Word: underworldly
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...droves of sleek cars with out-of-state license plates swept through the tiny (pop. 280) upstate New York town of Apalachin (pronounced apple-achin') and converged on the secluded hilltop estate of Joseph Barbara, a beer distributor known to be high up in the underworld. His curiosity pricked by the procession of strange Cadillacs and Imperials, an alert state cop called agents of the Treasury Department's Alcohol Tax Unit in Albany. Surrounding the 53-acre estate, policemen halted 63 carefully tailored men-some at a roadblock, others fleeing through dense woods-and asked them who they...
Mankowitz' affectionate attack on the cheerfully amoral operators who are London's buccaneers of bric-a-brac, the antique dealers of Portobello Road, sparkled with the vitality of the underworld he has taken for his own. "One specializes in the people nearest one's personal archetype," says Author Mankowitz, "dealers, agents, toughies, whores, pimps, gamblers, all freelances like myself-people who work in a mètier, vestiges of primitive capitalism. These are my people...
...shadowy underworld of boxing, the wise guys knew that the man to see when a fight was to be fixed-or even scheduled-was a thug named Frankie Carbo, a flat-eyed hood with a shock of silvery hair. Nobody called him "Frankie." They called him "Mr. Grey." But when the law went looking for him, nobody could remember a thing about him -where he lived, what he looked like, or even when he had last been seen...
Under the punning slogan of "Stop Power Politics," Collins thus implies that his opponent values his own career more than such matters as education, that he either deals with or at least sympathizes with gamblers and underworld figures, and that hidden sinister sources are supplying his financial support. In response, Powers claims that he can "do more for Boston," in short, that he is effective as a politician. Of course, he denies any dishonest dealings...
Twenty-two men are currently on trial in New York for "conspiring to obstruct justice" by concealing the purpose of their 1957 "underworld convention" at Apalachin. By the normal standards of American morality, the majority of them are undesirable creatures, suspected, and possibly guilty, of assorted crimes from murder on down the scale of turpitude to petty larceny...