1942 - Crime

Crime

New York's City Council outlaws pinball machines in a law that takes effect in January. Mayor La Guardia has pushed through the measure, saying that schoolboys are stealing nickels and dimes from their mothers' pocketbooks to feed the machines that are feeding the underworld (slot-machine "king" Frank Costello relocates his activities to New Orleans). The mayor smashes machines with a sledgehammer for news photographers; most of the confiscated machines are dumped into the Atlantic, and the ban will continue until 1976, when a player will demonstrate to the City Council that new flippers and levers have made pinball a game of skill, not chance.

U.S. Naval Intelligence officers approach Charles "Lucky" Luciano at Dannemora Prison in the wake of the February 9 S.S. Normandie fire, and mobster Meyer Lansky persuades Luciano to have his men co-operate with the government in preventing sabotage on the mob-controlled Manhattan docks (the Brooklyn docks are largely controlled by Carlo Gambino, now 40). Luciano is transferred from Dannemora to a minimum-security facility.

Criminal elements associated with the Mafia steal gasoline- and food-ration stamps, selling them on the black market and enriching themselves as they did in the Prohibition years before 1933. They also begin to develop a profitable business in blackmailing homosexual men prominent in business, the law, and government.