FOOD RACKETS

Waipawa Mail, Volume LXVI, Issue 97, 25 May 1938, Page 1

FOOD RACKETS

STAGGERING COST TO PUBLIC RUTHLESS ATTACKS NEW YORK, April 26. Industrial racketeering with characteristic ruthlessness attacks the United States’ largest city where it is weakest—in the bread-basket. First and foremost, a city of 7,000,000 must eat, and New York land is too costly for cabbage patches. The result is that “There is more racketeering in the distribution of food products than in any other field in New York,” declared John Harlan Amen, Federal ace of racket-busters. In the past five years Amen has prosecuted six racketeering cases, and obtained indictments in four more. Of the 10 cases eight concerned “chiselling” in the food industries. Evidence at racketeering trials indicated that the method of attack generally was to intercept food between the time if left the producer and reached the consumer. Tribute for the racketeer was extorted in money or other considerations at the point of interception. The effect of such strong-arming of industry was inestimable. “You can never figure it,” Amen said. “All the industries I have investigated lost more money during the period of racketeering than they did before. More and more had to be passed out to gangsters. ’ ’ Thomas E. Dewey, when he was special rackets prosecutor for the State of New York, estimated that eight rackets—only a few among the hundreds, large and small —were gouging £32,000,000 a. year in gross income out of New York’s pockets. Certainly racketeering has produced its million-dollar men. Louis “Lepke” Buchalter and Jacob “Gurrah” Shapiro were asserted to have taken a gross income of £BO,OOO a year from muscling-in enterprises.