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The Chicago Mafia was looking for new revenue streams since the repeal of Prohibition, and in 1934, installed George Browne as the IATSE president. One of the men who helped this happen was William “Willie” Bioff, an associate of Frank Nitti’s gang, the successor to Al Capone. Bioff became Browne’s right hand man and the “international representative” of IATSE. Through many questionable tactics, they consolidated their power within the union. With a two-percent “assessment” on all IA member’s earnings, they were able to build up a “defense fund” of about $60000 a month to continue fighting any of the many Locals who attempted to resist them. They also received $50000 from the major studios and $25000 from the minor ones to keep wages low and suppress potential strikes.
Brown and Biof case was famous at the time. Robert Lowell, the poets was locked up with them in a federal prison in Manhattan
…
These are the tranquillized Fifties,
and I am forty. Ought I to regret my seedtime?
I was a fire-breathing Catholic C.O.,
and made my manic statement,
telling off the state and president, and then
sat waiting sentence in the bull pen
beside a Negro boy with curlicues
of marijuana in his hair.
Given a year,
I walked on the roof of the West Street Jail, a short
enclosure like my school soccer court,
and saw the Hudson River once a day
through sooty clothesline entanglements
and bleaching khaki tenements.
Strolling, I yammered metaphysics with Abramowitz,
a jaundice-yellow (“it’s really tan”)
and fly-weight pacifist,
so vegetarian,
he wore rope shoes and preferred fallen fruit.
He tried to convert Bioff and Brown,
the Hollywood pimps, to his diet.
Hairy, muscular, suburban,
wearing chocolate double-breasted suits,
they blew their tops and beat him black and blue.
I was so out of things, I’d never heard
of the Jehovah’s Witnesses.
“Are you a C.O.?” I asked a fellow jailbird.
“No,” he answered, “I’m a J.W.”
He taught me the “hospital tuck,”
and pointed out the T-shirted back
of Murder Incorporated’s Czar Lepke,
there piling towels on a rack,
or dawdling off to his little segregated cell full
of things forbidden the common man:
a portable radio, a dresser, two toy American
flags tied together with a ribbon of Easter palm.
Flabby, bald, lobotomized,
he drifted in a sheepish calm,
where no agonizing reappraisal
jarred his concentration on the electric chair—
hanging like an oasis in his air
of lost connections….