Word: underworld
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Little Men, Big World moves fast, beats with excitement. Veteran Crime Novelist W. R. Burnett (Little Caesar; High Sierra) knows the underworld jungle and has a keen ear for its talk. In his study of Arky's misplaced loyalty, he even tries to find some human motive behind the squalor of his story. In the search, he overdoes the idea that most of Arky's hoodlum ways can be explained by a poverty-stricken boyhood. Otherwise, the book is almost as unsentimental as Frank Costello on television...
...Dwyer, the committee charged, had contributed directly and indirectly "to the growth of organized crime, racketeering and gangsterism in New York City." It accused him of playing footie with Underworld Big Shot Frank Costello (who also came in for a sharp dressing down) and with failing to do his full duty as Brooklyn's district attorney before becoming mayor...
...Harry Truman's campaign manager when the President was elected to the Senate in 1934. Dillon once received a $10,000 fee for getting a Capone henchman paroled. Mississippi Congressman John B. Williams, on the floor of the House, angrily referred to Dillon as "a rascal, an underworld character, a fixer, an influence peddler." Another of Hood's Washington "contact men" is Acey Carraway, former financial director of the Democratic National Committee, to whom Hood says he still pays $500 a month for "anything he can do" to help Hood's lumber business...
...George blocked the exit with his 205-lb. frame and nobody even tried to escape. Next morning, the exploit made the headlines, and letters began to pour in supporting his one-man crusade. For a week he patrolled the gambling and red-light belts each night, but the underworld seemed to have gone out of business...
That just about wound up the show, except for a few forthright and patriotic remarks from J. Edgar Hoover. The Kefauver committee had spent eleven months on the trail of the U.S. underworld, and left behind three sheriffs fired, at least a dozen police officials demoted or indicted, scores of damaged reputations. Its methods had created misgivings, as all congressional investigations do: in effect, trying witnesses who are not formally charged with any crime, using loose rules of evidence and few of the protective procedures of a judicial body. And it had raised a new problem: the propriety of doing...