Quotes About Gangsters

Nw a kind of no-man's-land occupied by a neo-Elizabethan hugger-mugger of racketeers, drug dealers, gangsters and abortionists, the shark-toothed area seemed only a rowdier version of the city all around — a freewheeling, free-spending center of free enterprise.

In the 1970s and early '80s, Shanghai was quiet, cautious, a ghost of a once-great city - and yet physically, little was changed from its glittering heyday. When visiting, I enjoyed reading books on local history and used my time off to scope out the former haunts of gangsters and jazzmen.

I was raised in Chicago and I guess that was one of the special breeding grounds for gangsters of all colors. That was the Detroit of the gangster world. The car industry was thugs.

Dancing in speakeasies was a job, and none of us knew for sure who were gangsters. No one told us, so how could we know? My mother used to come and take me home. We thought nothing of walking home together at two in the morning.

Like gangsters yelling out roll call before they slaughtered a group of weeping traitors.

Americans accept that gangsters are running the government.

I reread Mesrine's book every year because the way the story is told is fascinating. Today, we don't have gangsters like Mesrine - he had humor.

My four years of high school were spent locked up inside "el campo." I became a voracious reader and television-watcher, keeping to myself at such alarming extremes that I became invisible. My invisibility provided the perfect protection against harm of any sort. I walked to and from school past the gangsters as silently as a breeze, so disassociated from their tattoos and lingo that even they couldn't find a place for me in their lines of vision.

I've never seen a Western that was really truthful. Most are just morality plays. Good guys and bad guys - and the good guys always win, whereas in reality, most of the sheriffs were as bad as the gangsters they were after.

Terre Haute. They used to call it 'Terrible Hut' because it was so wide open. Gambling, red light district, speak-easies. I entertained for all the gangsters. Can't name a gangster that didn't come into the place where I worked.

The Conservative government decided to "merge" John's clinic with a new health trust, run by evangelical Christians who opposed prescription on principle. The patients panicked, because they knew what being cut off would mean—a return to abscesses and overdoses and scrambling for drugs from gangsters.

When alcohol was legalized again in 1933, the involvement of gangsters and murderers and killing in the alcohol trade virtually ended. Peace was restored to the streets of Chicago. The murder rate fell dramatically,25 and it didn't rise so high again until drug prohibition was intensified in the 1970s and '80s.

When the government war on alcohol stopped, the gangster war for alcohol stopped.

We have run this historical experiment once before, they point out, and we know what one of the effects will be. When alcohol was legalized again in 1933, the involvement of gangsters and murderers and killing in the alcohol trade virtually ended. Peace was restored to the streets of Chicago. The murder rate fell dramatically,25 and it didn't rise so high again until drug prohibition was intensified in the 1970s and '80s. At

right at the start of the drug war, gangsters supported prohibition, even bribing Harry Anslinger's agents to impose it more rapidly. Now, at the end of the drug war, they were violently intimidating people who wanted to end prohibition. What, I wondered to myself, does this reveal about who really benefits from this war?

I am a close friend of Robert Loggia. And I just love how, with actors, there's the screen persona. Here is Robert, known for his portrayal of many characters, including gangsters. But in real life, he is elegant and erudite. He sits in the garden reading the sonnets of William Shakespeare.

Nazism was, at heart, a criminal enterprise, a product of which was the Holocaust. The Nazis were gangsters and thugs. As much as they were ideologically driven, they were also greedy. Pure ideologues don't pull gold teeth from the mouths of the dead.

George Raft may or may not have gone both ways, but he was very sensitive to what they said about him, and it was one factor why he decided to play all those gangsters in the movies.

I knew so many gangsters, and I call on that experience with them for characters.

Basically, as everybody that has had a taste of the record business knows, they are gangsters and crooks.

The old G's, or the gangsters, turned me away from the street because they knew my dad, and they had a lot of respect for my dad, but because I was an athlete.

Playing gangsters is great. They usually dress you sharp. And you have a license to pretty much bully anybody. I mean, I wouldn't dare do that at home. My wife will give me a back hander.

My father ran London Films. He made films like 'The Red Shoes,' 'The Third Man.' And he had had a long career in the film business, which was bifurcated with a career in intelligence. He had to deal with gangsters, and sometimes he would take me with him. Also, I went to school with their children.

The link between gangsters nicknamed for food—Benny Eggs and Johnny Sausage—prompted agents to refer to them as "Chin's Breakfast Club.