Word: baron
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Maxwell was deep in hock and struggling to keep his conglomerate afloat in the months before his death. The Czechoslovak-born press baron, who embraced socialism in the 1960s as a Member of Parliament, had run up $4.5 billion in debts to buy everything from American book publishers to British soccer teams to Israeli and German newspapers. But even before Maxwell was interred, reports of financial skulduggery in his shop began to surface. First came the startling revelation that the company was broke. Then came the discovery that Maxwell had pledged the same assets as collateral for various loans...
...post-Civil War boom, Mark Twain's child-man reveals his real name. Arrested in a stock swindle, the rising robber baron escapes from jail with the aid of Jim, nonstop talker and former slave, who has shrewdly invested in ^ Thomas Edison's recording machine and become the founding grandfather...
...Python and the Holy Grail. On his own he directed one commercial hit (Time Bandits) and one cult smash (Brazil). Critics, this one included, went crazy for Brazil; but not many citizens felt at home amid all the astringent whimsy. And the director's next phantasmagoria, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, was a $50 million flop...
...people so certain of their birthright be disoriented? More to the point, how can the French feel lost when France has emerged as the master builder of modern Europe? Not since the mid-19th century, when Baron Haussmann thrust his boulevards through rancid slums, has Paris experienced such a fever of construction and renewal. With a Metro that works, streets kept remarkably clean by 5,000 green-uniformed sweepers, parks planted like Impressionist paintings and bakeries galore, Paris may well represent the apogee of civilized city living -- for those who can afford the rent. Yet not since Parisians finally ousted...
...record, he denied that he was a cocaine trafficker and insisted that he was being persecuted by the U.S. "You think one person, one 'baron,' as you Americans call him, can control all the cocaine being sent from Cali?" he said. "There are kids out there on the streets, 20 or 25 years old, shipping 10 kilos, becoming millionaires. You think one man can control that...