Word: underworlders
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Fire Sale. Small businessmen who need to borrow to keep going at all are increasingly turning to underworld loan sharks for credit, reports Ralph Salerno, chief rackets investigator for the district attorney of Queens County in New York City. The "vigorish," or interest rate, on these loans makes the bank prime look like a fire-sale bargain: $300 on $1,000 borrowed for 13 weeks, or 120% a year; $150 a week on a $5,000 loan, or 156% a year. The loan sharks are sophisticated operators who keep close tab on the legitimate money markets and often cite...
...bring back Euripides. In the Shevelove version, Bernard Shaw substitutes. As his companion, Dionysus takes along his obese, grumbling Sancho Panza-like servant Xanthias (Michael Vale). They have their slapstick encounters, not only with the cranky Charon, who speaks like a movie gold prospector, but with enticing houris, underworld strong-arm men, termagants, drunks and, finally, the haughty, unamused Pluto (Jerome Dempsey), god of the underworld. It seems that Shakespeare sits on the throne of honor as the No. 1 dramatist in Hades. (In Aristophanes' original it is Aeschylus.) A battle royal of quotations ensues between Shakespeare (Jeremy Geidt...
Springsteen is more confused about his role, and as a result seems to be living in the same world as the rest of us. He sets his songs in a mildly romanticized street semi-underworld somewhere in between New York and his hometown of Asbury Park, New Jersey, and the music, at least the best of it, is suitable raucous and scruffy. Unlike his first album, Greetings from Asbury Park, where the descriptions bristled with enough Dylanesque alliteration to make them look like typing exercises ("Madman drummers bummers and Indians in the summer with a teenage diplomat"), on E Street...
...story apartment building looks somber with its dirtencrusted windows and greasy Venetian blinds. Opposite, a group of tenement houses stand in the glare of DuPont's smoke and flames. The passengers waiting on the platform of Philadelphia's Thirtieth Street Station look like molish members of a dust-filled underworld. The train pulls out into a complex of electric power lines, intricately crossing tracks, and still freight cars. It then runs parallel to a river, crosses over, and continues through a residential area. To the right, a small rowboat drifts lazily on a pond set among grassy walkways and elaborate...
...Boston. The man in the driver's seat is a lawyer representing a family the Cabots do not speak to. The man next to him is named Cogan, and Cogan is the man to keep your eye on in George V. Higgins' third novel about the Boston underworld. In The Friends of Eddie Coyle and The Digger's Game, drawing on his drastic experience as Assistant U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts, Higgins followed a couple of very small cockroaches as they skittered every which way to elude the extermination man. In Cogan's Trade he sees...