers"), who was tortured to death and stuffed into the trunk of his Cadillac last August. Testa, 48, had also been romancing an 18-year-old, green-eyed stripper who moonlighted as a police informer, picked up her lowdown by keeping her ears open as she took her clothes off at command performances before mobmen in the Cicero and Franklin Park...
...traveled, drank and died young. Countless anecdotes but few insights were preserved by his ever fewer friends. "Tomorrow I go to Hayti. They say the President is a Perfect Dear!" he scribbled to a friend. He never traveled abroad without some big blocks of selected coal in his trunk to protect him against a sudden chill in a foreign villa. Ambiguity, misunderstanding and loneliness followed him to the grave and beyond. As he lay dying in Rome, he would not have friends visit him because he would not expose them to the dreadful wallpaper...
There were few failures-but one of them led to the burglars' downfall. Cruising one night in April 1960, Patrolman John D. Bates saw burglars leave a 17th Street coffee shop. When Bates chased the getaway car, a safe fell out of the trunk; the man who came back to retrieve it turned out to be a policeman. Bates told his story to Chief James E. Childers, passed on department rumors that a dozen policemen were cracking safes. He was ordered to see a psychiatrist. When the psychiatrist reported Bates was eminently sane and was probably telling the truth...
...guide. In one felicitous phrase, he marveled at the lack of a cultural and technological middle ground between "the outhouse and outer space"; in a fine vignette, he explained why all Russian traffic comes to a halt when a rainstorm begins: motorists keep windshield wipers locked away in the trunk when not in use. since spare parts are all but unobtainable. Reporting that many Russians have a thorough knowledge of American art and literature, he related a talk he had with one man about the late Abstract Expressionist Jackson Pollock. "He died in an auto accident," Paar had told...
...classic detachment. I do not want my administration to be remembered as the one that let the airlines slide into as much trouble as the railroads are in." Boyd told the airline executives flatly: "We have all got to start doing a better job." No one could disagree; the trunk lines have already lost $17 million so far this year, may lose as much as $22 million before year's end. Plagued by soaring costs, withering overcompetition and too few passengers, the lines are desperate to find measures that will cut their losses. Some of the measures...