Word: cons
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...ZZZZ Best carpet-cleaning scam, a mid-1980s securities caper, was worth $300 million before it went up in smoke. That rap landed him in a federal pen on a 25-year sentence. After serving seven years and four months, he got out in 1995 and, like the con man portrayed in the hit movie Catch Me If You Can, he started helping the feds. "Three weeks out of jail, my arresting officer extended an invitation to speak at an FBI conference on bank fraud," recalls Minkow, 38. "When you're a failure and get a second chance...
...busting, Minkow delivers speeches on fraud to corporate officers, insurance companies, accountants and law-enforcement groups, often appearing in a bright orange prison jump suit. At Quantico, as his 150 student FBI agents scribbled notes, he walked through Fraud 101, explaining the psychology of the scam. "A lot of con men just want to please everyone," he says. He stresses that in a successful con game, appearances are everything. "After all," says Minkow, "fraud is nothing more than the skin of the truth stuffed with a lie." Spoken by the master himself...
...Calif, gave Parilla free samples of Pampers and other P&G brands like Crest and Tide as she checked out after Fatima's birth (Parilla uses Crest, although she prefers Cheer, another P&G brand, to Tide). At a local health clinic, she picked up a copy of Avanzando con Tu Familia (Helping Your Family Move Ahead), a P&G-published Martha Stewart Living for recent Hispanic immigrants that reaches 1 million homes across the country. Besides coupons for P&G products, the magazine prints recipes, exercise tips and other lifestyle advice. Parilla especially liked a story...
Screenwriter James DeMonaco peoples the precinct with a Grand Hotel's worth of character clich??s: the grizzled patrolman (Brian Dennehy) who's ready to retire; the woman cop (Drea de Matteo) who can out-tough the macho men; the motormouth con (John Leguizamo) who sees ways of escape in the encroaching anarchy. This bunch could start a brawl in a bus line. But they need to become a community fast to fight an enemy whose siege tactics are as unfathomable as they are unstoppable...
Farfetched? Maybe not. Like a religious text, Lost is open to endless interpretation. In one episode, Kate and con man Sawyer (Josh Holloway) fight over a locked briefcase that she says holds something of hers. Sawyer offers to give it to her if she will say what's inside. "I don't care what it is," he says. "What's burning me up is why it means so much to you." The line is a perfect summary of Alias' and Lost's maddening appeal. Their characters hold secrets behind impenetrable locks. We know that the mysteries will never be solved...