Racketeering Revelations

ONLY SAPS WORK--Courtenay Terrett --Vanguard ($2).

Says Author Terrett, $1,000,000,000 "is a genuinely conservative estimate of the toll the rackets take from the purse of the American nation every year." Only Saps Work is his survey of U. S. racketeering, with particular consideration of New York. He found that Chicago's rackets get more publicity, New York's function more smoothly. "So adroitly are the rackets administered in the laundry and dry-cleaning industries, and the green vegetables, fruit, fish and ice trades that they are invisible to the naked eye."

Author Terrett makes the following assertions about New York rackets: That the building trades are "the field of the most extensive and intensive racketeering . . . today."

That six labor unions, "according to credible information ... are controlled or owned outright by racketeers."

That harbor piracy is common. The world's greatest seaport is "gangster dominated."

That New York is "the biggest sucker community in the country."

The racket, says he, is essentially an economic phenomenon: "The racket is but another of the devices the American nation has invented to combat the antimonopoly laws. It should not be considered from any other angle. . . . Its real nature is economic and that truth shall be demonstrated with increasingly frequent force."

Courtenay Terrett, 27, star reporter of the New York World, discovered the racketeering situation in New York by undertaking an investigation for the World. Racketeering, says he, is a good way to make easy money fast ; but racketeers are "unamusing and, like too many American business men, unable to talk interestingly of any topic outside their own field."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.