Word: church
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...1980s and '90s, as traders developed increasingly sophisticated investment vehicles, the cons cropped up with increasing regularity. In 1985, a San Diego currency trader named David Dominelli was revealed to have fleeced more than 1,000 investors to the tune of $80 million. During the 1990s, a Florida church called Greater Ministries International bilked nearly 20,000 people out of $500 million in a pyramid scheme hatched by leader Gerald Payne, who claimed God would double the money of pious investors. (Dominelli pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 20 years in prison, while Payne was convicted and sentenced...
...loved Mafia iconography and liked being known as a tough guy. When he watched the Sopranos, it was "like he was going to church," said one of his five wives, with whom he had an autistic son named after a character in The Godfather. He used the score from that film as the hold music on his office phone. Pellicano often brandished a baseball...
...Ironically, Pellicano was often hired by the government to analyze and improve the quality of taped recordings. In one notable case, he enhanced a decades-old recording on which a Ku Klux Klansman incriminated himself in the bombing of a Birmingham, Alabama church that killed four girls...
...slightly different number every time. Envelopes whose contents were counted the first night are lost. Absentee ballots that were never counted turn up. Some people get their votes invalidated by accident. The 133 missing ballots, from example, were in an envelope from the not-exactly-shenanigans-prone University Lutheran Church of Hope in Minneapolis that got counted late on election night, then transported to a warehouse, and seem to have gone missing in the recount. Everyone spent a day combing the place for the envelope as if they were on a CSI episode, but to no avail. "You'd love...
...state for a massive profit. "Henri doesn't have full popular legitimacy," says Pauly. "He has to find a new way to legitimate his role." Achieving such broad consent may not be helped by a hard line on bioethics in a country where fewer than 10 percent still attend church regularly. Getting out of the way, however, may just do the trick...