Word: underworlds
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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United Artists) is a thriller that makes a peculiar plea for racial integration in the underworld. The hero (Harry Belafonte, who is also the producer) is a singer in a Harlem hotspot who signs on for a bank robbery to pay off his bookie. Unhappily, once he is in, he discovers that another member of the gang is a paranoid punk from Oklahoma (Robert Ryan) who would sooner risk the bundle than his sense of white supremacy. The punk calls the Negro "Brother Bones," and warns him not to "crap out" on the job. "Ah been handlin' [Negroes...
...popular language Hell is the place of dreadful punishment . . . Is this how we should think of Hell?" Not at all, says Life and Death. The Bible uses the word Hell to translate the Hebrew Sheol and the Greek Hades, which were underworld places where all the dead lived shadowy, unsubstantial, joyless lives; at least at first, Sheol or Hades was not considered a place of punishment or torment. Gradually, the idea developed that there was a difference between the life of the righteous and the life of the wicked in Sheol. The part where the wicked dwelt was called Gehenna...
Fortnight ago the Amsterdam underworld, outraged by declining dividends, took matters into its own hands, dispatched a flying squad of 50 musclemen, who set upon a gang of nozem out on a heckling foray and administered professional beatings all around. The same evening Amsterdam's police commissioner got a telephone call from the city's leading racketeer. Willem ("Fat Steak'') Wagenaar. Said Fat Steak: "If you can't keep order in our district, we'll take over. Keep your police at home; we'll fix the nozem." Bubbling with official indignation, the commissioner...
...nothing to hide''), he finally admitted that the real power behind the Patterson-Johansson fight was Harlem's Anthony ("Tony Fat") Salerno, 48, according to Hogan "a known gambler, bookmaker and policy operator," and a friend of Frankie Carbo, leading light in boxing's dim underworld. Rosensohn said that Velella was only a front man for Tony Fat (who had found it convenient to disappear), later went on the air in New York City to state blithely that he had willingly sought out Salerno for his bankroll and "influence...
Chicago. Balked in earlier attempts to move into Chicago, Hoffa got a foothold in the late 19403 through an alliance with Paul Dorfman, described by the McClellan committee as "a major figure in the Chicago underworld." Hoffa paid Dorfman off by handing fat Teamster insurance contracts to Dorfman's son. Through Dorfman, the committee charges, Hoffa got on good terms with such top Capone gang chieftains as Joseph Glimco and Paul ("The Waiter") Ricca. Glimco, with a record of 36 arrests, including two on murder charges, became a trustee of a Chicago Teamster local. In 1956, when Ricca...