back-alley

back-alley

adjective Disreputable, unethical, squalid, or surreptitious. It is a modifier always used before a noun. I know a place that does back-alley dental work for a fraction of the normal cost, though, understandably, their results aren't always the best. The governor was found guilty of partaking in back-alley deals with local developers to secure costs lower than his budget.
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms.
See also:
  • side by side
  • blink-and-you-miss-it
  • par excellence
  • round robin
  • a round robin
  • the eleventh hour
  • eleventh hour
  • heads I win, tails you lose
  • out-and-out
  • the black market
References in periodicals archive
Pagliuca, however, said the current Hyde amendment law already prohibits use of federal funds for abortion and the health care bill would not force a new era of back-alley abortions.
Stupak says he can understand why some of his pro-choice colleagues voted to allow abortions to be performed in military hospitals overseas in order to avoid the inevitable alternative of back-alley procedures.
Sequentially, the doors open, revealing couples dancing, soldiers practicing marching, and glimpses of back-alley life, then shut again; the viewer, too, has to "dance" in a circle in order to take in the unfolding action.
Every time the government attempted to regulate the gin trade, plebeians rioted in the streets, preachers thundered in pulpits and pamphlets, and, in back-alley dram shops, things continued much as they had before.
The musical journey begins "in a back-alley corner off of Bourbon Street," and when the cats finish playing for the night, they head over to Cafe Du Monde for breakfast and then fall asleep in Jackson Square.
In which our man in Washington learns about conservative sex, Thomas Jefferson's HMO woes, and back-alley bookies
Together the gates will protect 973 city households from back-alley burglars.
Wilbur Larch (the movingly restrained Cohn Meaney) is a turn-of-the-century obstetrician and orphanage director whose horror at back-alley butchery moves him to become an abortionist as well.
I really couldn't figure out what she meant to say, exactly, about the Nauman piece itself, other than to conscript it for the sort of back-alley "Greenbergian" idea of medium-specificity she has lately advocated.
Will a black market arise, from which the poor can get back-alley clones?
Like other women who survived back-alley abortions, Fadiman told no one of this experience for many years.
What was at stake was "women's lives." The image of a coat hanger, symbol of the thousands and thousands of dangerous back-alley abortions, became the centerpiece of the pro-choice argument.
Lacking abortion on demand in any other instance, Mexican women undergo an estimated 1 million illegal abortions a year performed in appallingly unsafe, back-alley conditions.
Programming Donald Byrd's bombastic, aggressive back-alley Subtext Rage on the heels of the twentieth-century masterpiece from which he quotes on several occasions was probably a mistake.
It plunders the Earth For resources we haven't got, Then dumps them in back-alleys Fly-tippers care not.