TV Review: Racket Squad

TV Review: Racket Squad

First, a bit of news:  I have completed my coursework for an Associate’s Degree in Business Management, and should soon have the official recognition.    It’s been a rough couple of years, so I am relieved.

Racket Squad ran on television from 1950 to 1953, telling fictionalized versions of actual cases where confidence artists and other racketeers bilked Americans of their money.  Reed Hadley played Captain John Braddock, who narrated the episodes and provided tips on how to spot con games.  (He would go on to star in the previously-reviewed Public Defender, which had a very similar format.)  Each episode opened with a “City Police” car pulling up to “City Hall” and a police dispatcher intoning “rrRacket Squad!”

I watched six episodes on DVD:

• “Kite High” stars a funeral director whose odious mother-in-law is poisoning his wife against him.  In fairness, he’s the kind of dope who goes off to a convention, changes hotels without telling his wife, and then decides to go hunting with a buddy for three days after the convention, also without notifying his wife.  Rather than try to hash things out with his spouse (her mother is living with them due to a mild disability), he goes off to Las Vegas.  While there, he is snookered into playing at a “private” casino that alters (“kites”) the checks he uses to pay for chips to much higher amounts.  Once he figures this out, the funeral director confronts the racketeers and it goes badly for him.   Just as he’s about to be killed, the Racket Squad just happens to bust in, as they were pursuing related leads.
• “The Bill of Sale Racket” involves two men that “buy” gas stations for far more than they’re worth, using a thirty-day promissory note.  They then turn around and sell the stations at rock-bottom prices to third parties who are unaware that the bill of sale has been received fraudulently.  A man whose wife was taken advantage of this way while he was off in the Korean War sets a trap for the conmen, and there’s an extended shootout in which no one actually gets hit.  (Surprisingly realistic!)
• “Desperate Money” focuses on a aging tailor with fading eyesight who’s having a bad season.   Faced with eviction, he turns to a loan shark operating out of a boxing gym.  When the bad season lasts two weeks longer than expected due to hot weather, the loan shark starts ramping up the interest and getting increasingly violent.  The tailor is not stated to be Jewish, but there are really unsubtle clues.  Also notable in that the bartender who steers the tailor to the loan shark doesn’t realize how violent the man is, because he’s always made his payments on time.  He learns the hard way when he asks the shark to have mercy on the tailor.
• “The System” has a man on vacation meet an attractive young woman and her invalid father.  Several weekend dates later, the father reveals that he, his daughter and their manservant live comfortably because the father has a near infallible betting system.   Using a trick to confuse the mark about the time, the con artists make it look like they can predict the outcome of horse races.
• “His Brother’s Keeper” is a tearjerker of a story about a bum named Longshot who hits upon pretending to be deaf to beg for money for his gambling habit.   This works great, except that it turns out all the deaf beggars in the city have been co-opted by a fake charity that sends them out to beg, then confiscates their earnings in exchange for miserable bunks and thin soup.  Initially, Longshot just plans to hide enough money away to escape on, but when one of the actual deaf people becomes ill due to the poor treatment, Longshot decides he has to step up and help Captain Braddock smash the racket, regardless of personal cost.  One of the villains also played the loan shark in “Desperate Money”, and there’s a particularly good transition shot from the beggars’ miserable fare to the fine steak that the head of the “charity” enjoys while urging his henchman to cut expenses.
• “Take a Little, Leave a Little” involves a particularly smooth operator that poses as an oil geologist.  That is, he uses the name of a real geologist with a good record, so when people do credit checks and backgrounds on him, they find the good news and are more likely to believe his story about a rich oil deposit near town.  He’s so slick, in fact, that his victims don’t technically lose money, and thus usually won’t call the cops.  However, under RICO, if it’s possible to prove a pattern of racketeering behavior, that’s enough to catch you on, and he goes to the well once too often.

While some of these scams are dated and wouldn’t work as well any more, others have been able to adjust to modern times.   Altering checks has given way to altering credit card charges.  Payday loan offices do much the same work the loan sharks did.   And some rackets work the same as they ever did.  As Captain Braddock often reminds us, “It could happen to you.”

“Kite HIgh” relies heavily on old-fashioned stereotypes about marriage and mothers in law–younger viewers may find the family’s behavior baffling.  The most affecting story is “His Brother’s Keeper,” thank goodness it’s much easier for deaf people to get work these days.  It’s a well done series for its time.