Word: underworldly
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Death Revealed. Johnny Torrio, 75, compact (5 ft. 5 in.), button-eyed dean of Chicago's Prohibition-era gang leaders, (e.g., Dion O'Bannion, Hymie Weiss) who brought Al ("Scarface") Capone from Brooklyn as a $75-a-week mug, tutored him, later (1925) bequeathed him his underworld empire and title of Public Enemy No. 1; of a heart attack; on April 16, in Brooklyn. Dapper Torrio, a topnotch organizer, executive and marksman (tagged by colleagues as "Terrible Johnny" long before police got anything on him), joined Big Jim Colosimo in Chicago as chief triggerman in 1910, gathered...
...long been ripe for rubbing out. Now free on $25,000 bail while appealing a tax-evasion conviction (five years), Costello, a charmed-life anachronism from the Prohibition Era, could see signs that he had outlived his right to be known as "prime minister of the U.S. underworld." The obvious way for upstart mobsters to hasten the crumbling of Kingpin Costello's dark empire of crime and rackets would begin with the elimination of the Big Boss himself. Costello taxied last week from a quiet on-the-town evening to his apartment house on Manhattan's Central Park...
...Tulsa courtroom, U.S. Attorney B. Hayden Crawford charged that Tulsa Tribune Reporter Nolen Bulloch, famed for his exposes of bootlegging and political corruption, had actually for nine years masterminded an underworld ring that smuggled liquor into legally dry Oklahoma (TIME, March 11). Bulloch, roared the prosecutor, was the conductor of "a streetcar named Desire-and the desire was for money." He wanted Reporter Bulloch convicted on a conspiracy charge...
Swiftly and efficiently the men herded the women upstairs at pistol point, tied them with curtain cords, locked them in a bathroom, and-undetected by a private secretary asleep upstairs-systematically ransacked the house. Soon afterwards they walked away with a wad of bank notes and the French underworld's biggest haul of stolen jewelry (estimated value: $285,000) since the Aga Khan's wife was robbed of $500,000 worth on the Riviera in 1949. It was not. however, so much the size of the haul that gave the burglary its special interest as the identity...
Politico-Religious. Shrewd, tough, fiftyish General Le Van Vien is one man who could well afford to regard the lifting of a few million francs' worth of uninsured gems as petty thievery. Not long ago he ruled supreme as czar of the underworld in French Indo-China. The sixth son of a rural outlaw who built a modest fortune on stolen water buffalo, Le Van Vien showed early promise of becoming a successful chip off the old block. In the early days of the Sino-Japanese War he left home to fight with Chiang Kai-shek's armies...