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-mudflaps- t1_j6gxsq6 wrote

Let me guess, a few scumbags setup prominent men to gather evidence they can use to extort money by threatening to expose them as homosexual?

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KombuchaBot t1_j6h51jz wrote

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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oceanmutt t1_j6hpbcn wrote

Certainly being homosexual added to the leverage the blackmailers were able to exert on the victims during this era, but didn't the article also mention that all these men's partners were children? I'd suspect that this fact alone would make targets like this even more vulnerable to blackmail - for example to those with security clearances - today. And as well, for this reason it might also be appropriate to allocate at least some of ones own outrage toward these supposed "victims" themselves.

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gnark t1_j6hqthx wrote

No, not all of the "chickens" were underaged. Some were teenagers, others young adults. Even today 16 is the age of consent in most states of the USA and it was lower 60 years ago or only applied to young girls, not boy.

The leverage and extortion of the victims (no quotes necessary) came almost entirely from the social stigma and criminality of homosexuality.

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