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The next Detroit: The catastrophic collapse of Atlantic City

With the closure of almost half of Atlantic City's casinos, Newark set to vote on gambling and casinos or racinos in almost every state, it seems as if the reasons for the very existence of Atlantic City are in serious jeopardy.
Israel Joffe
Atlantic City, once a major vacation spot during the roaring 20s and 1930s, as seen on HBOs Boardwalk Empire, collapsed when cheap air fare became the norm and people had no reason to head to the many beach town resorts on the East Coast. Within a few decades, the city, known for being an ‘oasis of sin’ during the prohibition era, fell into serious decline and dilapidation.
New Jersey officials felt the only way to bring Atlantic City back from the brink of disaster would be to legalize gambling. Atlantic City’s first casino, Resorts, first opened its doors in 1978. People stood shoulder to shoulder, packed into the hotel as gambling officially made its way to the East Coast. Folks in the East Coast didn't have to make a special trip all the way to Vegas in order to enjoy some craps, slots, roulette and more.
As time wore on, Atlantic City became the premier gambling spots in the country.
While detractors felt that the area still remained poor and dilapidated, officials were quick to point out that the casinos didn't bring the mass gentrification to Atlantic City as much as they hoped but the billions of dollars in revenue and thousands of jobs for the surrounding communities was well worth it.
Atlantic City developed a reputation as more of a short-stay ‘day-cation’ type of place, yet managed to stand firm against the 'adult playground' and 'entertainment capital of the world' Las Vegas.
Through-out the 1980s, Atlantic City would become an integral part of American pop culture as a place for east coast residents to gamble, watch boxing, wrestling, concerts and other sporting events.
However in the late 1980s, a landmark ruling considered Native-American reservations to be sovereign entities not bound by state law. It was the first potential threat to the iron grip Atlantic City and Vegas had on the gambling and entertainment industry.
Huge 'mega casinos' were built on reservations that rivaled Atlantic City and Vegas. In turn, Vegas built even more impressive casinos.
Atlantic City, in an attempt to make the city more appealing to the ‘big whale’ millionaire and billionaire gamblers, and in effort to move away from its ‘seedy’ reputation, built the luxurious Borgata casino in 2003. Harrah’s created a billion dollar extension and other casinos in the area went through serious renovations and re-branded themselves.
It seemed as if the bite that the Native American casinos took out of AC and Vegas’ profits was negligible and that the dominance of those two cities in the world of gambling would remain unchallenged.
Then Macau, formally a colony of Portugal, was handed back to the Chinese in 1999. The gambling industry there had been operated under a government-issued monopoly license by Stanley Ho's Sociedade de Turismo e Diversões de Macau. The monopoly was ended in 2002 and several casino owners from Las Vegas attempted to enter the market.
Under the one country, two systems policy, the territory remained virtually unchanged aside from mega casinos popping up everywhere. All the rich ‘whales’ from the far east had no reason anymore to go to the United States to spend their money.
Then came the biggest threat.
As revenue from dog and horse racing tracks around the United States dried up, government officials needed a way to bring back jobs and revitalize the surrounding communities. Slot machines in race tracks started in Iowa in 1994 but took off in 2004 when Pennsylvania introduced ‘Racinos’ in an effort to reduce property taxes for the state and to help depressed areas bounce back.
As of 2013, racinos were legal in ten states: Delaware, Louisiana, Maine, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and West Virginia with more expected in 2015.
Tracks like Delaware Park and West Virginia's Mountaineer Park, once considered places where local degenerates bet on broken-down nags in claiming races, are now among the wealthiest tracks around, with the best races.
The famous Aqueduct race track in Queens, NY, once facing an uncertain future, now possesses the most profitable casino in the United States.
From June 2012 to June 2013, Aqueduct matched a quarter of Atlantic City's total gaming revenue from its dozen casinos: $729.2 million compared with A.C.'s $2.9 billion. It has taken an estimated 15 percent hit on New Jersey casino revenue and climbing.
And it isn't just Aqueduct that's taking business away from them. Atlantic City's closest major city, Philadelphia, only 35-40 minutes away, and one of the largest cities in America, now has a casino that has contributed heavily to the decline in gamers visiting the area.
New Jersey is the third state in the U.S. to have authorized internet gambling. However, these online casinos are owned and controlled by Atlantic City casinos in an effort to boost profits in the face of fierce competition.
California, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Pennsylvania and Texas are hoping to join Delaware, Nevada, New Jersey and the U.S. Virgin Islands in offering online gambling to their residents.
With this in mind, it seems the very niche that Atlantic City once offered as a gambling and entertainment hub for east coast residents is heading toward the dustbin of history.
Time will tell if this city will end up like Detroit. However, the fact that they are losing their biggest industry to major competition, much like Detroit did, with depressed housing, casinos bankrupting/closing and businesses fleeing , it all makes Atlantic City’s fate seem eerily similar.
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Did The Mafia Blackmail FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover About Being Gay?

M. Wesley Swearingen, an FBI agent from 1951 to 1977, writes in his memoir FBI Secrets: An Agent's Expose about the long-standing rumors within the Bureau concerning the relationship between FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and Associate Director Clyde Tolson which include allegations that Hoover ignored the Mafia for decades because the wise guys had incriminating goods on the supposed lovers:
One year after arriving in Memphis, Hoover transferred me to Chicago, Illinois. I was thrilled – my mind was full of gangsters, Tommy guns, and the FBI's famous machine gun battles of the 1930s. It was clear to me from Chicago's newspaper headlines that gangsters ruled a Chicago underworld element in the 1950s because gangland style murders averaged close to 100 a year in the Chicago area. * * * But when I told my colleague and veteran agent Vince Coll of my big plans for Chicago, he said that Hoover did not recognize the existence of a mob in Chicago. According to Coll, Mafia leader Meyer Lansky's organization had enough on Hoover and Tolson, as closet homosexuals, that Hoover would never investigate the mob.
The allegations were fleshed out in Official and Confidential: the Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover by Anthony Summer. A review of the book ("Partners For Life") by Sidney Urquhart for Time magazine summarizes one alleged incident as follows:
Perhaps Summers' most bizarre revelation is an account provided by Susan Rosenstiel, the wife of a liquor distiller and gambling crony. Rosenstiel recalls attending what she thought would be an elegant private party at New York City's Plaza Hotel in the company of lawyer Roy Cohn, Hoover and others. Instead, Cohn introduced Rosenstiel to a woman named "Mary," dressed in a fluffy black dress, lace stockings and high heels. It was obvious Mary was no woman. "You could see where he shaved. It was Hoover," said Rosenstiel. Joined by Cohn, Hoover stripped down to a tiny garter belt and proceeded to have sex with two young boys. Cohn later joked about the evening. "That was really something, wasn't it, with Mary Hoover?"
The "two young boys" with whom Hoover allegedly had sex perhaps were provided by Ed "the Skull" Murphy who was a long-time Genovese associate involved in the crime family's gay bar and boy prostitution rackets in New York City. In Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked The Gay Revolution, David Carter writes:
John Paul Ranieri, a former prostitute interviewed for this history, provided critical testimony for corroborating and better understanding the larger implications of Murphy's criminal enterprises for gay history. Ranieri said that as a youth from Westchester County he had been forced by blackmail and Mafia-supplied drugs into a prostitution ring in which he remained active for three years before he escaped the mob's control. He claimed that a number of youths in the ring had disappeared after they got careless with talk, for while most of the customers were more or less average homosexual men with money, the regular clientele, according to Ranieri, also included famous men such as Malcolm Forbes, Cardinal Spellman, Liberace, U.S. Senators, a vice president of the United States, one of the most famous rock musicians, and J. Edgar Hoover. The mob's order, according to Ranieri, was strictly "Keep your zipper open and your mouth shut."
Ranieri said that he met J. Edgar Hoover at private parties at the Plaza Hotel and that Hoover's name was never mentioned. Hoover was always in drag, and Ranieri said he could tell that the FBI director was sure that no one recognized him. Ranieri said that he had ensured his own survival by having in his possession a photograph of himself with Hoover, given to him by the photographer.
How does the preceding information link Ed Murphy with J. Edgar Hoover? The connection is made evident in a news story written shortly after Hoover's homosexuality and transvestism became public. When [Anthony] Summer's book [Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover], was published [in 1993], a newspaper story about the 1960s national homosexual blackmail ring suddenly appeared after a quarter of a century of silence on the subject. Without mentioning Murphy's name, it quoted law enforcement sources who had worked on the case as saying that their investigation into the nationwide blackmail ring had turned up a photograph of Hoover "posing amiably" with the racket's ringleader and had uncovered information that Clyde Tolson, Hoover's lover, had himself "fallen victim to the extortion ring." After federal agents joined the investigation, both the photograph of Hoover and the documents about Tolson disappeared. * * * Very suggestive in this context is that Murphy would publicly say in 1978—before it became public information, as it did in the 1990s, that the Mafia had photographs of Hoover involved in sex acts—that he knew that J. Edgar Hoover "was one of my sisters."
Murphy's boys did have a habit of disappearing. For example, one Puerto Rican youth known as Tano with whom Murphy was sexually involved was kidnapped right off the streets never to be seen again according to one eyewitness to the incident as recounted by Carter in Stonewall.
Curiously, Murphy also was a long-standing FBI informant according to a May 8, 1978 article ("Skull Murphy: The Gay Double Agent") by Arthur Bell for The Village Voice. Indeed, this article contained the interview in which Murphy expressly speaks of J. Edgar Hoover as one of his "sisters": "He was the biggest fuckin' extortionist in this country. He had presidents by the balls. He had a record on everybody and his brother."
The allegations that Meyer Lansky had incriminating evidence against the FBI Director are particularly credible in light of the relationships among all the parties with political fixer Roy Cohn -- a fellow closet case who died of AIDS in 1986 -- at the center of it all.
Cohn was a personal friend of Hoover during the 1950s and 1960s, and the two shared extensive correspondence directed to each other on a first-name basis including a September 1957 exchange on an article published by the Director entitled "Let's Wipe Out the Schoolyard Sex Racket." Ironically, only months earlier an apparent obscenity indictment against Cohn had been dismissed according to an FBI memo dated June 28, 1957 from Assistant Director Louis B. Nichols to Clyde Tolson:
Roy Cohn called 6-27-57 to advise that Neil Gallagher of the New Jersey Turnpike Commission represented him in connection with the return of an indictment charging the sale of obscene literature. Gallagher went before the Superior Court judge in Union County, New Jersey, Thursday afternoon and moved the dismissal of the indictment. The district attorney joined him in this recommendation and issued a public apology to Cohn.
Cornelius "Neil" Gallagher later became a U.S. Congressman from Bayonne, NJ until he lost the seat in 1972 after Life magazine ran an article alleging mob ties.
The relationship between Hoover and Cohn is particularly troubling given that the FBI was fully aware that Cohn had ties to the most powerful bosses in the Mafia. For example, in 1964 federal prosecutor Robert Morgenthau was trying Cohn on corruption charges, and at the trial introduced excerpts of earlier grand jury testimony by Cohn. A March 27, 1964 article from The New York Times which the FBI contemporaneously clipped for its files on Cohn states:
The excerpts contained admissions by Mr. Cohn that he was acquainted with Geralde (Jerry) Catena, described by the Senate Rackets Committee as "No. 2 Man" in the Vito Genovese unit of the Cosa Nosta, and with Meyer Lansky, gangster. Mr. Cohn said he scarcely knew Lansky but that he had played golf two or three times with Catena.
Cohn further had represented the Stork Club which was Hoover's favorite stomping ground and Schenley Industries which was one of the country's largest liquor distillers. Louis Rosensteil was the president of Schenley Industries, and he had close ties to Meyer Lansky and Frank Costello. "In fact, on several occassions, Hoover was seen at the Stork Club fraternizing with people like Costello and Rosensteil" according to Peter J. Devico in The Mafia Made Easy. After Hoover's right-hand man Louis Nichols left the FBI in 1957, Cohn allegedly secured him a plum job making $100,000 a year at Schenley Industries although Nichols insisted in Hooveresque fashion that Rosensteil shunned the mob.
Of couse, the best evidence that Meyer Lansky had the goods on the FBI Director is that the storied agency never laid a hand on the gangster who was a bootleg kingpin during Prohibition, later founded Murder Inc., and finally ran gambling operations in Las Vegas and Havana, Cuba for the Genovese family. At the time of Lansky's death in 1983 the FBI estimated that he had a net worth of $300 million, and yet during his long criminal career the G-men never nailed him on a single charge or recovered a single penny. Indeed, the FBI did not even start a file on Lansky until the 1950s, and a review of the file's sparse contents illustrates that the agency's efforts to target him -- a purported top hoodlum -- were half-hearted at best involving little more than the occasional wiretap and a sometimes surveillance. Indeed, the newspaper articles on Lansky which the FBI clipped were more informative on the mobster's activities than the investigator reports. Ironically, Lansky only was arrested in 1972 -- the same year Hoover died -- as a result of an IRS investigation involving an alleged skimming scheme from a Vegas casino, and even that indictment conveniently was dismissed because Lansky was considered too ill to prosecute.
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15 Most Famous Slot Machines and Most Popular Slot Games

1. Liberty Bell

Invented and designed by a San Francisco mechanic named Charles Fey in 1895, the Liberty Bell is the first slot machine. The main symbols here include horseshoes, stars, spades, diamonds, hearts, and Liberty Bells. Once three bells are aligned, the machine pays 50 cents.
Having a coin slot at the top, it features small reels in the middle and a paytable at the bottom. It works like this - players insert a Nickel and pull a lever on the right-hand side to spin the reels. Although the Operator Bell and Liberty Bell have been removed from casinos, the original Liberty Bell on display can be seen in the Liberty Belle saloon in Reno, Nevada.

2. Lion's Share

One of the most famous slot machines, Microgaming’s classic slot Lion's Share, gained a lot of success back in 2014, due to news channels that discussed the topic on how Lion's Share's progressive jackpot hasn’t been hit for two decades. Thousands of people have tried but no one was lucky enough to pull it off.
Although the machine only featured 3 reels and only 1 payline, Lion’s Share has managed to become one of the most popular releases in Vegas, so popular that people waited in line just to put a coin into it and try spinning those reels.
Eventually, a New Hampshire couple hit the $2.4 million progressive jackpot in MGM’s Grand’s Lion’s Share. Soon after, MGM Grand made a decision to retire the Lion's Share machine since it required a lot of maintenance. Still, the game became part of slot history with a jackpot that took 20 years to win.

3. Megabucks

Created by IGT, Megabucks has managed to become one of the world's best progressive slot machines. The game is also responsible for numerous big wins throughout the entire jackpots’ history. Also known as the biggest money jackpots of all time, Megabucks slot machines are described as simple games with a massive progressive jackpot. One of the biggest wins was when an anonymous engineer won a staggering $39.7 million at Las Vegas' Excalibur, back in 2003.
As for the other big wins hit on this machine, there was a cocktail waitress Cynthia Jay Brennan who snagged an incredible $34.9 million at Vegas' Desert Inn, as well as a retired flight attendant hitting $27.5 million at Vegas' Palace Statio­n. J­ohanna Huendl won $22.6 million whereas an Illinois businessman hit $21.3 million on the very first spin.
However, after winning the prize, one of the winner's family members had a tragic accident, which (as some believe) only supported the theory of a Megabucks curse. Other unfortunate stories are just believed to be urban legends, including anecdotes about underage players, as well as casino employees, being big winners but not being able to claim their jackpots because of specific state laws and regulation.

4. Wheel of Fortune

IGT’s Wheel of Fortune has proven to be the second most famous slot machine of all time. Featuring a bonus feature just like the real show, the slot machine is usually played by many slot fans and can be found in numerous casinos all over the globe. Although the game comes in more variations, probably the most popular one is still its 3-reel version, with a colourful wheel at the top.
The Wheel of Fortune multiplayer game features a bank of machines where every player gets their own screen. What makes the game even more exciting is the multiplayer edition where people can play the bonus round together, which really intensifies the game show aspect.
In a 5-reel Wheel of Fortune slot, however, Wild symbols will help players land winning combos and, if you’re lucky enough, you may get a Super Wild that will boost your win up to 5x! Last but not least, the Triple Action Bonus is activated by getting at least 3 Triple Action Bonus symbols anywhere on the reels. But still, none of the newer Wheel of Fortune slots measure up to the original one because of the large progressive jackpot involved.
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5. Mega Fortune

Featuring 5 reels and 25 paylines, NetEnt’s Mega Fortune slot became very popular among players as it usually grows into a multimillion-euro amount before being hit. The main symbols here include luxury cars, yachts, and expensive jewellery, Mega Fortune is an online slot machine game which justifies its theme that comes with the largest ever online slot jackpots.
The game offers a few different features that make the entire gameplay more fascinating, however, by far the most interesting ones are the 3 different progressive jackpots: Mega Jackpot, Major Jackpot and Rapid Jackpot. There are counters for all 3 of these that are displayed above the reels. Champagne is the Scatter and if you land at least 3 of them simultaneously, you will trigger Free Spins bonus round. Likewise, Wheel of Luck is the Bonus symbol, and if you land 3 or more symbols in succession from left to right on an active payline, you will activate the Bonus game.
What’s interesting about this slot is the fact that a Finnish man won a huge jackpot worth €17.8 million while spinning the reels of Mega Fortune. This record from 2013, has been passed by Mega Moolah, but the game is still proof how rich players can get after playing Mega Fortune.
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6. Mega Moolah

Powered by Microgaming and being among most popular slot games, Mega Moolah is a 25-payline progressive slot which has served as a competitor to Mega Fortune's big jackpots. Followed by African safari music, the game features antelopes, elephants, giraffes, lions, monkeys and zebras as the main symbols.
Landing at least 3 Scatters at the same time will trigger 15 Free Spins. What’s more, all wins hit during Free Spins are tripled, whereas Free Spins can also be retriggered. Players can win one of the 4 Progressive Jackpots within the randomly triggered Bonus round.
The game paid some of the largest slot machine jackpots that have ever been triggered. In 2015,for example, Mega Moolah gained international recognition when a British soldier Jon Heywood won a massive €17,879,645.
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7. Cleopatra

Inspired by the famous Egyptian theme and Developed by IGT, Cleopatra is a 20-payline classic game that managed to stand out above similar releases. Featuring ancient Egyptian music, the main symbols here include Cleopatra, the Eye of Horus, scarabs, and pyramids. Landing at least 3 Sphinx symbols will trigger the Cleopatra Bonus, which awards 15 Free Spins. All prizes, except for the 5 Cleopatra symbols, are tripled in the Free Spins round.
The game has been so successful that it inspired its creators to make a sequel, Cleopatra II, with richer graphics and engaging sound effects. But even if you choose the original game, you'll be playing a classic that's still enjoyed by various players today. And, in case you land 5 Cleopatra symbols you’ll get a jackpot of 10,000 coins.

8. Book of Ra

Having a popular Ancient-Egypt theme, Book of Ra has always been one of the best choices to play in land based and online casinos. Powered by Novomatic, Book of Ra is a 9 payline video slot that offers plenty of bonus features and big payouts. With entertaining narrative and energising gameplay, there are numerous ways to win here.
In case you land 5 archaeologists simultaneously, you’ll get an impressive 5,000x your line bet. Earning big bucks, however, comes from the Free Spins feature. What players need to do is land at least 3 Scatter books to trigger the Free Spins feature. Pages of the book will flip and randomly determine which symbol will expand during the 10 Free Spins.
Although hitting the jackpot may not be easy, with only a few one in between, when big wins come, they can be big.

9. Starburst

There’s no denying NetEnt’s Starburst slot became kinda legendary in the iGaming universe. With its dark background and shiny space looking gemstones, Starburst slot features 5 reels and 10 paylines. The well-known futuristic music in this release is also easily noticeable, as is the game’s expanding Wild.
More precisely, the Wilds may only occur on the reels 2, 3 and 4, and, once 1 or more wilds appear on those reels, the Starburst Wild feature will be activated. During this feature, Starburst wilds expand to cover the entire reel and remain while the other reels re-spin. Should a new wild land during a re-spin, it expands and stays along with any previously expanded Starbursts for another re-spin.
Another cool feature is that Starburst pays both ways, instead of only paying you for landing at least 3 identical symbols on adjacent reels starting with the reel furthest to the left. The maximum single spin payout for a person (betting the $200 maximum) is $100,000. But, in order for that to happen, you must land five bars on consecutive reels on an active payline. Players love this slot, probably because it’s suitable for both newbies and experienced players.

10. Immortal Romance

Powered by Microgaming, Immortal Romance is based on sci-fi and the cult of Vampires which has become one of the popular casino slot machines in the last couple of years. Apart from superb graphics and great audio and visual effects, the slot features 5 reels and 243 paylines, and the theoretical RTP rate of 96.86%. The four main characters are Amber, Troy, Michael and Sarah.
When it comes to features and bonus games, Immortal Romance offers different variants. Wild Desire feature can occur randomly, and as soon as it does, it can turn 1 to 5 reels completely Wild. Likewise, landing 3 or more Scatters anywhere on the reels in this game, activates the Chamber of Spins feature which cannot be triggered during Wild Desire.
The game is still among the most popular slots, as many players still try their luck in this slot in the hope to get the highest multiplier possible.

11. Gonzo’s Quest

Beautifully designed video slot powered by NetEnt, Gonzo Quest features 5 reels and 20 paylines. The story is based on the famous conquistador Gonzalo Pizzaro who is on his way to the Peruvian ruins and just about to experience the unique quest.
Now, Gonzo’s Quest has become one of the most popular slot games of all time, probably because it comes with a few interesting features, Avalanche Multipliers feature being the most interesting one of all. In Essence, the reels in the slot move in a cascading manner which resemble an Avalanche. As you activate each new Avalanche, you will win a multiplier. Multipliers are displayed above the reels, and go up to 5x, that is if you land 4 or more avalanches simultaneously.

12. Age of the Gods

Being among famous slot machines and inspired by Ancient Greek mythology, Age of the Gods is a 5-reel, 20-payline progressive slot powered by Playtech. The main characters are Athena, Zeus, Hercules, and Poseidon power up 4 free game modes that offer extra wilds and win multipliers! Once you start spinning, you’ll come across a series of bonus features, such as Athena Free Games, Zeus Free Games, Poseidon Free Games and Hercules Free Games.
Wild logo is the game’s wild card and it substitutes for all symbols, with the exception of the Scatter. Landing at least 3 Scatters anywhere on the reels simultaneously triggers the Bonus game. Moreover, landing 5 God symbols in any order on an active payline will get you 200x your line bet!
During the main game, any spin can activate the Age of the Gods Mystery Jackpot. This mini game guarantees a win of up to 4 progressive jackpots. All you gotta do is click on the coins to reveal jackpot symbols, and if you match 3 identical ones, you will win that jackpot.

13. Money Honey

Having a cute theme, Money Honey is a 5-reel and a 243 payline slot themed around honey. With Wilds, Free Spins, Scatters and multipliers, it is a fast-paced exciting creation featuring vibrant colours. Likewise, it is a mobile-optimized slot which may be an excellent choice if you’re new to online gambling or if you’ve been playing for years.
Just like in other games, Wilds will help you win payouts as they are able to replicate most other symbols on the reels once a winning combination has been made. Another symbol you may want to keep your eyes on is a Money Wheel card. Once you manage to land at least 3 of them on your reels after a spin, the bonus game begins, and you spin a big wheel to choose a prize.

14. Quick Hit

And our selection wouldn’t be complete without Bally's Quick Hit slot. Featuring traditional Las Vegas symbols with sharp graphics and relaxed music, the video slot has 5 reels, 3 rows, and 30 paylines. Once you decide how many paylines you want to bet on, your gaming adventure can begin. There are Scatters symbols and three bonus games to benefit from.
The biggest payout here comes from landing the triple seven symbol. Should you land 5 of these lucky numbers on the reels at the same time, you will win 5,000 coins, whereas if you land five wild symbols, you’ll get 12,500 coins.
Those looking for hitting a jackpot should pay attention to Quick Hit Platinum symbols as 5 of these contribute to 5,000x players’ original bet amount – and even more, with the max bet activated. The second-highest jackpot can be hit by landing 9 Quick Hit Slot symbols. Both the Quick Hit Platinum and regular Quick Hit symbols must occur on or within one position of the first payline to be eligible for a jackpot win.

15. SlotZilla Zip Line

And now something completely different. We’re finishing our selection of famous slots in style, with the world’s largest slot machine - StotZilla Zip Line - 128 feet tall which has two take-off levels. This $12 million SlotZilla zip line took more than a year to build and opened its doors in 2014 and has already had more than 2 million riders so far.
The 11-story slot machine is decorated with over-sized dice, a glass of martini, a pink flamingo, video reels, coins, and two showgirls - Jennifer and Porsha. SlotZilla offers two different rider experiences - the upper Zoomline and a lower Zipline. This unique machine has a huge video screen with reels and a gigantic arm, replicating a true slot machine experience.
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Was FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover Gay?

M. Wesley Swearingen, an FBI agent from 1951 to 1977, writes in his memoir FBI Secrets: An Agent's Expose about the long-standing rumors within the Bureau concerning the relationship between FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and Associate Director Clyde Tolson which include allegations that Hoover ignored the Mafia for decades because the wise guys had incriminating goods on the supposed lovers:
One year after arriving in Memphis, Hoover transferred me to Chicago, Illinois. I was thrilled – my mind was full of gangsters, Tommy guns, and the FBI's famous machine gun battles of the 1930s. It was clear to me from Chicago's newspaper headlines that gangsters ruled a Chicago underworld element in the 1950s because gangland style murders averaged close to 100 a year in the Chicago area. * * * But when I told my colleague and veteran agent Vince Coll of my big plans for Chicago, he said that Hoover did not recognize the existence of a mob in Chicago. According to Coll, Mafia leader Meyer Lansky's organization had enough on Hoover and Tolson, as closet homosexuals, that Hoover would never investigate the mob.
The allegations were fleshed out in Official and Confidential: the Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover by Anthony Summer. A review of the book ("Partners For Life") by Sidney Urquhart for Time magazine summarizes one alleged incident as follows:
Perhaps Summers' most bizarre revelation is an account provided by Susan Rosenstiel, the wife of a liquor distiller and gambling crony. Rosenstiel recalls attending what she thought would be an elegant private party at New York City's Plaza Hotel in the company of lawyer Roy Cohn, Hoover and others. Instead, Cohn introduced Rosenstiel to a woman named "Mary," dressed in a fluffy black dress, lace stockings and high heels. It was obvious Mary was no woman. "You could see where he shaved. It was Hoover," said Rosenstiel. Joined by Cohn, Hoover stripped down to a tiny garter belt and proceeded to have sex with two young boys. Cohn later joked about the evening. "That was really something, wasn't it, with Mary Hoover?"
The "two young boys" with whom Hoover allegedly had sex perhaps were provided by Ed "the Skull" Murphy who was a long-time Genovese associate involved in the crime family's gay bar and boy prostitution rackets in New York City. In Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked The Gay Revolution, David Carter writes:
John Paul Ranieri, a former prostitute interviewed for this history, provided critical testimony for corroborating and better understanding the larger implications of Murphy's criminal enterprises for gay history. Ranieri said that as a youth from Westchester County he had been forced by blackmail and Mafia-supplied drugs into a prostitution ring in which he remained active for three years before he escaped the mob's control. He claimed that a number of youths in the ring had disappeared after they got careless with talk, for while most of the customers were more or less average homosexual men with money, the regular clientele, according to Ranieri, also included famous men such as Malcolm Forbes, Cardinal Spellman, Liberace, U.S. Senators, a vice president of the United States, one of the most famous rock musicians, and J. Edgar Hoover. The mob's order, according to Ranieri, was strictly "Keep your zipper open and your mouth shut."
Ranieri said that he met J. Edgar Hoover at private parties at the Plaza Hotel and that Hoover's name was never mentioned. Hoover was always in drag, and Ranieri said he could tell that the FBI director was sure that no one recognized him. Ranieri said that he had ensured his own survival by having in his possession a photograph of himself with Hoover, given to him by the photographer.
How does the preceding information link Ed Murphy with J. Edgar Hoover? The connection is made evident in a news story written shortly after Hoover's homosexuality and transvestism became public. When [Anthony] Summer's book [Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover], was published [in 1993], a newspaper story about the 1960s national homosexual blackmail ring suddenly appeared after a quarter of a century of silence on the subject. Without mentioning Murphy's name, it quoted law enforcement sources who had worked on the case as saying that their investigation into the nationwide blackmail ring had turned up a photograph of Hoover "posing amiably" with the racket's ringleader and had uncovered information that Clyde Tolson, Hoover's lover, had himself "fallen victim to the extortion ring." After federal agents joined the investigation, both the photograph of Hoover and the documents about Tolson disappeared. * * * Very suggestive in this context is that Murphy would publicly say in 1978—before it became public information, as it did in the 1990s, that the Mafia had photographs of Hoover involved in sex acts—that he knew that J. Edgar Hoover "was one of my sisters."
Murphy's boys did have a habit of disappearing. For example, one Puerto Rican youth known as Tano with whom Murphy was sexually involved was kidnapped right off the streets never to be seen again according to one eyewitness to the incident as recounted by Carter in Stonewall.
Curiously, Murphy also was a long-standing FBI informant according to a May 8, 1978 article ("Skull Murphy: The Gay Double Agent") by Arthur Bell for The Village Voice. Indeed, this article contained the interview in which Murphy expressly speaks of J. Edgar Hoover as one of his "sisters": "He was the biggest fuckin' extortionist in this country. He had presidents by the balls. He had a record on everybody and his brother."
The allegations that Meyer Lansky had incriminating evidence against the FBI Director are particularly credible in light of the relationships among all the parties with political fixer Roy Cohn -- a fellow closet case who died of AIDS in 1986 -- at the center of it all.
Cohn was a personal friend of Hoover during the 1950s and 1960s, and the two shared extensive correspondence directed to each other on a first-name basis including a September 1957 exchange on an article published by the Director entitled "Let's Wipe Out the Schoolyard Sex Racket." Ironically, only months earlier an apparent obscenity indictment against Cohn had been dismissed according to an FBI memo dated June 28, 1957 from Assistant Director Louis B. Nichols to Clyde Tolson:
Roy Cohn called 6-27-57 to advise that Neil Gallagher of the New Jersey Turnpike Commission represented him in connection with the return of an indictment charging the sale of obscene literature. Gallagher went before the Superior Court judge in Union County, New Jersey, Thursday afternoon and moved the dismissal of the indictment. The district attorney joined him in this recommendation and issued a public apology to Cohn.
Cornelius "Neil" Gallagher later became a U.S. Congressman from Bayonne, NJ until he lost the seat in 1972 after Life magazine ran an article alleging mob ties.
The relationship between Hoover and Cohn is particularly troubling given that the FBI was fully aware that Cohn had ties to the most powerful bosses in the Mafia. For example, in 1964 federal prosecutor Robert Morgenthau was trying Cohn on corruption charges, and at the trial introduced excerpts of earlier grand jury testimony by Cohn. A March 27, 1964 article from The New York Times which the FBI contemporaneously clipped for its files on Cohn states:
The excerpts contained admissions by Mr. Cohn that he was acquainted with Geralde (Jerry) Catena, described by the Senate Rackets Committee as "No. 2 Man" in the Vito Genovese unit of the Cosa Nosta, and with Meyer Lansky, gangster. Mr. Cohn said he scarcely knew Lansky but that he had played golf two or three times with Catena.
Cohn further had represented the Stork Club which was Hoover's favorite stomping ground and Schenley Industries which was one of the country's largest liquor distillers. Louis Rosensteil was the president of Schenley Industries, and he had close ties to Meyer Lansky and Frank Costello. "In fact, on several occassions, Hoover was seen at the Stork Club fraternizing with people like Costello and Rosensteil" according to Peter J. Devico in The Mafia Made Easy. After Hoover's right-hand man Louis Nichols left the FBI in 1957, Cohn allegedly secured him a plum job making $100,000 a year at Schenley Industries although Nichols insisted in Hooveresque fashion that Rosensteil shunned the mob.
Of couse, the best evidence that Meyer Lansky had the goods on the FBI Director is that the storied agency never laid a hand on the gangster who was a bootleg kingpin during Prohibition, later founded Murder Inc., and finally ran gambling operations in Las Vegas and Havana, Cuba for the Genovese family. At the time of Lansky's death in 1983 the FBI estimated that he had a net worth of $300 million, and yet during his long criminal career the G-men never nailed him on a single charge or recovered a single penny. Indeed, the FBI did not even start a file on Lansky until the 1950s, and a review of the file's sparse contents illustrates that the agency's efforts to target him -- a purported top hoodlum -- were half-hearted at best involving little more than the occasional wiretap and a sometimes surveillance. Indeed, the newspaper articles on Lansky which the FBI clipped were more informative on the mobster's activities than the investigator reports. Ironically, Lansky only was arrested in 1972 -- the same year Hoover died -- as a result of an IRS investigation involving an alleged skimming scheme from a Vegas casino, and even that indictment conveniently was dismissed because Lansky was considered too ill to prosecute.
submitted by PhillipCrawfordJr to lgbthistory [link] [comments]

Was FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover Gay?

M. Wesley Swearingen, an FBI agent from 1951 to 1977, writes in his memoir FBI Secrets: An Agent's Expose about the long-standing rumors within the Bureau concerning the relationship between FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and Associate Director Clyde Tolson which include allegations that Hoover ignored the Mafia for decades because the wise guys had incriminating goods on the supposed lovers:
One year after arriving in Memphis, Hoover transferred me to Chicago, Illinois. I was thrilled – my mind was full of gangsters, Tommy guns, and the FBI's famous machine gun battles of the 1930s. It was clear to me from Chicago's newspaper headlines that gansters ruled a Chicago underworld element in the 1950s because gangland style murders averaged close to 100 a year in the Chicago area. * * * But when I told my colleague and veteran agent Vince Coll of my big plans for Chicago, he said that Hoover did not recognize the existence of a mob in Chicago. According to Coll, Mafia leader Meyer Lansky's organization had enough on Hoover and Tolson, as closet homosexuals, that Hoover would never investigate the mob.
The allegations were fleshed out in Official and Confidential: the Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover by Anthony Summer. A review of the book ("Partners For Life") by Sidney Urquhart for Time magazine summarizes one alleged incident as follows:
Perhaps Summers' most bizarre revelation is an account provided by Susan Rosenstiel, the wife of a liquor distiller and gambling crony. Rosenstiel recalls attending what she thought would be an elegant private party at New York City's Plaza Hotel in the company of lawyer Roy Cohn, Hoover and others. Instead, Cohn introduced Rosenstiel to a woman named "Mary," dressed in a fluffy black dress, lace stockings and high heels. It was obvious Mary was no woman. "You could see where he shaved. It was Hoover," said Rosenstiel. Joined by Cohn, Hoover stripped down to a tiny garter belt and proceeded to have sex with two young boys. Cohn later joked about the evening. "That was really something, wasn't it, with Mary Hoover?"
The "two young boys" with whom Hoover allegedly had sex perhaps were provided by Ed "the Skull" Murphy who was a long-time Genovese associate involved in the crime family's gay bar and boy prostitution rackets in New York City. In Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked The Gay Revolution, David Carter writes:
John Paul Ranieri, a former prostitute interviewed for this history, provided critical testimony for corroborating and better understanding the larger implications of Murphy's criminal enterprises for gay history. Ranieri said that as a youth from Westchester County he had been forced by blackmail and Mafia-supplied drugs into a prostitution ring in which he remained active for three years before he escaped the mob's control. He claimed that a number of youths in the ring had disappeared after they got careless with talk, for while most of the customers were more or less average homosexual men with money, the regular clientele, according to Ranieri, also included famous men such as Malcolm Forbes, Cardinal Spellman, Liberace, U.S. Senators, a vice president of the United States, one of the most famous rock musicians, and J. Edgar Hoover. The mob's order, according to Ranieri, was strictly "Keep your zipper open and your mouth shut."
Ranieri said that he met J. Edgar Hoover at private parties at the Plaza Hotel and that Hoover's name was never mentioned. Hoover was always in drag, and Ranieri said he could tell that the FBI director was sure that no one recognized him. Ranieri said that he had ensured his own survival by having in his possession a photograph of himself with Hoover, given to him by the photographer.
How does the preceding information link Ed Murphy with J. Edgar Hoover? The connection is made evident in a news story written shortly after Hoover's homosexuality and transvestism became public. When [Anthony] Summer's book [Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover], was published [in 1993], a newspaper story about the 1960s national homosexual blackmail ring suddenly appeared after a quarter of a century of silence on the subject. Without mentioning Murphy's name, it quoted law enforcement sources who had worked on the case as saying that their investigation into the nationwide blackmail ring had turned up a photograph of Hoover "posing amiably" with the racket's ringleader and had uncovered information that Clyde Tolson, Hoover's lover, had himself "fallen victim to the extortion ring." After federal agents joined the investigation, both the photograph of Hoover and the documents about Tolson disappeared. * * * Very suggestive in this context is that Murphy would publicly say in 1978—before it became public information, as it did in the 1990s, that the Mafia had photographs of Hoover involved in sex acts—that he knew that J. Edgar Hoover "was one of my sisters."
Murphy's boys did have a habit of disappearing. For example, one Puerto Rican youth known as Tano with whom Murphy was sexually involved was kidnapped right off the streets never to be seen again according to one eyewitness to the incident as recounted by Carter in Stonewall.
Curiously, Murphy also was a long-standing FBI informant according to a May 8, 1978 article ("Skull Murphy: The Gay Double Agent") by Arthur Bell for The Village Voice. Indeed, this article contained the interview in which Murphy expressly speaks of J. Edgar Hoover as one of his "sisters": "He was the biggest fuckin' extortionist in this country. He had presidents by the balls. He had a record on everybody and his brother."
The allegations that Meyer Lansky had incriminating evidence against the FBI Director are particularly credible in light of the relationships among all the parties with political fixer Roy Cohn -- a closet case who died of AIDS in 1986 -- at the center of it all.
Cohn was a personal friend of Hoover during the 1950s and 1960s, and the two shared extensive correspondence directed to each other on a first-name basis including a September 1957 exchange on an article published by the Director entitled "Let's Wipe Out the Schoolyard Sex Racket." Ironically, only months earlier an apparent obscenity indictment against Cohn had been dismissed according to an FBI memo dated June 28, 1957 from Assistant Director Louis B. Nichols to Clyde Tolson:
Roy Cohn called 6-27-57 to advise that Neil Gallagher of the New Jersey Turnpike Commission represented him in connection with the return of an indictment charging the sale of obscene literature. Gallagher went before the Superior Court judge in Union County, New Jersey, Thursday afternoon and moved the dismissal of the indictment. The district attorney joined him in this recommendation and issued a public apology to Cohn.
Cornelius "Neil" Gallagher later became a U.S. Congressman from Bayonne, NJ until he lost the seat in 1972 after Life magazine ran an article alleging mob ties.
The relationship between Hoover and Cohn is particularly troubling given that the FBI was fully aware that Cohn had ties to the most powerful bosses in the Mafia. For example, in 1964 federal prosecutor Robert Morgenthau was trying Cohn on corruption charges, and at the trial introduced excerpts of earlier grand jury testimony by Cohn. A March 27, 1964 article from The New York Times which the FBI contemporaneously clipped for its files on Cohn states:
The excerpts contained admissions by Mr. Cohn that he was acquainted with Geralde (Jerry) Catena, described by the Senate Rackets Committee as "No. 2 Man" in the Vito Genovese unit of the Cosa Nosta, and with Meyer Lansky, gangster. Mr. Cohn said he scarcely knew Lansky but that he had played golf two or three times with Catena.
Cohn further had represented the Stork Club which was Hoover's favorite stomping ground and Schenley Industries which was one of the country's largest liquor distillers. Louis Rosensteil was the president of Schenley Industries, and he had close ties to Meyer Lansky and Frank Costello. "In fact, on several occassions, Hoover was seen at the Stork Club fraternizing with people like Costello and Rosensteil" according to Peter J. Devico in The Mafia Made Easy. After Hoover's right-hand man Louis Nichols left the FBI in 1957, Cohn allegedly secured him a plum job making $100,000 a year at Schenley Industries although Nichols insisted in Hooveresque fashion that Rosensteil shunned the mob.
Of couse, the best evidence that Meyer Lansky had the goods on the FBI Director is that the storied agency never laid a hand on the gangster who was a bootleg kingpin during Prohibition, later founded Murder Inc., and finally ran gambling operations in Las Vegas and Havana, Cuba for the Genovese family. At the time of Lansky's death in 1983 the FBI estimated that he had a net worth of $300 million, and yet during his long criminal career the G-men never nailed him on a single charge or recovered a single penny. Indeed, the FBI did not even start a file on Lansky until the 1950s, and a review of the file's sparse contents illustrates that the agency's efforts to target him -- a purported top hoodlum -- were half-hearted at best involving little more than the occasional wiretap and a sometimes surveillance. Indeed, the newspaper articles on Lansky which the FBI clipped were more informative on the mobster's activities than the investigator reports. Ironically, Lansky only was arrested in 1972 -- the same year Hoover died -- as a result of an IRS investigation involving an alleged skimming scheme from a Vegas casino, and even that indictment conveniently was dismissed because Lansky was considered too ill to prosecute.
submitted by PhillipCrawfordJr to askgaybros [link] [comments]

Was FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover Gay?

M. Wesley Swearingen, an FBI agent from 1951 to 1977, writes in his memoir FBI Secrets: An Agent's Expose about the long-standing rumors within the Bureau concerning the relationship between FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and Associate Director Clyde Tolson which include allegations that Hoover ignored the Mafia for decades because the wise guys had incriminating goods on the supposed lovers:
One year after arriving in Memphis, Hoover transferred me to Chicago, Illinois. I was thrilled – my mind was full of gangsters, Tommy guns, and the FBI's famous machine gun battles of the 1930s. It was clear to me from Chicago's newspaper headlines that gansters ruled a Chicago underworld element in the 1950s because gangland style murders averaged close to 100 a year in the Chicago area. * * * But when I told my colleague and veteran agent Vince Coll of my big plans for Chicago, he said that Hoover did not recognize the existence of a mob in Chicago. According to Coll, Mafia leader Meyer Lansky's organization had enough on Hoover and Tolson, as closet homosexuals, that Hoover would never investigate the mob.
The allegations were fleshed out in Official and Confidential: the Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover by Anthony Summer. A review of the book ("Partners For Life") by Sidney Urquhart for Time magazine summarizes one alleged incident as follows:
Perhaps Summers' most bizarre revelation is an account provided by Susan Rosenstiel, the wife of a liquor distiller and gambling crony. Rosenstiel recalls attending what she thought would be an elegant private party at New York City's Plaza Hotel in the company of lawyer Roy Cohn, Hoover and others. Instead, Cohn introduced Rosenstiel to a woman named "Mary," dressed in a fluffy black dress, lace stockings and high heels. It was obvious Mary was no woman. "You could see where he shaved. It was Hoover," said Rosenstiel. Joined by Cohn, Hoover stripped down to a tiny garter belt and proceeded to have sex with two young boys. Cohn later joked about the evening. "That was really something, wasn't it, with Mary Hoover?"
The "two young boys" with whom Hoover allegedly had sex perhaps were provided by Ed "the Skull" Murphy who was a long-time Genovese associate involved in the crime family's gay bar and boy prostitution rackets in New York City. In Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked The Gay Revolution, David Carter writes:
John Paul Ranieri, a former prostitute interviewed for this history, provided critical testimony for corroborating and better understanding the larger implications of Murphy's criminal enterprises for gay history. Ranieri said that as a youth from Westchester County he had been forced by blackmail and Mafia-supplied drugs into a prostitution ring in which he remained active for three years before he escaped the mob's control. He claimed that a number of youths in the ring had disappeared after they got careless with talk, for while most of the customers were more or less average homosexual men with money, the regular clientele, according to Ranieri, also included famous men such as Malcolm Forbes, Cardinal Spellman, Liberace, U.S. Senators, a vice president of the United States, one of the most famous rock musicians, and J. Edgar Hoover. The mob's order, according to Ranieri, was strictly "Keep your zipper open and your mouth shut."
Ranieri said that he met J. Edgar Hoover at private parties at the Plaza Hotel and that Hoover's name was never mentioned. Hoover was always in drag, and Ranieri said he could tell that the FBI director was sure that no one recognized him. Ranieri said that he had ensured his own survival by having in his possession a photograph of himself with Hoover, given to him by the photographer.
How does the preceding information link Ed Murphy with J. Edgar Hoover? The connection is made evident in a news story written shortly after Hoover's homosexuality and transvestism became public. When [Anthony] Summer's book [Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover], was published [in 1993], a newspaper story about the 1960s national homosexual blackmail ring suddenly appeared after a quarter of a century of silence on the subject. Without mentioning Murphy's name, it quoted law enforcement sources who had worked on the case as saying that their investigation into the nationwide blackmail ring had turned up a photograph of Hoover "posing amiably" with the racket's ringleader and had uncovered information that Clyde Tolson, Hoover's lover, had himself "fallen victim to the extortion ring." After federal agents joined the investigation, both the photograph of Hoover and the documents about Tolson disappeared. * * * Very suggestive in this context is that Murphy would publicly say in 1978—before it became public information, as it did in the 1990s, that the Mafia had photographs of Hoover involved in sex acts—that he knew that J. Edgar Hoover "was one of my sisters."
Murphy's boys did have a habit of disappearing. For example, one Puerto Rican youth known as Tano with whom Murphy was sexually involved was kidnapped right off the streets never to be seen again according to one eyewitness to the incident as recounted by Carter in Stonewall.
Curiously, Murphy also was a long-standing FBI informant according to a May 8, 1978 article ("Skull Murphy: The Gay Double Agent") by Arthur Bell for The Village Voice. Indeed, this article contained the interview in which Murphy expressly speaks of J. Edgar Hoover as one of his "sisters": "He was the biggest fuckin' extortionist in this country. He had presidents by the balls. He had a record on everybody and his brother."
The allegations that Meyer Lansky had incriminating evidence against the FBI Director are particularly credible in light of the relationships among all the parties with political fixer Roy Cohn -- a fellow closet case who died of AIDS in 1986 -- at the center of it all.
Cohn was a personal friend of Hoover during the 1950s and 1960s, and the two shared extensive correspondence directed to each other on a first-name basis including a September 1957 exchange on an article published by the Director entitled "Let's Wipe Out the Schoolyard Sex Racket." Ironically, only months earlier an apparent obscenity indictment against Cohn had been dismissed according to an FBI memo dated June 28, 1957 from Assistant Director Louis B. Nichols to Clyde Tolson:
Roy Cohn called 6-27-57 to advise that Neil Gallagher of the New Jersey Turnpike Commission represented him in connection with the return of an indictment charging the sale of obscene literature. Gallagher went before the Superior Court judge in Union County, New Jersey, Thursday afternoon and moved the dismissal of the indictment. The district attorney joined him in this recommendation and issued a public apology to Cohn.
Cornelius "Neil" Gallagher later became a U.S. Congressman from Bayonne, NJ until he lost the seat in 1972 after Life magazine ran an article alleging mob ties.
The relationship between Hoover and Cohn is particularly troubling given that the FBI was fully aware that Cohn had ties to the most powerful bosses in the Mafia. For example, in 1964 federal prosecutor Robert Morgenthau was trying Cohn on corruption charges, and at the trial introduced excerpts of earlier grand jury testimony by Cohn. A March 27, 1964 article from The New York Times which the FBI contemporaneously clipped for its files on Cohn states:
The excerpts contained admissions by Mr. Cohn that he was acquainted with Geralde (Jerry) Catena, described by the Senate Rackets Committee as "No. 2 Man" in the Vito Genovese unit of the Cosa Nosta, and with Meyer Lansky, gangster. Mr. Cohn said he scarcely knew Lansky but that he had played golf two or three times with Catena.
Cohn further had represented the Stork Club which was Hoover's favorite stomping ground and Schenley Industries which was one of the country's largest liquor distillers. Louis Rosensteil was the president of Schenley Industries, and he had close ties to Meyer Lansky and Frank Costello. "In fact, on several occassions, Hoover was seen at the Stork Club fraternizing with people like Costello and Rosensteil" according to Peter J. Devico in The Mafia Made Easy. After Hoover's right-hand man Louis Nichols left the FBI in 1957, Cohn allegedly secured him a plum job making $100,000 a year at Schenley Industries although Nichols insisted in Hooveresque fashion that Rosensteil shunned the mob.
Of couse, the best evidence that Meyer Lansky had the goods on the FBI Director is that the storied agency never laid a hand on the gangster who was a bootleg kingpin during Prohibition, later founded Murder Inc., and finally ran gambling operations in Las Vegas and Havana, Cuba for the Genovese family. At the time of Lansky's death in 1983 the FBI estimated that he had a net worth of $300 million, and yet during his long criminal career the G-men never nailed him on a single charge or recovered a single penny. Indeed, the FBI did not even start a file on Lansky until the 1950s, and a review of the file's sparse contents illustrates that the agency's efforts to target him -- a purported top hoodlum -- were half-hearted at best involving little more than the occasional wiretap and a sometimes surveillance. Indeed, the newspaper articles on Lansky which the FBI clipped were more informative on the mobster's activities than the investigator reports. Ironically, Lansky only was arrested in 1972 -- the same year Hoover died -- as a result of an IRS investigation involving an alleged skimming scheme from a Vegas casino, and even that indictment conveniently was dismissed because Lansky was considered too ill to prosecute.
submitted by PhillipCrawfordJr to Mafia [link] [comments]

Transparent Voter Suppression by GOP

Alabama
Arizona
Arkansas
Florida
Georgia
Illinois
Indiana
Kansas
Maryland
Michigan
Mississippi
Nevada
New Hampshire
New York
North Carolina
North Dakota
Ohio
Pennsylvania
Texas
Virginia
Wisconsin
National
"I don't want everybody to vote... As a matter of fact our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down."
-Paul Weyrich, co-founder of Heritage Foundation and ALEC, 1980
“Look, if African Americans voted overwhelmingly Republican, they would have kept early voting right where it was,” Wrenn said. “It wasn’t about discriminating against African Americans. They just ended up in the middle of it because they vote Democrat.”
-Carter Wrenn, Republican consultant in North Carolina
“There's a lot of liberal folks in those other schools who that maybe we don't want to vote. Maybe we want to make it just a little more difficult. And I think that's a great idea.”
-Cindy Hyde-Smith, Republican Senator of Mississippi, 2003
Seeking more examples, if you have them.
Get out and vote. https://www.vote.org/
submitted by Kakamile to Keep_Track [link] [comments]

This is Why I Hate Working with Children

Hello All,
It’s your least favorite semi-regular NoSleep contributor here to share another of my collected stories. If you’re unfamiliar I normally edit myself out of these in order to tell the story from the victim’s point of view. I see lots of weird shit, and it gives me all kinds of pleasure to share it with you. FWIW if you’ve had a terrifying experience and would like to share with me, I’d be glad to pass a scare along to others.
This latest retelling… I don’t know what to say. I can’t think of a good way to take myself out. If I was better at writing fiction, maybe I could, but since I'm not; the easiest way to convey this one was just to tell it from my point of view. Happy Nightmares.
I lease a small office in the Suburbs of North Chicagoland. It’s modest but it’s well-kept and tidy. Truth be told I keep it for two reasons: 1) To store all my “nice” books, the ones that I might have electronic copies of, but can’t bear to part with because of leather binding or sentimental reasons etc., and 2) because I need a space away from my home office to do things from time to time. As you can imagine, meeting with people that have had experiences with the supernatural and other terrifying occurrences, I don’t really want to meet all those people at my home office. If anyone were to look into my past, it makes for a nice appearance and façade of normalcy.
The unit has a waiting room and an office. The waiting room has a decent couch and some comfy sitting chairs. I put out brain teasers and magazines. There’s even a decent Keurig coffee machine and pod tree next to a water dispenser.
My office is full of my creature comforts for when I’m staying there instead of in my house proper. Some clients see it and decide to talk in the waiting room, their loss. Inside you'll find a futon, and rocker recliner, a couple of desk chairs for client and a room filing over-sized desk with matching chair. It might sound eclectic, but I like what I like.
For anyone in the know. You can come to me, I will interview you. I will ask you lots of questions maybe do some investigation on your behalf (if your story initial story is interesting enough) and if you feel like it you can pay me. If your story is interesting I can convey it for you. I know it’s not a real strong business model, but I’m set and I’m doing what I love.
My business is word of mouth only. It helps to keep out most of the doubters and adventure seekers. I have nothing against either of these groups, but I had to earn my way into this profession, so I believe in the right of passage for them as well.
Tommy’s mother came into my office waiting room with her son in tow. She didn’t have an appointment and I was getting the distinct feeling that somehow she thought barging into my office and sitting in my waiting room was somehow an imposition on her.
I beckoned them in offering coffee and pop (yes pop, even after being exiled to Illinois I’m still a Michigan boy). I didn’t have anything else going on so I thought I would see if I could help this woman and her child, or at least get a good story out of it.
“Tommy be a good boy and stay here playing with the puzzles, okay?” She smiled at ‘Tommy’ who seemed totally detached. I’m not saying to be mean, but where I grew up, they would have called that ‘sickly’. For a kid that age, his clothes; which were way nicer than mine, were looking loose like he hadn’t been eating. His face was pale and sallow like he’d been losing sleep. The poor kid had bags under his eyes and a death grip on a small blanket. She hadn’t needed to tell the kid not to move, he looked like if he did anything it would be pass out in my waiting room. This is usually pretty good indication that I’ll have a story to share with you. Poor kid.
September is usually the lull before the storm in the supernatural realm. It’s not that all the preternatural creatures of the world are dormant, far from it, it’s just that they seem to be laying low from the heat of August and bidding their time for late October and early November. So I was a little surprised to see someone, and being free I was eager to take down someone’s story. I closed the door so Tommy didn’t have to hear.
“What can I do for you Mrs.…?”
“Buchanan.” I changed the name, anonymity is good for business. “I am hiring you to come to my house. There you are to tell my family and house-staff that there’s nothing supernatural going on. You’re going to tell my son specifically that there’s no such thing as monsters, and that he doesn’t need that ratty little security blanket with him night and day.”
I had to smirk at this. It’s not my typical fare. This was going to end up being one hell of ride. I stared at her for a minute and started cracking my knuckles. It’s a bit of a subconscious habit. I know it can be off putting but I think what bothers people most about it is that I do it one handed. My little focusing technique is the result of a lot fist fights. If people don’t know me well it can certainly amp up the tension.
“I’m sorry Mrs. Buchanan. I decide what cases I take. Such a statement could only come after thorough investigation; and logically, I can’t prove the absence of something without going to some extreme lengths. And, it’s been my experience people have never needed help being told there’s no such thing as monsters, even as cover face reality is biting on their throat.”
“Hmm. I see. Tell me, how does someone like you become acquainted with classical logic?” I could tell by her tone that she was goading me. Seems like she thought she clever by throwing a jab without insulting me outright.
“And by ‘someone like’ me what exactly do you mean?”
“Oh dear, isn’t it obvious? Someone so rural, and clearly a charlatan. There’s not need to be crass about it, I’ll pay you your fee, and you can do your little spiel in my household and your little placebo will help my son sleep through a night.”
I grinned at her. Now she’d done it. I may be young, I may have a rural upbringing. But don’t EVER confuse young and rural with being stupid.
How in the Hell had this one gotten my card? I should mention that my grin is also a bit off putting. It’s the same grin whether I’m happy or angry. You can only pickup subtle differences by looking in my eyes. In most people, it makes them sweat. I wanted this prissy little twat out of my office, but the chance to make her eat her own words and to get a sufficiently scary story to creep out those of you brave enough to enjoy my work was too much. I wanted her to sweat through that stupid Vera Wang ensemble, but if I told her to ‘go pound sand’. I would miss my chance.
Well nice to know that this ice queen wasn’t totally oblivious she had the good sense to realize that my grin wasn’t friendly.
“You know, we have books out in the country too. Internet and satellite TV even, indoor plumbing and everything.”
“Maybe this was a bigger mistake than I thought. I should be going.”
“Please stay. I insist.” With that there were little micro signs of unease on her face, she was clearly a seasoned pro at hiding emotion.
“I will of course pay you for your time this afternoon.” Ah money, growing up poor I always wondered what it would be like when I got to this level. Turns out, when you no longer have to worry about being able to buy most things, you think you can buy all things.
“Of course you will. Everyone who comes through my door pays me. No one ever leaves without at least telling me their story.”
“Well I’m sure that must keep you very busy, so now I really must leave.”
“No One. Leaves. Without. Telling. Their. Story.” I cracked my knuckles again. I know, those tactics are a little harsh, but she was really being a bitch and that little kid out there needed a helping hand. Clearly something was going on there, but I wouldn’t be able to help until I knew more. I know a couple of really good social workers and psychiatrists that can help (not just drug you or give you to the state) that can help for not supernatural stuff. But, I wouldn’t be able to figure out if he needed that or my services without a bit more information.
Those little rivulets of sweat beading up from her makeup were pretty unattractive. I keep the ac in my office between 68 and 70 degrees (19-20C for you Canucks) so it certainly wasn’t the room.
“Muh house staff claim thur ’r straaange thangs goingon.” She cleared her throat. Oh my. Little bit of a southern twang when she gets rattled. She started again. “It started recently. I don’t know exactly when, but it has something to do with that blanket. I was with some of the other mothers at Tommy’s school when someone made a comment to the effect of ‘isn’t Tommy a bit old to still have a security blanket’. When I asked him why he holds onto it. He said it keeps the black men away. As you can guess I was completely mortified. So I tried to coax him out of it, but he was very stubborn about it. I’ve actually never seen him so difficult. ‘Huee waz… He was not letting it go. No matter what I tried, he dug in and screamed and hollar’d… threw a tantrum."
I don't know why she would be embarrassed by a Southern dialect, but any time she caught herself she would repeat with proper denotation and enunciation of a accent free Midwesterner.
"Finally, when he was asleep, I snuck into his room a snuck it away. No one got any sleep that night. I think maybe even the neighbors heard his screaming. After that, every little thing is the works of spooks or haints…the paranormal.” She was regaining composure.
Good enough.
“Mrs. Buchanan. I AM going to help you. However. However, from this minute until the time I leave your house you will do exactly what I say, when I say it. Is that understood?” She looked a little taken aback, and started to huff about it. “Don’t flatter yourself. It’s not that kind of party, though you look like you could use a good dicking. Now am I understood?”
She stared back at me with brilliant cold hard eyes. She pursed her lips like should couldn’t bear to say it, so she nodded curtly at me.
“Excellent. Now when I give you the signal you will hide in this closet.” I opened a closet made to look like a wall panel. “You will not make a sound until I give the signal to come out. Am I understood?” My tone left her no room to argue. She was clearly uneasy about all of this, but if you’ve ever met me, you know I’m very persuasive.
“What’s the signal?” She asked as I moved the panel back, instructing her where to grab.
“You’ll know it when you see it. Now play along and soon everything will back to margarita parties and snorting lines of blow off the pool boy’s dick, or whatever it is you do to keep busy in the afternoon.”
Oh my God. It looked like I had short-circuited her brain. Another minute and smoke might actually come out of ears.
“Relax it was a joke. C’mon lighten up we’re going to have fun. Or at least Tommy and I will. Now play along.”
I opened my office door. Tommy hadn’t moved. Damn. I hate when weird stuff messes with kids. Unfortunately, kids haven’t been jaded by the world enough to not pay attention to creatures of the night. Predators go after easy prey when they can find it, trust me I know; preternatural predators are no exception.
“Hey Tommy. My name’s Bick (used my real name here just to be clear). You wanna come in here guy?” He looked to his mother who for a change gave what looked to be a warm smile and nodded at him. He still didn’t look too sure.
I opened the door to my office all the way so he could see all the way inside. Man this was bad. This kid looked so on edge and frayed that he might start bawling. I had to tread really carefully here. I didn't want the kid going catatonic and sucking his thumb. He seemed to ease down when he saw the blankets I keep draped over the back of the futon and my easy chair. In fact, he fixated on them.
“What’s up guy? You want to sit in my chair? It’s really comfortable.” He shook his head no and crossed his arms hugging himself and the blanket closer. “You sure? I can move the blankets and you can rock on it.” He really started shaking his head ‘No’ to that. I had messed up here. He had been edging further into my office but not he looked ready to bolt again. I had to think fast if I was going to keep this kid from having a panic attack.
“Okay, okay, not the chair. You like blankets?” He stopped violently shaking his head. He kind of buried his face in his arms but gave me a little nod. “How about this? You can sit on the couch and crawl under the blankets?” His eyes lit up when I said that, and he looked towards his mom like he was looking for the okay, or maybe like he was going to get in trouble for something. I don’t know which exactly kids can be a bit hard to read.
“Oh shoot, Tommy. I forgot. Before I can build the blanket fort, I need to show you a magic trick. You see these are magical blankets.”
“They are?” Ouch, right in the feels. The sound of fractured hope from someone so young, it’s tough.
“They sure are. But the magic isn’t in them yet. I have to say the magic word and then the magic will come into them.”
“What’s the magic word?”
“Please.” He cracked a big ol’ smile while telling that groaner of a dad joke. It seemed to work though. Tommy dropped his arms to hanging in front of him, though still clutching the blanket. “Okay but seriously, I am going to say some magic words and the magic is going to go into the blankets. Now don’t be afraid, but when that happens your mom is going to go the Land of Magic for a little while okay? We’re going to borrow some magic from Magic Land, and they’re going to borrow your mom. Is that okay?”
He looked at the blankets, and then at me and his mom. She gave him a big smile and nodded exaggerated nods at him.
“Okay.”
“Ready?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Okay then when I count to three and say ‘bumfuzzle’, the magic is going to enter the blankets and we can build a fort, and your mom will visit the folks in the Land of Magic for a little bit okay?” More head nodding.
“One…”
“Two…”
“Three. Bumfuzzle! Bumfuzzle! Bumfuzzle!” Tommy giggled each time I said ‘Bumfuzzle’. I was glad that worked. I had gambled that the little misdirecting pyrotechnics I set off might have been too much for the kid. Lucky for me, Daisy Buchanan was quick enough on the uptake to realize her cue to enter the closet.
“Well it worked. Nothing says magic like magic smoke, but I can’t see much. What do you say Tommy, should I turn on the fan so we can build this fort?”
“Whooooaaa! Yeah!” With that he actually sounded like an eager little boy again.
I will occasionally smoke a cigar or pipe in my office. No one knows thanks to expensive cleaning and some of the best air filters money can buy. I turned them on before returning with the furniture cushions from the other room.
Tommy looked awed as I propped up the cushions making a simple blanket fort. Did rich kids never do this? Not ever?
The blankets in my office are hand crocheted. My grandmother made them for me. The beautiful ripple-weave and Navajo patterns are extremely comforting. I don’t know how Tommy knew that but he wouldn’t have been the first to relax and feel comfortable after snuggling into them. Or for using them for a fort as the case may be.
“My mom’s not really gone.” Tommy said knowingly.
“Sure she is. Do you see her here?” Tommy looked around the room. I was not used to this level of suspicion coming from a little kid.
“No.” He said it, but I needed him to feel completely comfortable about his mom not being there to get him to open up.
“Tommy. I promise, your mom isn’t in this room (proper). Tommy’s mom is a bootyhead.” That got a laugh. “Tommy’s mom sniffs her own farts.” More giggles.
“Mom has big stinky butt!” There we go. I had to laugh. He’s insulting her, but he’s still calling her ‘mom’ hahaha kids are a riot.
“Alright Tommy the fort’s ready! Let’s head on in.” Tommy pushed the blanket door open and we sat under the cushions on my futon surrounded by old crocheted blankets. Tommy hadn’t let go of his own blanket yet, but was kind of loosely holding it in one hand which was a good sign.
We crawled into the fort and started an epic game of pretend. We bounced around, fought space aliens, hunted dinosaurs, you know boy stuff (until they find out about violent video games and boobs).
“Your magic blankets are really cool Mr. Bick.”
“Yeah, my grandma made them for me when I was a boy. Did your grandma make your blanket for you?”
Tommy nodded looking at the knit fabric in his hand. “I love Nana. I really miss her, she was always nice to me. I don’t get to see Nana any more. My dad said Nana had a stroke. He was sad for a long time, now he works all the time. I hate strokes! You should take your blanket with you like I do. My blanket protects me from the Black Man. He…he…wants to give everybody strokes and take my mommy and daddy away!!!”
Aw Geez. Tommy started bawling into my shirt. At the sound of her son crying Daisy popped out of the closet. She was breaking the rules, but I wasn’t going to fault her for this one. I shook my head and signaled for her to get back in the closet. She wasn’t happy but she did it.
“Tommy. Listen buddy. Who is The Black Man? Can you tell me what he looks like?”
Tommy did some of those hitching breathes. You know, when you’ve been really crying and you’re trying to catch your breath, but it’s kind of like a hiccup. He did that for a full minute into my shirt before wiping his tears and snot into it.
“He’s scary. He’s black, but not like my friend Jaden. He’s like a shadow, but shadows come out during the daytime. He’s darker than a shadow and he only comes out at night, when no one else is there. He… he…” Tommy was back to vise-grips on that baby blanket. “He says bad things to me. At night. I used to try and sleep, but then he’d yank my covers off. He tries to pull me under the bed Or int the closet! I called for mom and dad, and they don’t believe me. Sometimes he hides in my closet, and breaks things. Mommy gets mad and yells at me for it but she doesn’t believe me when I tell her it’s the Black Man. She tells me I need to stop lying and to stop saying that. The Black Man says he’s going to give her a stroke. He says he’s going to give her a stroke." The poor little kid was so flusterd he was repeating himself.
"He said that he gave Nana the stroke and he’s going to give mommy and daddy a stroke and that I’ll be all alone!! When I’m all alone, that’s when he’ll get me. He said he’ll pull me under the bed and hurt me, and give me a stroke, and no one will be able to help me.”
“And you believe him Tommy?”
“Uh huh. He...” Tommy trailed off. He hesitated a bit before going. “He grabbed me. One night when he was just first starting, I thought he might of been my imagination like a bad dream. I didn’t know he was under my bed. I got up to go to the potty, and when I stepped past off my bed he…he… HE GRABBED MY ANKLE!!!”
Tommy was full on crying again. This kid was having some kind of post-traumatic stress from what was going on.
“I couldn’t move. He tried to GET ME! I tried to kick and scream, but I was so ascared that I couldn’t scream. I tried to call Mommy and Daddy for help, but I couldn’t get words out. The Black Man tried to pull me under the bed with him! I couldn’t move much. He had my legs under the bed when I grabbed Nana’s blanket. It saved me. The Black Man let go, and I could scream again. Mommy and Daddy came, and I told them the something tried to get me. They didn’t believe me! They said I was having a bad dream. They looked under the bed but he wasn’t there anymore. They didn’t believe me. After that he started coming more often. Mommy and Daddy would get mad, and he would hide and say bad things when they left. He wants to hurt them. He wants to hurt me most of all.”
I grabbed some tissue off of my desk cleaned Tommy up as best as I could.
“Tommy.”
“Hmm?”
“Do you want to hurt the Black Man, Tommy? You want to hurt him so bad, he’ll go away and never come back?”
Tommy looked up at me in awe. He nodded at me.
“Alright little guy. Let’s get your mom back here.”
He sniffled one of those gross long little kid sniffles where you know it can’t be good for his sinuses. “Okay.”
“Now when I say these new magic words your mom will return. Okay?” I didn’t have to wait for a response. Tommy went and sat at the desk chair and waited for me.
“Here we go: Three…Two…One. Gardyloo Gardyloo Gardyloo.” One more time for the pyrotechnics and Mrs. Buchanan was back in the room with us.
“Tommy? Where are you Tommy?”
“Here I am mom. Did you have a fun time?”
“Yes baby. I had tea with a wizard and he said that Mr. Bick was going to help us.” Fucking big mouth wizards, mind your own damn business. LOL well at least Daisy could play along. Chances are I would need her help tonight if I was going to get rid of whatever was haunting Tommy.
“Is that true Mr. Bick?”
“Well a wizard said it, so probably.”
“You know wizards?”
“Yeah but they’re not as cool as you think. All the powerful ones hang out in Magic Land.”
“So then how are you going to help?”
“Have you ever had a sleepover Tommy?”
“I’m not apposedta have friends spend the night, and no one wants to hang out with me anymore at school.” His face was still red and blotchy from the crying. Daisy, looked like she didn’t know what to do. Part of her clearly didn’t want to believe this, but another part clearly couldn’t deal with her child suffering like this.
“Well I tell you what Tommy. Just for tonight, I’m going to be your sleepover buddy.”
“And you’ll protect me from the Black Man?”
“Oh you betcha. But first, I’m pretty hungry. What do you say to some pizza?”
“Really mom? Can we have pizza?” Daisy was back to staring daggers at me as her son buried his face into her waist.
“Yeah mom. Can we have pizza.” I said it as a statement. My harsh monotone obvious to anyone except maybe the elementary school boy there.
“Sure Tommy. We’ll do what your sleepover buddy wants.”
I smiled at her in a very patronizing way.
“Well we had better be off. I’ll call my driver and have him meet us at the Lou Malnati’s up the street. Are you excited Tommy?”
“YEAH!!” A big old smile and some color was coming back to the kids face.
“Well you ain’t seen nothing yet guy! After we eat, we’re going up to Six Flags!” Tommy ran around my office screaming like he’d won the lottery, and holding up his blanket like he’d won the lottery. Well, no cash on this, one. Looks like getting paid with the story would have to do it. The look on Mrs. Buchanan’s face was well worth it. I ushered the boy and his mother to the door, but before I left, I rushed back to my desk and grabbed my snub-nose .357 and two speed-loaders and slipped them into my pocket. I shouldn’t need them but better to be safe than sorry.
Conclusion Part 1 Here Conclusion Part 2 Here
Happy Nightmares
submitted by BickisMyPensName to nosleep [link] [comments]

Gun Control Conversation. I am against it for the most part but even my against causes issues with others against it. In my opinion the issue has less to do with guns and more to do with people.

I posted this as a reply to a "people freak about lettuce but not guns" post. Z0idberg_MD gave a reply that I haven't posted back to because I felt getting other opinions was better than hijacking someone elses post with this. The following is my original post as well as the reply from Z0idberg_MD which I will follow up with my reply. I am adding it all for context and for quoting purposes. Sorry in advance for the long post.

An estimated 600,920 people were killed by cancer last year. 155,870 (highest of one type) from Lung & Bronchus. Mostly related to Cigarettes which are said to account for 480,000 deaths 41,000 from second hand smoke. Cigarettes can be bought everywhere and are easy to get without ID.
15,548 deaths in 2017 from guns when excluding suicide (~39,000-40,000 with them) Guns really aren’t as easy to get hands on as people seem to think.
Any deaths are a bad thing and the sooner we address the actual issues the better or the problems will never be solved.
I have used guns since I was 5 and the only things, I have killed are animals I was going to eat or animals attacking the cattle on the family ranch. People rip on the AR-15 saying nobody needs a gun like that but I am inclined to disagree. When you deal with things like coyote you need something capable. The .22 can hold more ammo but doesn't have the range to kill coyote from across two 40-acre plots of land (the ranch is divided up in 40s for grazing and baling purposes) my 410 is good for small animals (squirrel, rabbit, moles, etc.) My .243 has the range and power but is bolt action and only holds 5 rounds and I can use a Bow quicker than I can the bolt. The AR-15 is semi-auto and can get the distance so when dealing with a pack of coyote with 7 of them trying to attack cattle you don't have to stop to reload or try to get closer.
Every gun I have bought I have had to wait a week for a background check. Sure, I can go to a gun show instead of a store but the show's a lot of time will also make you wait for the base background check to be run before you can get a gun. They also tag the guns going in and out. (Not to the owner just noting what guns are bought. I know it isn't necessarily a security thing but like cameras all around watching you, it is a deterrent) People looking for illegal guns don't go to these places.
There is the argument that Chicago only has an issue because you can just go the next state over and get a gun but those states also have the same federally mandated background checks. The guns in Chicago more often than not are either illegal or stolen (making them illegal) from a legal owner. Those shooters aren't crossing state lines to purchase legally.
The other argument is that people should lock up their guns in a safe. A gun is useless for defense if you can't access it easily. You can be safe without putting it behind a 12-inch-thick metal door. I have two kids but I teach them not to touch the guns without me and how to properly use a gun. My guns are not in a safe and do not have trigger locks. They are in an area accessible to me and the ammo is easily gotten even though it is not beside the guns. I am teaching my children exactly like I was taught and my dad was taught as well as his dad and grandpa. None of our guns have killed anyone.
A lot of the stigma, I fell, around guns is the fact that in larger cities people don't tend to do things like hunt so they also don't learn to use a gun and see no reason in having one. In the rural areas it is different. I understand the arguments posed but at the same time if you take guns away from people that doesn't make shootings not happen. Even then if the gun crime decreases a different form will increase. (Crossbow, bow, knife, cattle prod, machete, bombs) Hell my wife is more likely to grab a knife or sword to kill someone than a gun.
When my cousin was in school he used to go raccoon hunting before school started and he would bring his gun and dead raccoons to school prop his gun by the classroom door and tie the raccoons to his desk. This was just in the 60s. The issues facing these things today spur some from the stigma but also from the lack of discipline. My cousin could take his gun because had he ever tried to use it there were multiple other boys that would stop him but also the teacher would have beat him into the next week. Look at schools now and how teachers are scared of students or how students will beat the shit out of each other with the teacher just saying "stop please, I am calling the police" which then puts kids into the system because the teachers instead of disciplining are just having kids arrested.
We avoid topics like mental health or PTSD while also trying to punish bullies (with cops again) Punishing the bully doesn't fix the mental damage suffered and it also doesn’t address the issues plaguing the bully. Communities don't work together to stop things they just call the police and hope it gets fixed. The more these things happen the more they try to push it on the police. Laws get altered that give the police more control of the punishing aspects and then when a child is in the system they yell and scream about injustice. Parents don't want to parent though.
I know an Officer in my city that got a call to deal with a kid. He got to the house and the Mom told the Officer "He won't obey, he just back talk’s me and refuses to listen. I have told him 10 times to clean his room and he refuses"
The Officer talked to the kid found he was a little rebellious but mostly because his parents had recently split up and his dad had always been the one to punish if the boy didn't listen. He told the kid to straighten up and act as if his dad were there and think how he would be punished if he acted out against his mom with him there.
He left and a few hours later got called back with the Mom complaining about the same thing. She said "did you even do anything last time you were here?" He asked what he was supposed to do to which she replied "Punish him somehow. Make him understand he can't talk to adults like that."
The Officer proceeded to take off his belt and fold it in his hands, as he walked toward the kid the Mom flipped out and screamed at him "OMG! WHAT ARE YOU DOING???"
He said "Punishing him like you asked"
She said "I didn't mean beat him"
He replied with "I was only going to give him a whooping. What were you expecting me to do?"
The mom who had been so angry at her son said "I figured you would arrest him or something"
The Officer said "For what? Disobedience? Back talking? My Mom would have slapped me across the room for acting like that. I am not giving your child a record for back talking."
The Mom snipped back saying "I don't mean actually arrest him. I meant just arrest him and take him to jail to scare him"
The Officer was furious. Explained that the cops were not their to supplement when parents don't want to be mean. He gave her a warning for improper use of 911 services. (not sure if that’s possible but he was probably just trying to beat it into her)
This is the type of thing I mean when I say it is discipline.
I don't want people to die any more than the rest of the civilized sane people in this country but playing the this kills x but this kills y game is stupid. The number one cause of death isn’t the cigarettes or the guns (or lettuce) it is the people behind those things. The cigarette can't light itself and the gun can't fire itself (The lettuce can grow itself but it can't clean and test itself) they need people and until the human problem is fixed all of these arguments about buying guns or the like are 100% moot. If we aren't willing to help those in need mentally or even physically and we keep acting like a gun is anything more than a tool like a wrench, hammer, hatchet or chainsaw than these shootings and crimes will never stop. Maybe instead of arguing this politically just to get upvotes we should look at it medically and try to find a real solution.
If you don't like guns, fine. Nobody is forcing you to have one but don't act like you are morally superior just because you don't like them.
​
Reply from Z0idberg_MD
Who said morally superior? They make society less safe without a whole lot of demonstrable "good".
\ Correlation between suicide and firearm ownership rate*
[Conclusions. We found a strong relationship between state-level firearm ownership and firearm suicide rates among both genders, and a relationship between firearm ownership and suicides by any means among male, but not female, individuals] (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4984734/)
\ Permissive gun laws lead to more homicides*
[Conclusions. Shall-issue laws are associated with significantly higher rates of total, firearm-related, and handgun-related homicide.] (https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/10.2105/AJPH.2017.304057)
\ The largest gun study in history on more guns = more firearm homicide*
[Results. Gun ownership was a significant predictor of firearm homicide rates (incidence rate ratio = 1.009; 95% confidence interval = 1.004, 1.014). This model indicated that for each percentage point increase in gun ownership, the firearm homicide rate increased by 0.9%.] (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3828709/)
​
First and foremost, let me thank you for properly providing sources. Actual non-bias ones that are out to provide data not to specifically take a side.
I said morally superior. Strictly in context of the original post acting like pulling a dangerous lettuce that anyone could buy was equitable to buying a gun.
It's not.
#1. Personally, I ignore suicide in gun numbers in gun debates and I only added them for those interested. Suicide is a separate issue from homicide so putting them together in my view just skews numbers and distracts from one conversation such as this one about guns. Suicide can be viewed, that is fine, but only so long as it is viewed separate from gun violence as a whole. People who fully intend to commit suicide will do it regardless. I have no argument with the statement that having access to a gun while suicidal will raise the chance of one committing suicide. However, that also loops to my statements about mental instabilities and if we paid more attention to things such as PTSD and Depression than things might be different.
#2. In my opinion you shouldn't get a concealed permit without taking classes and it should 100% be up to a criminal background check to decide if you have one. Most the concealed classes around me are taught by active Police officers and the rest tend to be handled by retired ones.
Carrying a gun requires you to have some idea of responsibility but that is, unfortunately, not always how it works. That said limitations that are placed through recent legislation tend to be overly vague and are more harmful than they are good. Saying "People with mental illnesses shouldn't have access to guns" is well past overly vague. There are people that compete in the Special Olympics sport shooting competitions that would fall under that blanket law. “Mental illnesses” is a pretty vague term for law. When it comes to language in law, terminology is everything. With a law that simply states “mental illness” we would have to use something as a reference. Most likely the DSM-5 as it is the most comprehensive and as such all of these would fall under it:
  1. Acute Stress Disorder
  2. Adjustment Disorder
  3. Adult Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder
  4. Agoraphobia
  5. Alcohol/Substance Abuse
  6. Alcohol/Substance Dependence
  7. Alzheimer’s Disease
  8. Anorexia Nervosa
  9. Antisocial Personality Disorder
  10. Anxiety Disorders
  11. Attachment Disorder
  12. Autism
  13. Autism Spectrum Disorder
  14. Avoidant Personality Disorder
  15. Bereavement
  16. Binge Eating Disorder
  17. Bipolar Disorder
  18. Body Dysmorphic Disorder
  19. Borderline Personality Disorder
  20. Brief Psychotic Disorder
  21. Bulimia Nervosa
  22. Circadian Rhythm Sleep-Wake Disorder
  23. Conduct Disorder
  24. Conversion Disorder
  25. Cyclothymic Disorder
  26. Delusional Disorder
  27. Dependent Personality Disorder
  28. Depersonalization Disorder
  29. Depression
  30. Disinhibited Social Engagement Disorder
  31. Disorder of Written Expression
  32. Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder
  33. Dissociative Amnesia
  34. Dissociative Disorder Not Otherwise Specified
  35. Dissociative Fugue
  36. Dissociative Identity Disorder
  37. Dyspareunia
  38. Dysthymic Disorder
  39. Encopresis
  40. Enuresis
  41. Erectile Disorder
  42. Exhibitionistic Disorder
  43. Expressive Language Disorder
  44. Female & Male Orgasmic Disorders
  45. Female Sexual Arousal Disorder
  46. Fetishistic Disorder
  47. Frotteuristic Disorder
  48. Gaming Disorder
  49. Gender Dysphoria
  50. Generalized Anxiety Disorder
  51. Histrionic Personality Disorder
  52. Hoarding Disorder
  53. Hypersomnolence
  54. Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder
  55. Hypochondriasis
  56. Insomnia Disorder
  57. Intermittent Explosive Disorder
  58. Kleptomania
  59. Major Neurocognitive Disorder
  60. Mathematics Disorder
  61. Mental Retardation
  62. Minor Neurocognitive Disorder
  63. Multiple Personality Disorder
  64. Narcissistic Personality Disorder
  65. Narcolepsy
  66. New Specifiers of Bipolar Disorder and Depression
  67. Nightmare Disorder
  68. Non-Rapid Eye Movement Sleep Arousal Disorders
  69. Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder
  70. Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder
  71. Oppositional Defiant Disorder
  72. Pain Disorder
  73. Panic Attack
  74. Panic Disorder
  75. Paranoid Personality Disorder
  76. Parkinson’s Disease
  77. Pathological Gambling
  78. Pedophilia
  79. Phobias
  80. Pica
  81. Postpartum Depression
  82. Posttraumatic Stress Disorder
  83. Premature Ejaculation
  84. Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder
  85. Pseudobulbar Affect
  86. Psychotic Disorders
  87. Pyromania
  88. Rapid Eye Movement Sleep Behavior Disorder
  89. Reactive Attachment Disorder
  90. Reading Disorder
  91. Restless Legs Syndrome
  92. Rumination Disorder
  93. Schizoaffective Disorder
  94. Schizoid Personality Disorder
  95. Schizophrenia
  96. Schizophreniform Disorder
  97. Schizotypal Personality Disorder
  98. Seasonal Affective Disorder
  99. Selective Mutism
  100. Separation Anxiety Disorder
  101. Sexual Masochism and Sadism
  102. Shared Psychotic Disorder
  103. Social Communication Disorder
  104. Social Anxiety Phobia
  105. Somatic Symptom Disorder
  106. Stereotypic Movement Disorder
  107. Stuttering
  108. Tourette’s Disorder
  109. Transient Tic Disorder
  110. Transvestic Disorder
  111. Trichotillomania
  112. Vaginismus
  113. Voyeuristic Disorder
I understand it is a hassle to name all the specific illnesses that shouldn't have a gun but if we just left it with mental illness many people who have never had any problems would lose access to them and it would eventually be thrown out in the Supreme Court. We could hope that if we used a blanket term it wouldn't be misused but in time it would eventually be that way. If only to stack charges. People with Depression and Schizophrenia would be obvious ones to prevent due to the nature of the disorder but what about Bipolar? Something easily controlled with medication. Would that be ok? Someone with ADHD, Tourette’s, Social Anxiety, Erectile Dysfunction or even Transgenders (Gender Dysphoria), should they be put under this blanketed ban of mental illness? Because history shows you that blanket laws are taken advantage of, a prime example is Civil Forfeiture laws.
I am not one of those people against all gun laws but I am against the “Common Sense” gun law statements and the fight to ban guns completely. Common Sense gun reform sounds good but people always take it off the deep end and then start attacking the second amendment. The only way to get rid of the second amendment would be to rewrite the constitution after a civil war or to rewrite it with the purpose of starting a civil war because the gun owners in this country would overwhelmingly oppose that option no matter what. For arguments sake though using the Huffington Post as an example of how crazy people can be when talking about this topic, this is the list from the article (https://www.huffingtonpost.com/warren-j-blumenfeld/proposals-for-common-sens_b_8231786.html)
We must ban and criminalize the possession of automatic and semi-automatic weapons!
Automatic Weapons are highly restricted. To buy and sell you have to have a Federal Firearms License or they have to be registered gun made before 1986 (assuming they can even be owned in your state) You have to inform the Chief Law Enforcement Officer of your area that one is being purchased. A form has to be filled out with the ATF ($200 for tax, fingerprints, passport style photo, and information on the firearm are all part of this form) Then you have to wait up to a year for it to be approved. All of that is assuming you can afford one seeing as the bans on them have made them extremely expensive. (A standard AR-15 usually runs $800-$1000 brand new, A fully automatic made before 1986 will be $20,000-$35,000)
Saying Semi-automatic Weapons is about as bad as saying mental illness. Semi-Auto is defined as an automatic loading weapon that fires one bullet per trigger pull whereas Fully Auto is more than one bullet per trigger pull. So, by this writers’ definition we are left with bolt action (which people can fire at high rates very easily) and muzzleloaders. Pistol wise you are basically left with a derringer. There are derringers that shoot .410 shotgun shells and a muzzleloader can be a .32 all the way to a .58 caliber. All of which can do some damage and depending on the user can be reloaded faster than most people can get away. What works in favor of the Semi-Auto is that you don’t have to be as accurate with your aim.
We must close loopholes such as buying a weapon at a gun show!
Private sale between 2 private owners is an option when both are in the same state regardless of being at a gun show. Most dealers at gun shows are FFL gun dealers and they have to do a background check on you under the requirements. Not preforming one is against the law and they will lose their license as well as be charged with the unlawful sale of a firearm. Is this saying it isn't possible? No. Likely? Also no. If you crossed state lines and bought a gun the sale has to be processed by an FFL in your home state. FFLs aren't just selling to criminals and ne’er-do-wells. Gun Shows make it easier for FFLs to find buyers for the product they have in their stores. Believe it or not gun shops aren't multi-million-dollar cash machines sometimes change of venue gets your product sold.
We must ban the purchase of firearms and ammunition on the internet!
Again, to sell across state lines an FFL has to be involved even when purchasing online. The idea that you can just hop online and buy a gun like you were shopping on Amazon. Ammunition wise I am not really sure what that has to do with anything because you can always reload ammo so banning online sale won’t solve anything.
We must increase the waiting period and make background checks more rigorous and effective!
As I said in my last post, I have had to wait a week every gun I have bought. It isn't like the background checks are simple little papers that aren't actually looked at. If it is effectiveness you are wanting, the background check is only as good as the information reported on it just like a credit score. Make mental health record of certain types mandatory to report and all police records considered such as tickets for Jaywalking.
We must limit the number of firearms any individual can own!
Not really realistic but sure I will bite. Limit to what. Who decides this number? As in my first post all the guns I use have specific purposes. If I own 1 gun or 50 of them what difference would it make with the exception of there being 50 less guns on the streets to be used in a crime? I know it could be argued that everyone has the potential to commit a crime with a gun and that it is more likely dependent on the number of guns in one’s possession but this isn't a Tom Cruise movie and pre-crime isn't a thing. At that rate what is stopping us from limiting how many kitchen knives you have? You only really need one and as long as it cuts what’s the difference?
We must limit the number of bullets any firearm clip can hold!
I am not sure what limiting the number of bullets in a clip is going to do with the exception of making people insert bullets into their magazine slower. Clips are nice but I personally don’t use them. Having 2 smaller magazines for the AR-15 covers 20 rounds for me and I rarely if ever shoot enough to constitute being able to use a clip to quickly reload my magazines. Other people might have a need for this but even then, if you limited a clip to 5 bullets you are just telling me I need 2 clips to feed my magazines not 1. (I 100% understand that this writer was making the statement about magazines and not clips but this perfectly illustrates my point on why language used is important.)
We must ban and criminalize the purchase and possession of armor piercing bullets, and also hollow-tip bullets!
There is a lot to unpack here but I will keep it simple. Bullets kill regardless of the type and again with language saying Armor Piercing has wide connotations. True Armor Piercing rounds have a steel core instead of the standard soft lead and are designed to penetrate light armor.
While if you are talking about bullets that can penetrate things like Kevlar you are talking about anything larger than the standard .22. The AR-15 uses .223 ammo which in essence is a .22 bullet. The difference is that .223 is high velocity and the bullet tends to come to a point. It comes in a Round Nose (Used mostly in handgun ammo) and a Boat Tail (Used mostly in rifle ammo) The average owner will most likely have Full Metal Jacket ammo which sounds scary but for the most part it is a lead bullet with a copper coating on the outside it has nothing to do with Armor Piercing ability. If you shot a standard .22 round and a .223 the .22 would do more visual damage entry wise and would also more than likely not exit at all.
Hollow Point bullets are common for self-defense and also used by police because unlike FMJ they have stopping power on impact. As they hit, they expand and take up more area meaning they are less likely to do damage outside of the impact zone. They are safer to use for self-defense because you will be able to stop your attacker without having to worry as much about bystanders These bullets aren't made for long range shooting.
Banning and criminalizing two types of bullet is pointless unless you are doing it to all ammo. The writer misses Open Tip, Soft Point and Ballistic Tip ammunition as well as Shotgun shells which have Birdshot, buckshot and Slugs (A typical 12 Gauge slug is .73 caliber) Which in the right hands can be just as dangerous as a typical rifle.
We must rethink the “logic” of permitting concealed weapons, especially in places like houses of worship, colleges, bars, restaurants, and political rallies!
Yes, we should. Many shootings happen in gun free zones Reason being that the person wanting to do maximum damage will go where they are less likely to receive resistance. The Gun-Free Zone is implemented with good intentions but that also paves the road to hell. It is a matter of criminals are criminals because they don’t follow the law. No mass shooter has seen a “Gun-Free Zone” sign and though ‘Well shit, there goes that idea’
We must interface all data bases monitoring firearm ownership to assess the firearm-owning population more accurately and effectively!
As mentioned above, criminals are criminals because they don’t follow the law. This would be fought as an invasion of privacy almost immediately and wouldn't contribute to anything more than tracking law abiding citizens and their gun ownership. Do you think the criminals are letting the government know the use and sale of their guns? Yes, this writer is stating that we pull all the databases we already have together but he is also implying that it should be easily accessible for research which, as said, is an invasion of privacy.
It isn't to say that I disagree with gun laws entirely it is just stating that there is more to the issue than simply banning things that are used by mass shooters. Someone wanting to deal damage will figure out a way. If we are banning like the article suggest we are left with Shotguns, Derringers, Bolt action rifles and Cannons. It also ignores Swords, Knives, Chainsaws, Sledge Hammers, Flamethrowers, RPGs, Tanks, Bows and Crossbows, 3D Printed weapons, Lawnmower blades, Planks of Wood with Nails in them, Baseball bats with barb wire and Potato Guns just to name a few. It also doesn't account for bombs or chemical weapons made with household products such as Ammonia and Bleach or Bleach and Alcohol. All in all, the weapon of choice isn't the problem as none of them can act independently. Humans will always find a way to be the biggest assholes they can be should the need, in their mind, arise.
Looking at recent mass shootings, how many could have been avoided had people been less selfish and paid attention to the signs pointing to problematic mental health issues? How many could have been avoided if we just taught parents to be parents instead of letting them rely on the government to be the babysitter. I agree that not all people need guns but proper education would help too. Instead we yell and scream that guns are bad and kill people so we should remove them from the hands of the public. I would love to see the study supporting the idea that guns kill people.
#3. EXTREMELY interesting study. It is almost too smart for its own good though. More guns = more firearm homicide. What is wrong with that statement? More knives = more knife homicides. More car bombs = more blown up cars. The study had the proper idea but they implemented it wrong merely in the way we can break down their study and say something as vague as more guns = more firearm homicide.
Going back to my original post I covered this slightly. In rural America you have many towns where the firearm to citizen ratio is 1:1 or higher. Even taking states you have places like Wyoming where the registered guns to citizens is ~230:1. Whereas larger population states like California and New York are ~9:1 and ~4:1 respectively. (Oddly enough referring back to the Automatic weapon point the Top 5 states with Machine guns: 1. Connecticut - 52,965, 2. Texas – 36,534, 3. Florida – 36,194, 4. Virginia – 34,074, 5. Illinois 33,646. Though, California is really close to the Top 5 at #7 – 29,047.) (https://huntingmark.com/gun-ownership-stats/#_ftn1%20)
The top 5 most dangerous cities (According to Forbes) and their state rank of registered gun owners are:
​
City Rank State Rank
1 Detroit, MI 45. Michigan - 6.59:1
2 St. Louis, MO 36. Missouri - 11.94:1
3. Oakland, CA 44. California - 8.71:1
4. Memphis, TN 33. Tennessee - 14.76:1
5. Birmingham AL. 6. Alabama - 33.15:1
​
The study you reference while giving very helpful and valid data wasn't quite as valid as it could have been. The information is definitely there to produce solid evidence should you combine the data with other studies. I don’t see it as one sided but I do think they failed to include information that might have changed the data.
​
submitted by tpinkfloyd to unpopularopinion [link] [comments]

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