Word: conning
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...newspaper that was offering a reward for information about the crime. Soon the man showed up at the newspaper's offices with a small statue, one of several that he claimed to have stolen four years earlier from the Louvre. The anonymous thief turned out to be a bisexual con man named Honoré Joseph Géry Pieret. He had once served as "secretary," and perhaps other roles, for Guillaume Apollinaire, the poet and art-world polemicist who was Picasso's constant supporter in the public skirmishes over modern art in the French press. Before long, Pieret had implicated Apollinaire...
...working for bigger operators. This is where both books dive headfirst into a huge pile of baloney. In 1932 a swashbuckling American journalist named Karl Decker published a piece in the Saturday Evening Post, in which he wrote that in 1914 in Morocco, he met an aristocratic con man, Marqués Eduardo de Valfierno, who told him that he had masterminded the theft as part of a scheme to sell six meticulously forged versions of Mona Lisa to six gullible millionaires. Each would be duped into believing he had secretly bought the picture that had just been famously stolen...
...Eric and had a distinct memory of him being such an impressive young man: polite, charming, deferential to adults. Just like what you wish all the little high school brats were like. She said all the teachers were fooled. When you have someone growing up to be a professional con artist, it's pretty hard for the Harrises to see through that. Parents of psychopaths never figure...
...behind the wildly successful “Bourne†trilogy, “Duplicity†delves into the grimy underbelly of the fierce competition between two rival pharmaceutical companies who hire Claire and Ray to pawn top-secret technological breakthroughs undercover. They’re going to con both companies. “You on one side, me on the other,†Claire schemes. “It’s perfect.†To ensure their future together, they devise a complex plan involving multiple passports and secret meetings, all meticulously thought...
...become clear that there's a bit of an obsession with process in the Obama Administration as well, but this is a necessary corrective. Rather than making peremptory judgments, pro and con, about foreign leaders, as Bush did, Obama seems predisposed to see every foreign policy problem in its global context - the decision to press the reset button with Russia, for example, could have a profound influence on the start of talks with Iran, especially if the Russians agree to help dissuade the Iranians from an illegal nuclear program (in return for a U.S. pledge to halt the antimissile defense...