To help maintain prices of poultry at a fair level during Passover and to expose racketeers now exacting toll from every party, from the original shipper to the ultimate consumer, Market Commissioner William Fellowes Morgan, Jr. announced yesterday that he is waging war against mobsters into whose hands control of New York’s great poultry industry has fallen.
Commissioner Morgan said yesterday that an illegal tax of three cents a pound is being imposed on every farmer who ships poultry into New York, and charged that handlers in New York must pay fifty cents extra for every bag of feed sold by a company owned by racketeers as well as one dollar rent on every coop, whether it is used or not. The coops, he said, can be constructed at a cost of less than two dollars each.
Walter Chambers, secretary for the Market Commission, yesterday revealed that between eighty and 100 shochtim, Jewish orthodox slaughterers, have been thrown out of work by the racketeers. He said that numerous cases have come to his attention in which attempts were made by alleged unions to exact fees, amounting to as much as $250 from those engaged in the kosher slaughter of chickens.
“We find,” Chambers said, “that these racketeers frequently intimidate the slaughterers into meeting their demands, and when they fail to do so, violence often follows. When they refuse to meet the demands they find themselves blackballed by almost every slaughtering agency in New York.
“A number of the slaughterers have told me stories of their inability to secure employment once they have come into difficulties with the racketeers. A few have succeeded in obtaining work independently of the so-called unions, but they find themselves discharged almost before they have established themselves in their new positions. Their employers invariably come to them to say, ‘We are sorry, but racketeers have told us that if we continue to hire you they will bomb our place. So you’ll have to leave.’ “
The commission is-also investigating the sale of non-kosher food in kosher shops. It was said that of 216 million pounds of poultry sold in New York annually only about 175 million pounds are kosher, a part of the rest being advertised and sold as kosher.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
