Word: underworlders
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...fairgrounds and crying out against gamblers as "a lying, perjured, rum-soaked and libidinous lot." U.S. Protestantism was especially hostile to gambling, which it saw as luring people into extravagance and away from work. By 1910, most states had passed antigaming laws, and gradually gambling went underground-or underworld. Says Gambling Historian Henry Chafetz: "Men had shot and killed each other across gaming tables on the Mississippi and the gold fields of the West, but it took the 20th century to make gamblers mobsters...
...hooked; 2) lotteries in particular are played mostly by lower-income families and thus constitute an unjust tax on the poor; 3) in places like Nevada, where gambling is legal, criminal elements have certainly not faded away. Virgil Peterson, director of the Chicago crime commission, argues that the underworld inevitably gains a foothold under any licensing system by organizing legal "fronts" and establishing rival illegal operations that place the state-operated venture at a disadvantage...
...liver; in Sequals, Italy, 34 years to the day after winning the title. At 6 ft. 5¾ in. and 267 Ibs., "Da Preem" was billed as a giant (though nothing special by today's pro-football standards) in 1930, when U.S. fight promoters and their underworld bosses found him fresh from lifting weights in a European circus. As a fighter he was a joke, but fixed bouts and blaring publicity led to a payday championship match with the slipping Jack Sharkey. Incredibly, Camera won-on a lucky sixth-round knockout. He lasted only a year, until Max Baer...
...make the rounds that the American C.l.A. was behind the abduction. Even Charles de Gaulle allowed as to how that was probably the case. Then, to the French President's chagrin, it became clear that his own police, acting in cahoots with Moroccan officials and the Parisian underworld, had engineered the whole operation. "A vulgar and minor affair," said De Gaulle in airy dismissal...
...alive with muckraking relish. Eventually the flics collared two of their own vice-squad men, one part-time informer for the French and Moroccan secret services, one ranking French secret-service official, one Moroccan cop and one journalist who was also a police informer. They also implicated four French underworld types they could not lay their hands on and Moroccan Interior Minister Mohamed Oufkir and his deputy, Ahmed Dlimi, who were both safe at home...