Word: underworld
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...have their 60 "soft drink parlors," their brothels, and their roulette wheels. The Bad Lands have their king, "Scarface Al" Caponi, alias "Al-phonzo Brown," who has been on the throne since 1922. Never since the days of "Big Jim" Colosimo (the man with the diamond complex) has the underworld had so potent an organizer. "Scarface Al," except for the old razor gash on one side of his face, might easily be mistaken for a fat, prosperous baker. King Caponi does not bake. With his brothers, Ralph and James, he keeps the beer route flowing and the political machinery...
Metropolitan newspapermen sent out to Canton, Ohio, to cover the now national Mellett murder case (TIME, July 26, POLITICAL NOTES), last week discovered and described just such an automobile, in the garage of one James ("Jumbo") Crowley, gigantic onetime monarch of the Canton underworld. There were five cars in this Crowley's garage, but of the five the reporters noted specially the vehicle whispered of by timorous Cantonese as "Jumbo's Box Car." It would readily hold nine men, and considerable tools or luggage be- sides. It had extra high gears. It was battered, dented and per- forated...
...then another and another glass in Canton's plentiful blind-pigs. People in bawdy-houses are seldom all asleep by 12:30, and last January 108 such houses flourished in Canton's three tougher sections, "The Badlands," "The Hole," and "Whiskey Centre." Gunmen and lords of the underworld are not asleep just after midnight. Instead that hour is the dawn of their working day. Many of these sat muttering guardedly in Canton...
...Publisher Donald R. Mellett, crumpled and bleeding in his backyard, was not uselessly dead. Shooting him, the Canton underworld had shot away a flimsy facade that has been propped for years between Canton's law-abiding citizenry and a system of back-alley politics and vice-protection fought by Mr. Mellett in his paper...
...made to him last March when Mellett testified in a Canton narcotics case-statements by Mellett that he had been threatened specifically by the Canton police and "vice lords" for "inter-fering." The public learned more about one "Harry-the-Greek" Bouklias and one Harry Turner, convicted perjurers and underworld go-betweens, whose release from the penitentiary Mellett had fought after having rid Canton of their presence. Sleuths nosed along a well-beaten narcotics trade-route between Canton and Pittsburgh that had been prime target of Mellett's vice-crusade...