Esmée Denters - What Goes Around (avec Justin Timberlake) photo

Esmée Denters – What Goes Around (avec Justin Timberlake)

Voici la nouvelle star made in YouTube qui devrait bientôt percer sur la scène internationale : Esmée Denters. Elle a une voix assez remarquable, sans pour autant en faire des tonnes.

La voici en duo avec Justin Timberlake, pour interpréter What Goes Around :

Esmée est née sur YouTube il y a 9 mois, a signé depuis avec une maison de disque, prépare un album qui sortira cette année et joue en première partie de Justin Timberlake.

Une véritable web story !

Repression and Censorship photo

Organized Crime: Repression and Censorship

  1. Organized Crime in America
  2. Evolution of Organized Crime
  3. Organized Crime : Expression and Repression
  4. Organized Crime and the Prohibition
  5. Organized Crime: Repression and Censorship

Organization of the Repression

With John Edgar Hoover, the FBI had certain successes in its fight against Organized Crime. The FBI was/is a federal agency that could/can work across the territory. Police forces were sometimes ill-trained because they faced very well organized murderers.

1933 saw the creation of the Bureau of Investigation (Justice), the Prohibition Bureau (Department of the Treasury and eventually to the Department of Justice), and the Bureau of Identification.

The FBI emphasized figures to receive more subventions and for the training of policemen, the FBI became a kind of police academy.

The codes of appearances tell the fall or rise of the gangster. It is sometimes wrong: they can die very well-dressed. Banquets are social rituals, as well as funerals.

In Little Caesar, once they killed someone they would attend his funerals very well dressed. Repression is a spectacle in a way: FBI and politics of prestige.

President Hoover used the media a lot: he collaborated with the media and the movie industry to create a positive image of the war on crime. The Kefauver hearings were televised for the first time. In a way, it was a show.

The cinema was the major medium to picture Organized Crime. Ten years later, TV would be a great threat to movies. Hearings were televised live: immediacy and power.

Organized Crime was in the streets and on the screens: dialectic between expression and repression. New forms of expression both in reality and in fiction.

When Hollywood involved censorship, it became an indirect form of expression but it was still depicting Organized Crime.

The image of America on screen is that of a country in which morality should impose images. Always new forms for gangsters on film even if censorship was present.

Lire Organized Crime: Repression and Censorship

Evolution of Organized Crime photo

Evolution of Organized Crime

  1. Organized Crime in America
  2. Evolution of Organized Crime
  3. Organized Crime : Expression and Repression
  4. Organized Crime and the Prohibition
  5. Organized Crime: Repression and Censorship

Evolution of Gangsterism

1929: Wall Street crash. Prohibition is an attempt to decrease the revenue of alcohol.

1933: election of Franklin Roosevelt, who sets up the New Deal.

1934: Repeal of the Prohibition. Roosevelt had realized the importance of the ethnic vote, and especially the Catholic vote.

Creation of the Work Progress Administration (W.P.A.): the state provides the jobs. The Organized Crime became less of a necessity.

The vision of the gangster also evolved in the movies: he is now presented as a thing of the past.

When R. Sullivan gets out of prison after the repeal of the Prohibition, he does not fit in anymore: he is out of touch. The idea is that once you have been into illegal activities you can take the money and go into legal activities (some Jewish businessmen are grandchildren of earlier Organized Crime gangsters).

Gangsterism is doomed to vanish but the gangsters have not disappeared, they are still killed by other gangsters.

To go legit: to go legitimate. Gangland reconversion: gangsters could change by investing illegal money into illegal businesses.

The Organized Crime went more and more into legal activities. The State creates its counterpower: the lottery, which is legal in certain states.

Las Vegas was created by the Mafia (Bugsy Siegel). He opened the first casino, the Stardust; which was controlled by the Mafia and connected between legal and illegal activities.

Siegel was also interested in Hollywood but there was no very known widespread involvement of Organized Crime in the movie industry, except for the Browne-Bioff episode.

The Browne-Bioff plan

The Browne-Bioff episode started in Chicago: Willy Bioff was a Chicago racketeer in partnership with George Browne, a local official for a trade union (I.A.T.S.E.: International Association of Theatrical and Stage Employees).

The association had a campaign of extortion from the theatre director to avoid strikes and loss of money.

This campaign extended nationwide and touched Hollywood (RKO and Fox gave money in exchange for peace on the labour front). In 1941, all came to the surface.

Joseph M. Schenk, president of Fox, got arrested by the police and in exchange for a lighter sentence, he denounced the Browne-Bioff plan.

World War II

The structure of Organized Crime did not change except that it sometimes worked with the American government.

The Americans feared German submarines to attack the coast so Organized Crime ensured the waterfront workers’ liability to the government.

The Cold War

1951: the Kefauver Commission was set up to investigate crime and McCarthy was against the communists. Both are often associated. The Kefauver Commission was headed by Senator Kefauver (for Tennessee).

In 1950, he became chairman of the Senate Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce. The committee studied:

  • inter-state gambling and racketeering
  • use of inter-state facilities for Organized Crime (railway…)

1967-1968: Omnibus Crime Bill, allowing for wire topping. Organized Crime is a reflection of American society. It places the Kefauver Commission in the Cold War atmosphere.