His campaign finally got the boost it needed following the attack on Pearl Harbor when the U.S. La Guardia claimed that pinball brought in somewhere between $20 to $23 million a year. The breadwinners were frittering away their hard earned cash and stealing from their families kids were skipping school and using their lunch money to play one game after another and the game in question was utterly addictive so the only way to stop this behavior was the eliminate them altogether, the anti-pinballers said. Many of the complaints against pinball mirrored those that had been lobbed against booze several decades earlier during the prohibition campaign. There is no difference between the two rackets other than the more subtle and furtive methods of robbing the public employed by the pinball machine operators.” In 1942, several days after his visit to the precinct, Mayor La Guardia said, “The pinball machine racket is a direct outgrowth of the slot machine racket, and, as was the case with its evil parent, is dominated by interests heavily tainted with criminality. “Practically every bar and restaurant in the city makes enough from the pin ball machines to pay the rent,” the Johnstown Observer, the Shorto family’s local paper, reported following an investigation in 1954. It helped that the game was even more solidly set against the players before 1947, when flippers were finally invented. Because these coin-operated games were so hard to win, the house-in this case, the bars, restaurants, hotels, and various other local establishments that acquired a console for themselves-were raking in the losers’ hard-earned dough. Pinball owners, manufacturers, and the shady elements who shook the former down for “protection” were making money, and lots of it. The high-tech fun of the game plus the possibility of beating it for cash made them addictive.” He writes, “The beauty of pinball to the mob was that, since coins you put in didn’t correspond with a quantifiable product like cigarettes or candy, it was impossible to track the machines’ earnings. In Smalltime, author Russell Shorto explored his own family’s involvement with the mob in a small town in Pennsylvania and discovered their connections with the game. During hearings, the district attorney of Kings County testified that the gang, Murders, Inc., was connected to pinball as they “would assign certain territories to those whom they owed favors, such as stealing an automobile, and that these people would operate a protection racket. In 1948, a lawsuit objecting to the crackdown brought by four pinball manufacturers made its way to the New York Supreme Court. There was some evidence that the mob had their sticky tentacles in the game. La Guardia may have been an extremist in his proposed solution to the problem, but his issue with pinball wasn’t entirely unfounded. While he won in 1934, it would take him eight more years before he would finally get anywhere with the ban he had been seeking for over a decade. In a statement issued after receiving his party’s nomination in August 1933, La Guardia said that his campaign was “not merely a political contest but a citizen’s movement for the salvation of the city.” So, it was no surprise that corruption and gambling became a central theme of his campaign for NYC mayor. As a congressman after World War I, he sponsored a bill proposing a national ban on slot and pinball machines, but it didn’t make it past the House of Representatives. La Guardia had been waging a war to clean up the country for years.
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