Word: conning
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Banks need banks, just as companies and ordinary people do. But what institution would do serious business with the Bank of Credit & Commerce International, the rogue financier of crooks, drug lords and con men? As investigators probe the debris of the vast scandal, the name that most persistently comes up is Bank of America, one of the top five in the U.S. The bank, which co-founded B.C.C.I. in 1972, takes pains to emphasize that it sold off its stake in the Middle Eastern institution in 1980. But ties between the two were far more extensive and long lasting than...
...face of such assaults, says psychiatrist Alvin Poussaint, vulnerable blacks can unconsciously accept the negative images attributed to their race, then scurry to distance themselves from those images by words or deeds. Denying that luck, family support and other factors, including affirmative action, may have helped them, TBS victims con themselves into believing they have made it solely because they are exceptionally gifted individuals who are innately superior to less fortunate members of their race. They often exhibit disdain for poor blacks, especially those who are on welfare or have given birth to a child out of wedlock. They believe...
ANOTHER YOU. A congenital liar (Gene Wilder) and his con man friend (Richard Pryor) get involved in an elaborate insurance scam. This comedy is complicated too -- but a big why-bother. By now these two gifted farceurs are doing it from memory, not from inspiration. The parts keep moving long after the machine is turned...
...Stinks, a kind of Homeless Alone about a billionaire on the bum, as if it were trying to wipe a rag across their windshield. Brooks' old colleague Gene Wilder has fared no better with Another You, in which he plays a compulsive liar coupled in a complex scam with con man Richard Pryor. On its second weekend of release, this mediocre jape averaged a pathetic $262 per screen; that's about 50 people in each theater all weekend. With those numbers, a moviemaker can go broke, and an usher can get awfully lonely...
...other media reported in July: the criminal enterprise known as the Bank of Credit & Commerce International thrived as a $20 billion worldwide cash conduit for thugs ranging from terrorists to narcotraficantes, while Washington and other capitals turned a blind eye. "This is a story of big-time, big-money con artists," said Massachusetts Democrat John Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee that held the two-day hearings. "It's a story of international lawlessness and extraordinary greed, which is becoming the centerpiece of recent history...