Word: conned
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...PROJECTS WAS completed. But so what? What did I have to show for my research, besides threateningly high plaque levels? Even worse, I was afraid I might have seriously misinterpreted the candy. I called Walter J. Marshall, marketing and special projects manage of the New England Con fectionery Company in Cambridge, where conversation hearts originated...
...Burns makes his subject come alive by focusing on three crucial people. First is Lee DeForest, who patented the key invention that spawned the radio age -- the three-element vacuum tube -- but emerges as something of a self- promoter and con man. Edwin Howard Armstrong, who made important refinements in De Forest's invention and battled him endlessly in the patent courts, is the film's tragic hero: a bullheaded visionary defeated by people smarter and more ruthless than he. David Sarnoff, the founder of NBC, is one of those ruthless people ("I don't get ulcers; I give them...
Next to confess was Robert Easterling, a Mississippi ex-con who told journalist Henry Hurt in 1985 that he killed Kennedy on behalf of Fidel Castro. And then, in 1989, there was the son of a Dallas policeman who pushed his own (now dead) father forward as the grassy-knoll assassin, introducing some curious confessional documentation he claimed to have found in an attic. (The credibility problem of assassination buffs has not been enhanced by the double standard with which they seem to accept indiscriminately every self-proclaimed assassin or grassy-knoll eyewitness who comes forward, but tear to shreds...
THEY WERE BOTH SELF-MADE MEN WHO BUILT THEIR empires on the ill-placed confidence of lenders and investors. One of the con men was a Pakistani banker who exercised influence from Washington to Beijing but was in fact running a financial supermarket for criminals. The other was a 300-lb. tabloid tycoon whose fatal plunge into the Atlantic was one of the most bizarre finales in business history. When their empires came crashing down in 1991, the debacles raised pointed questions about the laxity of financial regulations around the world...
...Part of the answer is that the international financial system is rife with offshore tax havens, secrecy laws and virtually unregulated banking zones. Maxwell's family trusts were incorporated in Liechtenstein, and B.C.C.I. was incorporated in Luxembourg. Both countries are known for their lax regulation. In each case, the con men made billions of dollars disappear through the world's cracks and loopholes...