Review

... and there are certain equivalents in what happened to the Covid relief money except there were no paper tickets and thus no way the bad guys could just punch people out and muscle their way in.

In the 1930s one of the things the American government did that it had never done before was hand out relief tickets on a large scale that the unemployed could exchange for an equal amount of food from local grocers. This was a new source of money and so of course it was just a matter of time before organized crime tried to take their cut. They would strong arm the grocers into giving up their relief tickets but only pay the grocers for 60% of what the tickets were worth. The mob would then have the grocers that were fronts for their activities take the tickets that they collected to the Home Relief Office and redeem them. The legitimate grocers are in danger of going out of business, so Nick Garvey, the head mobster, has the word put out for all of the grocers to raise prices 40% to get back their profit. But the relief checks are still the same size, so the large number of unemployed are in danger of starvation even with relief tickets.

Enter special investigator Stanton (Leon Ames) to try to figure out what's going on. He does figure it out immediately, but proving it is another thing, since the mob has a mole in the Home Relief Office. So Stanton instead starts getting court orders to obtain the books of what he figures to be crooked grocers, since that bypasses Home Relief entirely.

This was an engaging installment in the Crime Will Not Pay series, but one casting choice rather hurt my suspension of disbelief. That was having Leon Ames play the investigator. Maybe it is because I really know classic film of the 30s and 40s, but Crime Will Not Pay generally is done in semi documentary style, and having somebody who I know was a well known actor of the era play a part transforms this into pure fiction for me.

Still, I'd recommend it.