Swing (Feb-Dec 1951)

;92 Su/ina December, mi tionally equipped to take Mr. Sullivan if they blew him up to fourteen feet and shot him along in four colors. Tale of Old Hollywood . . . THE other day Carmel Myers, the silent film star who now has her own TV show, was telling one of her guests about what fun they had on the set in the old days, which is to say, back when they kept the money. It was a nice little anecdote. A director had driven her to a restaurant in his Cadillac. When the doorman asked him what to with the car, the director said, "Keep it." No one ever saw the car again. Or the doorman either. Three Ring Circus THE Columbia Broadcasting System presented a fine series of radio documentaries on crime in a series of five broadcasts titled "The Nation's Nightmare." The country's criminals were given a thorough going-over which may or may not result in any very drastic action. This has been a great year for the exposure of crime. It has not yet been exactly sensational for the conviction of criminals. Perhaps next year, an imposing array of district attorneys with flashing smiles and telegenic personalities will spring up and send platoons of gamblers, narcotic salesmen and politcians tp jail right in front of the leering cameras. Then the D. A.'s will all go on to become either governors or narrators on "Gangbusters." While I still harbor some doubts as to the motives of those who are deploring the practice of murder with such great vehemence, CBS deserves great acclaim for the elaborate research and thorough workanship of its crime series. The most harrowing of them was "Crime on the Waterfront", a real shocker. CBS picked up a lot of their material for this one right on the New York and New Jersey waterfront and frequently faced physical danger in so doing. At one point a crowd of longshoremen threatened to throw a CBS truck in the river. While this particular broadcast was on the air, a man identifying himself as a longshoreman union official called the network and threatened all forms of retaliation. That's no idle threat either. If you listened to the broadcast, you'd discover they play real rough along the waterfront. "The record of racketeering, exploitation, extortion, conspiracy and murder is so foul that it's hard to believe even when you have documented proof before you. But it's true, shamefully and unquestionably true," declared Bill Down, the narrator, at the outset of this program. There follows a horrendous sightseeing tour around Manhattan Island. Each pier area and the men who control them, all men with long police records, were identified by name. "The waterfront from the Fulton Fish Market on the east to Pier 9 on the West Side, the famous tip of Manhattan Island, controlled by Socks Lanza, pal of Lucky Luciano — ten arrests, now out on parole after conviction for extortion." The slave conditions of the longshoremen to their hiring boss has been told often before but it was retold in condensed, simple and dramatic form. The shipping interests as well as the unions have a marked preference for ex-convicts as hiring bosses because they keep the men in line. Once in power, the mobsters fleece the longshoremen through a dozen rackets — numbers, bookmaking, kick-backs, loan-sharking. The man who doesn't play along doesn't work. But that is small potatoes next to the organized theft on the waterfront which costs the insurance companies $60,000,000 a year. As explained oy one longshoreman: "Yer see, they work with the checker, the fellow who checks the cargo as it comes off the ship. The checker is supposed to get the longshoremen to put