Word: underworld
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...MOST CONTAGIOUS GAME, by Samuel Grafton (256 pp.; Doubleday; $3.75), is a fast, offbeat little yarn about a magazine reporter who is handed a money belt with $5,000 and told to sink into the New York City underworld in order to write an exposé. Both the underworld and the police promptly mistake Reporter Dan Lewis for a mobster from Kansas City. After taking a brutal beating, he is put to bed by a brunette bit of fluff who soon climbs in with him. Dan becomes a bodyguard for a gambling czar, kills a man, takes over a bookie...
...Look out for Loulou," was a warning often whispered in the Paris underworld when chunky Louis Métra was chief of the Vice and Narcotic Brigade. A Parisian cop since 1925, "Loulou" Métra, a mild, tactful and polite fellow, had an insidious talent for winning the confidence of shady characters. The labyrinths of Parisian vice being what they are, Loulou was also skill ful at extricating prominent citizens from embarrassing situations. Once he got the delicate task of recovering a royal jewel impulsively presented by a visiting for eign prince to a professional homosexual...
...Chief Inspector Louis Métra retired from the force and set up practice as a private detective, and most of the Paris underworld breathed easier. Many of Louis' old friends among the drug addicts continued to visit him at his new office below Montmartre. They visited him so regularly, in fact, that Louis' former colleagues became suspicious. One day last fall, armed with a telescope, police in an apartment across the street watched two known female addicts drop in on Louis and pick up a large package. They followed the women back to their apartment and caught...
...onetime "treasurer" of Al Capone's vice syndicate, aging (68) ex-Public Enemy Jake ("Greasy Thumb")* Guzik, heard that the American Broadcasting Co.'s local TV station in Chicago was cooking up a series on "notorious underworld leaders." Figuring that the description fitted him like a kid glove, Greasy Thumb filed suit to block ABC from giving his life a public airing. Said his petition: "Guzik is not an athlete or actor, not a candidate for public office, has never achieved fame in literature, the arts or sciences, and he has never given his assent to becoming...
Then Donahue persuaded Helen Weaver's family to offer $10,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the murderer, plastered the reward-offer story on the front page of the Press. It touched off a chain reaction of tips from underworld informers. First two tipsters said in affidavits that Harry Washburn, the son-in-law, had paid them a total of $750 to shoot not Helen Weaver but her husband. Police promptly arrested Washburn on the charge of murder...