By December 1948 “the book finally was closed” on the lockout, with the levying of fines totaling $9,650 on thirty-two of the picketers and jail sentences for five others. In October 1949 the “last victim” of the lockout, Emil Freed—a Communist—was released after serving a one-year jail term; he had been selling party newspapers across the street from the picket lines when arrested. By November 1950 there was “no picketline for the first time in almost five years: the United Brotherhood of Carpenters has called off the token picket line it had maintained ever since the so-called jurisdictional fight that started in 1946.”217 Toward the end, Edmond DePatie, a vice president at Warner Bros., recalled that many were feeling sorry for CSU: at times there was only a solitary picket marching resolutely in front of the studio.218

The mob was not just a sideshow for tourists. Mobsters have expanded into money laundering, large-scale drug dealing, and more legitimate businesses.34 Wall Street has been invaded by gangsters.35 Small-scale mobsters are involved in more prosaic activity. In New York City “legitimate tenants were driven from their apartments by gangsters and other low-lifes brought in by unscrupulous landlords … an organized ring of tenant terrorists.” They “hired themselves out to landlords from 1978 to 1984” and “installed drug addicts, prostitutes, thieves and other criminals in vacant apartments to commit burglaries and assaults against tenants, and to cause floods, set fires, strew garbage and otherwise terrorize the tenants.”36 Most of all, mobsters still maintain control over many unions, particularly the painters who had once embraced Herb Sorrell.37 This barbaric grip has been sustained with a kind of violence that made what happened in Los Angeles in 1945–1946 seem mild by comparison.38