Word: conman
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...earthly endeavors. His paddleball game is slowing down; he owes his publishers $70,000 on advances for books he has yet to write; his wife Denise is suing him for divorce and stripping him of everything but his costly cotton undershorts; his old friend Thaxter, an eccentric literary conman with expensive tastes, has squandered thousands of Citrine's dollars given to start an intellectual quarterly. In addition, Citrine's silver-gray Mercedes has been vandalized by a petty hood, a Mafia buffo character named Ronald Cantabile, to whom Citrine unwittingly gave a bad check in payment...
...they would otherwise pay out in taxes. Trippet for a while surprised them by paying handsome dividends, so many upped the ante, investing more than they would have for tax purposes. Apparently, Trippet did it by running a Ponzi scheme, a type of swindle named for Charles Ponzi, a conman who used it to shake more than $10 million out of the citizens of Boston in 1919 and 1920. The principle is simple: the first group of investors are paid dividends out of the money contributed by newer investors. Eventually, such an operation has to collapse of its own weight...
Born to Win is a movie where the parts make up two halves. Segal is one of America's best comic actors, and he has ample opportunity to display his talents as a small-time conman and junkie. Captured by a bunch of crooks he has doublecrossed, and locked into a lady's bedroom without his clothes, he dons a pink nightgown and exposes himself through the window to a watching neighbor below, hoping she'll call the police. As he jumps up and down in anguish, opening the nightgown and desperately trying to show enough of himself over...
...father. He is working off his sixth conviction, an 18-year sentence for burglary. Among his previous crimes: impersonation of an income tax collector. Abshire's is the most professional acting in the entire cast, for which he has a ready and plausible explanation: "I'm a conman...
...POLITICS of the action completely aside, the image is a most appealing one. There's a certain evil tinge to the performance that rings true. For you do learn to be a conman in the suburbs. And while every parent probably envisions their children of the fifties as little Beaver Cleavers. the much more calculating behavior of, say, an Eddie Haskell is probably a lot closer to the mark. To hell with all that Woodstock crap. As Rosen quotes Wilde, "Being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose I know...