Word: baron
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...traffickers. "At one point," he says, "I actually presided over a conference, with people at all levels of the business explaining to me how it works." Gaining their confidence was not easy. Beaty, who once went through 10 days of screening before being allowed to meet with Bolivian coca baron Roberto Suarez Gomez, knows the first rule: "You have to promise you won't write anything that reveals their identities to the police -- or their competitors...
...trimming of the market, and how first-rate things would continue to get first-rate prices. (That an exceptional painting could still make an exceptional price was in fact confirmed earlier this month at Sotheby's in London when a great Constable landscape, The Lock, 1824, was bought by Baron Thyssen for $21.1 million.) Michael Findlay, head of Christie's Impressionist and modern art sales, called the market a "roller coaster" -- inexactly, since roller coasters go up and down but always finish at the level where they started. The next big sales, in the spring, may or may not bring...
Harry Weinberg was a pugnacious businessman who probably had his share of enemies when he was alive. But the real estate baron made a final gesture that will win him friends for years to come. Weinberg, who died last week at 82, willed nearly $1 billion to a family trust to help the poor. The sum represents his entire estate, except for $3 million he left his grandchildren. The trust will distribute up to $45 million a year to the needy as Weinberg dictated: one-quarter to Jewish charities, one-quarter to non-Jewish groups and the rest to organizations...
...dangerous earthquake zones in the world. Early in the past century an unseen fault, obscured by tons of sediment, unleashed a fearsome trio of tremors -- each as powerful, some say, as the earthquake that virtually destroyed San Francisco in 1906. The eyewitness accounts read like the tall tales of Baron Munchhausen. The ground rippled with waves as though it were an ocean. The Mississippi River raged with waterfalls and rapids. Fountains of sand erupted in gritty geysers. Shock waves, pulsing outward for hundreds of miles, wrecked boats in the Charleston, S.C., harbor, cracked masonry in Cincinnati, and caused church bells...
After 11 months of all-out war, the government of President Virgilio Barco Vargas has damaged but not destroyed Escobar's multibillion-dollar empire. Since last August, when cartel hit men murdered presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galan, dozens of cocaine laboratories have been torched, one top drug baron has been killed, hundreds of suspects have been arrested, and more than a dozen extradited to the U.S. In response, Escobar has unleashed a campaign of terror that has claimed some 300 civilian lives. After two successive weekends of violence in Medellin took more than 40 lives, the government two weeks...