Word: boilers
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...fraternity of sorts, says Somers. "There are certain bars in Las Vegas where they are known to hang out." Their shops are a kind of floating network of operations that start up, close and reopen on an instant's notice. When active, they run at a true boiler-room pace. One operation busted by federal agents in Phoenix last year had been logging 3,000 calls a day on just four phone lines...
...telemarketers rarely call victims in their own state. Calling across state lines or from Canada helps them elude prosecution because caller and victim are in different jurisdictions. In the bigger boiler rooms, jobs are specialized. "Fronters" make the initial call, working from lists of entrants into legitimate prize contests or from obituaries, or sometimes just looking through phone books for "elderly-sounding" names like Viola or Henrietta. The Sun City phone book is a scam artist's bible because it lists hometowns and former occupations of seniors. "Closers" make follow-up calls to likely marks; "reload men" make them...
Some of the boiler rooms are specialized, peddling only phony prizes, perhaps, or fraudulent investments or fake charities. Two subspecialty operations are the "recovery room" and the "badge room." The latter is staffed by callers who pretend to be raising money for families of slain police officers, firefighters or other related (and fake) charities. American Eagle Advertising, which employed 60 solicitors in boiler rooms in Arizona and Georgia, raked in more than $9 million in two years of operation, according to a 67-count federal indictment unsealed in June. Reload men and "recovery room" specialists individually can make in excess...
...County seemed protected by its solid marriage to Virginia Power's Mount Storm generating station. It was built on a tortured, windswept plateau in the mid-1960s only because abundant coal was nearby. The coal was worth mining, in turn, only because Mount Storm would burn it. Tipple and boiler were linked by a two-mile covered conveyor belt that carried coal from the east portal of the mine straight to the storage silos of the power plant. The miners still marvel at the sheer handiness of the setup. "That coal never touched the ground," they...
...letter to Clinton questioning whether his deployment of two aircraft carrier battle groups to the Taiwan Strait at the time would provoke a war with China, an outcome that, Trie warned, could have a "negative outcome" for the President politically, "especially in this campaign year." Clinton responded with a boiler-plate reassurance that the only U.S. intent was to help the two sides peaceably resolve an ongoing dispute over China's military maneuvers in the strait. The letter may not have constituted a big foreign-policy concession, but it burnished a big donor's stature in China, where connections mean...