Word: conning
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There are a lot of things that make the life of a con artist a dubious career track - not the least being the risk that you'll get caught. No matter how grand your ill-gotten Bentley or your cooked-books villa, they have to be hard to enjoy when you know that at any moment the jig could be up. The hope - and the thrill - is in the fact that that's only one possibility. The other is that the scam is so good you'll never be nabbed...
...what if your con is certain to fail? Why would any self-respecting scoundrel pick a scheme that's guaranteed to end in handcuffs and a perp walk? That's what a lot of people are asking as 70-year-old Bernie Madoff cools his heels under house arrest, charged with masterminding a decades-long, $50 billion Ponzi scheme that has incinerated wealth around the world. (See the top 10 scandals...
...Madigan, a graduate of Notre Dame and Loyola University Law School, got his start in politics as a ward leader from the working-class and politically powerful southwest side of Chicago. He headed to the state capital of Springfield in 1970 as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention, or "Con Con" - the same body that helped craft the impeachment rules Madigan is now playing by - and really never left. Over more than 30 years, he has pushed through legislation on such issues as education, electrical deregulation, child-predator laws, medical and mental-health care and, recently, a transportation tax that...
...Once Mulligan and Pakula found a congenial performer, they wanted to do it again. They reunited with McQueen for a Horton Foote drama, Baby the Rain Must Fall (1965), about an ex-con singer who has problems staying out of criminal or domestic trouble. And in Inside Daisy Clover (1966), Wood is a thornier soul: a '30s waif who becomes a movie star. (The young man in her grim life was played by Robert Redford, again at the beginning of a big career...
...Even knowledgeable people can't really tell you what he's doing." But for investors pocketing windfalls, the lure of easy money outstripped suspicions raised by Madoff's shroud of secrecy. When that shroud was lifted, however, Madoff's investment fund stood revealed as a classic Ponzi scheme: a con game in which the illusion of solvency was created by paying off early investors with capital raised from later entrants. As long as new investment continued to come in the door, the earlier adopters reaped fat rewards; once markets tumbled and investors withdrew, however, the whole thing collapsed like...