Word: cons
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...past eight years, 175 cases have been recorded worldwide of nuclear materials (not bombs) being smuggled out of former Soviet territories and other countries. Such material could have reached bin Laden through criminals - intelligence officials reportedly believe Al Qaeda operatives have been stung more than once by con men offering them relatively harmless spent fuel disguised as weapons-grade radioactive material - or by sympathizers in Chechnya. Bin Laden operatives reportedly also tried in 1993 to buy enriched uranium produced in South Africa on the black market...
...Tajik film, Djamshed Usmanov's Angel on the Right, has such a steely appreciation for man's deep need to fleece his fellow man that it plays like a David Mamet film moved to the village that time forgot. An ex-con returns home to help his dying mother. But mom is only pretending; she's a crook too, and wants sonny boy to fix up her house so she can settle the family debts. In a town where every transaction is negotiated with a handshake (you don't let go till you've agreed on a price...
...sheep get in. This man, a Muslim, complains to the driver that "the Russians think anyone with dark skin is a bandit." Turns out he's not a bandit; he's a heroin dealer. But then, in this dark, delicious comedy everyone is a crook: the ex-con hero, his "dying" mother and the village mayor who acts as if he's Vito Corleone. Creative chicanery: that's capitalism, Third World-style. If films weren't overtly political, they were insistently social. Some of the strongest works examined the working-class, the out-of-work, the criminally forlorn. The Brazilian...
...What remains is the mystery of how a character like Ogami managed to inspire trust in so many for so long. Francis Yuseco, the Philippine banker who negotiated the Unitrust deal, marvels, "I really thought he would help our country. But he turned out to be just a con artist." Indeed, that was the one activity at which Genta Ogami?kung fu master, movie star, savior of the world?truly excelled...
...What's also disturbing is that the con seems to have required the complicity of consulate staffers, possibly local Vietnamese. Unlike most immigration policies, the Amerasian regulations are designed to be lenient. A visa can be granted to anyone deemed to possess "Amerasian facial features." So it's hard to understand how Tran Van Hai could have been rejected. Dark-skinned with kinky hair and built like a linebacker, Hai, 30, says he's the son of an African-American airman named Mark who lived with his mother in the 1970s. Denied a visa, he went to the consulate...