Word: underworldly
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...years in office, and a deputy testified that a fellow deputy had delivered to the sheriff's wife $36,000 in payoff money from gamblers. Over on the west coast, Tampa's Sheriff Hugh Culbreath was apparently in business with the top underworld boss, "Big Red" Italiano, let his brother run a book right in his office. An accountant for the racketeers in the Cuban bolita (a version of numbers in which small numbered balls are shaken up in a burlap bag) told the committee that one weekly expense item meant money for the sheriff, scornfully designated...
...body politic. But in New York last week, it was intent on deeper surgery. Though its hearings were closed, and could only be followed by buttonholing the doctors at the operating-room door, the committee's interests were plain. It wanted to know all about 1) Underworld Kingpin Frank Costello, and 2) former Mayor and present U.S. Ambassador to Mexico William O'Dwyer...
...stood trial, although District Attorney O'Dwyer once described the Anastasia case as "the perfect murder case." They failed to corral Gambler Frank Erickson (who preferred to stay in his Rikers Island cell, where he is serving a two-year rap for bookmaking). But the committee pulled in Underworld Big Shot Meyer Lansky, Gamblers Gerard Catena and James ("Niggy") Rutkin, who entered the hearings protesting: "I'm small peanuts. Why don't these Hollywood investigators retire and get J. Edgar Hoover up here? He'll tell them all they want to know in two days...
...Even the underworld, or at least its old guard, gets sympathetic treatment from The Blue Lamp. The plot is pegged on the London police's tradition of doing their duty without firearms. The film suggests that socially adjusted lawbreakers respect this tradition, but one amateurish criminal upstart (Dirk Bogarde) loses his head and plugs the picture's most likable bobby (Jack Warner). The courage of the unarmed police closing in on the gun-toting killer invites both admiration and suspense. What should most impress U.S. fans, however, is the reaction of London gangland's staunch conservatives: well...
...Fort Leavenworth. Drug addicts, he feels, are not so much criminals as neurotics who belong in hospitals. He writes of his cons with affection, and it is plain that he won theirs. When his assignment ended, they tried to offer him a choice of profitable jobs through their underworld connections. In his garage, a few days before he left, he found a brand-new car in place of his wobbly old one. When he refused it with regrets, Punch said: "Boss, I hate to say this to you, but I'm afraid you'll always be a sucker...