Gangster!

Gangster! is a role-playing game published by Fantasy Games Unlimited in 1979.

Description

Gangster! is a cops-and-mobsters system for the period 1900 to the present. The rules cover police (city and federal) and criminal (loner and syndicate) characters as well as combat with all sorts of firearms. The game includes sections on crimes and corruption, gang wars, police methods, forensic medicine, FBI labs, and SWAT teams, with guidelines on the laws of the land, criminal law, conviction, and penalties.

Publication history

Gangster! was designed by Nick Marinacci and Pete Petrone and published by Fantasy Games Unlimited in 1979 as a boxed set with two 32-page books and two reference sheets. The game was codesigned by a former New York police officer.

Robert N. Charrette created 25 mm miniatures to accompany Gangster!

References

Days of Fire

Days of Fire (Italian: Gangsters '70) is a 1968 Italian crime-thriller film written and directed by Mino Guerrini.

Cast

References

External links

Shark (helmet manufacturer)

Shark is a French company that produces motorcycle helmets, which was founded in 1986 in Marseille, France.

Helmets

Headquartered in Marseilles and with over 600 employees, SHARK helmets are distributed by a network of over 5,000 sales outlets worldwide.

External links

Cryptanalysis of the Enigma

Cryptanalysis of the Enigma enabled the western Allies in World War II to read substantial amounts of secret Morse-coded radio communications of the Axis powers that had been enciphered using Enigma machines. This yielded military intelligence which, along with that from other decrypted Axis radio and teleprinter transmissions, was given the codename Ultra. This was considered by western Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower to have been "decisive" to the Allied victory.

The Enigma machines were a family of portable cipher machines with rotor scramblers. Good operating procedures, properly enforced, would have made the cipher unbreakable. However, most of the German armed and secret services and civilian agencies that used Enigma employed poor procedures and it was these poor operating procedures that allowed the Enigma machines to be reverse engineered and the ciphers to be read.

The German plugboard-equipped Enigma became Nazi Germany's principal crypto-system. It was broken by the Polish General Staff's Cipher Bureau in December 1932—with the aid of French-supplied intelligence material that had been obtained from a German spy. Shortly before the outbreak of World War II, the Polish Cipher Bureau initiated the French and British into its Enigma-breaking techniques and technology at a conference held in Warsaw.

Loan shark

A loan shark is a person or body who offers loans at extremely high interest rates. The term usually refers to illegal activity, but may also refer to predatory lending with extremely high interest rates such as payday or title loans. Loan sharks sometimes enforce repayment by blackmail or threats of violence. Historically, many moneylenders skirted between legal and extra-legal activity. In the recent western world, loan sharks have been a feature of the criminal underworld.

United States

19th century salary lenders

In late 19th century America, the low legal interest rates made small loans unprofitable, and small-time lending was frowned upon by society, as a borrower of small loans was seen as an irresponsible person who could not manage a budget. Banks and other major financial institutions thus stayed away from small-time lending. There were, however, plenty of small lenders offering loans at profitable but illegally high interest rates. They presented themselves as legitimate and operated openly out of offices. They only sought customers whom they felt were good risks: a steady and respectable job, which meant they had a regular income and a reputation to protect; married, which made them less likely to flee town; and legitimate motives for borrowing. Gamblers, criminals, and other disreputable, unreliable types were avoided. They made the borrower fill out and sign seemingly legitimate contracts. Though these contracts were not legally enforceable, they at least were proof of the loan, which the lender could use to blackmail a defaulter.

Movies@

Movies@ Ltd. is a cinema chain in the Republic of Ireland. The company opened its first multiplex cinema at the Dundrum Town Centre on 1 October 2005, with 12 screens. Other sites include the Pavilions Centre, Swords (11 screens) which opened in mid November 2006, and Gorey, Co. Wexford. A branch was proposed to be located in Salthill, County Galway (10 screens) in Autumn 2007, but has not yet opened.

The company bears some resemblance to the largest Irish cinema chain, the Ward Anderson group, in that it is a family owned business run by members of two families, in this case the O'Gorman family (who ran the Ormonde Cinema in Stillorgan) and the Spurling family who are also involved in rural cinemas, albeit having closed one (Enniscorthy) due to being in relative proximity to a Movies@ site.

External links

1894 in film

The following is an overview of the events of 1894 in film, including a list of films released and notable births.

Events