Word: coin
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Bank of America $40 million and Merrill Lynch $37 million. What remains of his traceable fortune is in hock. Gone are a couple of his houses, gone his private jet and a few cars, his hockey team, his football team and his stake in a movie company. His coin business is in legal limbo. Creditors are queuing up to sue him. Soon McNall, the former boy tycoon, may not have an old -- or even a plugged -- drachma to call...
...passion for coins that did him in. Early on, his hobby blossomed into a fascination with antiquity. McNall even went so far as to enroll in the graduate program in ancient history at UCLA. But he did not stay long enough to learn how fate exacts a terrible price for hubris. Before long he was traveling the ancient trade routes, striking coup after coup. In 1974, when the record price for an ancient coin was about $100,000, he bought the rarest of them all, the 5th century B.C. Athena decadrachm, for a seemingly outlandish $420,000. But within...
...have yet to see a Brink's truck following a hearse." Smitten by his swath and style, bankers fairly begged him to borrow their money; Merrill Lynch created three coin-trading funds for him to manage. McNall set up a bogus horse-appraisal firm, listing his chauffeur as owner and appraiser...
...couldn't last. Lately, his sports enterprises were no longer making big money, and the coin trade was ailing. Creditors called, and McNall scrambled for money. His associates began playing shell games with his various "companies," faking coin sales, borrowing from one bank loan to pay on another. The Merrill Lynch funds crumbled, obliging the company to cough up perhaps as much as $30 million in compensation to 3,500 investors and leading the fbi to investigate the disappearance of $3.3 million in coins from one of the funds. Having learned from the horse's mouth, so to speak, that...
...this surreal saturation of dollars were not a generous enough compliment to the American coin, here comes another one: the American bill is being illegally reproduced around the globe and in greater quantity than ever. "The U.S. currency," says Secret Service spokesman Carl Meyer, "is not only the most desirable currency in the world. It is also the most easily counterfeited." Of the $350 billion worth of U.S currency in circulation today, anywhere from 50% to 65% is held overseas. In 1980, estimates University of Wisconsin economist Edgar Feige, just 30% of all dollars could be found offshore...