(FORTUNE Magazine) – Try imagining this scenario: An organization behaving somewhat like the Mafia has gone after a major corporate employer in a large American city. It tells the employer it will put him out of business unless he makes extortionate payments. Members of the organization get arrested for firebombing his delivery trucks, beating up many of his workers, and warning his distributors and retailers that they too will get pummeled with baseball bats if they try to sell his product. Now imagine an even eerier detail: While the above events take place, the voices of high-minded morality in the city remain curiously silent. If you live in the Big Apple, you have doubtless intuited that we are describing the current (as of early December) reign of terror against the New York Daily News. After being struck by nine of its unions late in October, the / News tried to keep going with replacement workers. It has basically succeeded in printing and delivering its paper, but it has been unable to protect the several thousand newsstand dealers on whom the whole enterprise ultimately depends. So now, after losing maybe $115 million over ten years because of its oversize (by about 1,000 workers out of 2,800) union work force, it is losing maybe $10 million a week because of the home run hitters who have terrorized its dealers. The typical newsdealer is losing possibly $200 a week by not being able to sell the News. As we write, the paper has 369 documented cases of assault, vandalism, theft, firebombing, and simple threats against the dealers, who, over and over again, report terrifying visits by strikers -- mostly from the drivers' union -- typically bearing baseball bats. The drivers' union is really something special. One president of the union was convicted of extortion in 1980. The present union president has testified (under a grant of immunity) that he too had collected extortion payments earlier in his union career. He further testified to collecting extortion money for still another union president. And the strangest part of it all is the deafening silence of the usual moralizers. Mayor David Dinkins has declined to ''take sides'' in the dispute. The New York Times registered dismay at the violence only in one perfunctory editorial four weeks ago, and at that expressed understanding of the strikers' being ''frustrated.'' The American Civil Liberties Union's New York affiliate has been even more understanding. The only civil-liberties issue on which it has spoken out is the First Amendment right of the drivers' union to picket every last one of the entrances from which the beleaguered News trucks leave. As we lumber off to press, wondering how it will all turn out, the ACLU has still said nothing about the newspaper's own First Amendment rights.