The Department of Justice lists Multnomah County Racketeering 1951-1960 as a notable investigations and achievements. In the years following World War II, Portland developed a quiet reputation as a place that wasn’t all that quiet. Scratch the surface, and you’d have found brothels, gambling, bootlegging and plenty of underground characters more than happy to try and buy off an official or two. And there was more than an official or two willing to take the money. Eventually, even the Teamsters made their way down from Seattle to get a piece of the action. A series of articles in the Oregonian in 1956 pulled the story into the daylight.

Oregon Attorney General, George Neuner (R) started investigating the crimes, followed with prosecution by Robert Y Thornton (D) in 1960 with the help of the Federal Bureau of Investigation that took on the Teamsters. The story of that period in Portland was reported by Wally Turner and William Lambert, Oregonian reporters, exposing a wide-ranging conspiracy to take over Jim Elkins’ illegal empire in Portland. The city’s corruption drew the interest of the U.S. Senate select committee on labor racketeering making headlines across the country and become the basis of a 1957 film titled Portland Expose.

The mob-type tactics of the 1950s are again surfacing. Racketeering has surfaced repeatedly through the years through theft rings. Today, it is more in-your-face bias crimes. One of the leaders of BLM arrested in Portland’s riots stated they have a right to reparations and will keep looting and destroying businesses.

Senate Bill 577 passed in 2019 requiring the Oregon Criminal Justice Commission (CJC) to review all data pertaining to bias crimes and non-criminal bias incidents and to report the results annually on July 1. The first report is a preliminary to a more expansive report, but for the first year ending July 1 they reported 185 calls to the hotline and 273 bias related offenses reported to law enforcement of which 68 cases included bias charges in the first or second degree. The key findings of the report are that race was the most targeted class for both bias crimes reported to law enforcement and bias incidents reported to the hotline. The Bias Response Hotline received a surge of calls in March and April for bias toward Asian, Asian American, and Pacific Islander community members due to erroneous beliefs about COVID-19.

“Bias victimizes the person who is targeted, but it also victimizes their friends and family, and in fact our larger community. Language and conduct intended to divide us can be just as harmful as hands-on assaults,” said Johanna Costa, Oregon DOJ’s Bias Response Coordinator.

Attorney General Rosenblum said, “If you are a witness, reporting hate and bias sheds light on the experiences of some of our most vulnerable community members, and it demonstrates that you are an ally and you will not stand for hate in our state.”

What do they see as “hate?” The members of the Legislature’s Black, Indigenous and People of Color Caucus (BIPOC) are Rep. Teresa Alonso Leon (D-Woodburn), Rep. Janelle Bynum (D-Happy Valley), Rep. Diego Hernandez (D-Portland), Rep. Akasha Lawrence Spence (D-Portland), Rep. Mark Meek (D-Oregon City), Rep. Andrea Salinas (D-Lake Oswego), Rep. Tawna Sanchez (D-Portland), Sen. Lew Frederick (D-Portland) and Sen. James Manning (D-Eugene). Without cause or investigation, they used hate language calling Proud Boys, Patriot Prayer and Three Percenters, white supremacist and right-wing extremist groups. Proud Boys leader, Enrique Tarrio, said in a tweet that the group is not associated with white supremacy. Similar to how the celebration of Black lives got radicalized with left extremists, so an article sought out a radical to discredit Proud Boys instead of interviewing the leader who, by the way, is a person of color.

Is their play book, The Masque of the Red Death, by Edgar Allen Poe? Fear is a real toxic thing. It illustrates how fear can alter how you think, how you feel and how people interact. Hate crimes are based on fear that manipulated people. Where does social justice fall on the scale of manipulation?


--Donna Bleiler

Post Date: 2020-10-04 07:37:33