Word: underworld
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Chicago was strident, corrupt, lavish, fat from war contracts in 1919 when a young hoodlum from Brooklyn slipped into Diamond Jim Colosimo's South Side underworld and muttered his name. The hoodlum, branded on one swart cheek by the razor memento of the Neapolitan Camorra, was Al Capone...
Prohibition, an experiment noble in purpose, was about to begin. Midnight on Jan. 16, 1920, it went into effect. Five months later, guns barked and drilled plump Diamond Jim Colosimo dead as a herring in his own restaurant. The murder was a clue to the sudden bustle in the underworld. Colosimo, owner of brothels, had tried to bite off too much of the new business in illicit booze. That killing set the pattern for many more...
...hold the easy pickings of bootlegging, the U. S. underworld went to war. It was an internecine affair of ambush and the double cross. Along Jersey highways from the shore, where rum runners landed their cargoes, runners and highjackers fought it out in the night. In New York City, men were shot discreetly in basement saloons. In Detroit and St. Louis, guns banged on street corners, men died at high noon...
...scouring of the subversive underworld, rawboned Martin Dies of Texas, First Whip of the Red Hunting pack, never put on the stand a real, live, honest-to-goodness Communist. At his House Committee on Un-American Activities hearing last week in Washington he could have reached out and touched one: wispy, unobtrusive Earl Browder, general secretary (at $40 a week) of the Communist Party, its 1936 Presidential candidate...
Callers on District Attorney Dewey last week were J. Richard ("Dixie") Davis, underworld lawyer whose "squealing" testimony won the Hines case for Dewey, and Hope Dare, the redheaded showgirl, long his mistress, whom he married last fortnight. After posing protrusively for newscameras, Davis, whom Dewey detectives still guard night & day, denied helping Dewey try to find Lepke, complained: "Everybody is looking for Lepke and finding me! I want to go away with Hope to some small town and write fiction...