Word: underworld
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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When Burton became mayor of Cleveland in 1935, the city was infested with underworld mobs, riddled with police graft. He appointed young Eliot Ness safety director, started a clean-up which had spectacular results. One racketeer it dredged up was Albert Ruddy, who this week was convicted of shaking down building contractors for thousands of dollars during his 20-year reign as a union tsar. Burton earned for Cleveland, once a city shamed by its record of traffic deaths, the National Safety Award in 1939 and 1940. He turned his attention to public health, and this year Cleveland...
Police shut him up. They didn't have to ask who he was. They knew: Vito Gurino, 33, ex-baker, top trigger man of the Brooklyn syndicate of small-time gunmen who, at bargain-basement prices (TIME, April 1), murdered underworld characters for rival gangs. They had been looking for him. Two of his bosses were in the death house at Sing Sing, two more were on trial, others awaiting trial for their part in the 83 murders chalked up against the syndicate by Irish William O'Dwyer, Brooklyn District Attorney...
...Nazi party, according to Donovan & Mowrer, spends $200,000,000 annually on an organization of some 4,000,000 agents. Said Donovan & Mowrer, Nazis require every German leaving the Reich to promise to report back everything seen & heard abroad. The great army of the political underworld includes private citizens, members of the Gestapo, the official Propaganda Ministry, the German Labor Front, the intelligence services of the German Army, Navy and Air Corps, officials in the embassies and consulates...
...four and a half years on the air, the CBS Gang Busters stood off many an attack. When parent-teacher associations complained that their re-enactment of underworld derring-do was bad stuff for children, Gang Busters pointed out that the little ones couldn't learn too early that crime does not pay. When Probation Officer Frank Xavier Reller of St. Louis denounced the program for inspiring juveniles to concoct all kinds of deviltry, Gang Busters boasted that over a hundred mobsters had been brought to justice through aerial tips that they supplied...
...gather round the Green Table, follow the clicking white cue-ball in its geometrical course. There, in the cozy twilight, they howl and argue and relax. When their backs cluster too thickly around the play, they turn and shout for help. They cry for the arbiter of this musky underworld, and from behind the counter a grey old man, watching with cold, steel-blue eyes, rises slowly and shows the boys. And once old Ben shows the boys, he may be seen casually running off five hundred at straight rail...