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KombuchaBot t1_j6h51jz wrote

Reply to comment by -mudflaps- in The Chickens and the Bulls: The Rise and Incredible Fall of a Vicious Extortion Ring That Preyed on Prominent Gay Men in the 1960s by PhillipCrawfordJr

Yeah but it was an important case because some Feds and some of the NYPD and the DA's office actually overcame their prejudices to help some gay men rather than victimising them and it happened before Stonewall.

Which is not to say it was an unmitigated success for justice.

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double-you t1_j6hnp7s wrote

Well...

> “We had all these big people around the country thinking our guys were really doing this, and it was starting to make us all look bad,” former rackets investigator Tobias Fennel explains. The class backgrounds of the victims certainly didn’t hurt,[...]

So had they not been rich and influential, they might have not gotten any help. But indeed they ended up helping gay men.

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DaFugYouSay t1_j6iiup6 wrote

>Well... > >> “We had all these big people around the country thinking our guys were really doing this, and it was starting to make us all look bad,” former rackets investigator Tobias Fennel explains. The class backgrounds of the victims certainly didn’t hurt,[...] > >So had they not been rich and influential, they might have not gotten any help. But indeed they ended up helping gay men.

If they hadn't been rich and influential, nobody would have bothered blackmailing them in the first place.

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dpdxguy t1_j6j3pmr wrote

>nobody would have bothered blackmailing them in the first place.

The article clearly states that the extortion ring went after targets big and small.

However, it also seems clear that the primary reason the police went after the extortion ring was that it was making the police look bad to the powers that be. IOW, it's the police that would not have bothered if (some of) the victims had not been wealthy and powerful

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