Word: durst
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...risen above that annual figure since. "The need for revenge, for vengeance is being curbed, the appetite is no longer there," contends Robert Hirschorn, a nationally known Texas attorney and jury consultant who has helped pick juries for many prominent clients, including, most recently, millionaire real estate mogul Robert Durst, who was found not guilty of killing and dismembering his neighbor. "The tide has changed," Hirschorn says. "It used to be fashionable to say, 'I support the death penalty.' It used to be unfashionable to say, 'I am against the death penalty.'" (See the Top 10 Crime Stories...
...tireless and outspoken critic of government waste and intervention, Durst routinely purchased space on the front page of the New York Times to run what he liked to call "bottom lines" - rants that ran along the bottom of the page like stock tickers. His haiku-esque May 26, 1991 message: "Federal debt soaring, national economy shrinking, soon the twain shall meet." In 1980, before technology could support a debt clock, he mailed handwritten holiday cards to dozens of congressmen that read: "Happy New Year. Your share of the national debt is $35,000." When technology finally caught up with...
This is not the first time the clock has experienced technical difficulties. In 1991, Durst had to remove and revamp the clock so it could keep pace with the national debt's $13,000-per-second increase. ("Interest payments on the national debt are becoming the largest federal expenditure," he noted at the time). Before his death in 1995, the amount began accumulating so fast that the last seven digits became totally illegible. At one point, the surge actually crashed the computer that calculates the billboard's numbers...
...September 7, 2000, Durst's son, Douglas, who now serves as the company's president, hung a red, white and blue curtain over the sign. The ceremony not only marked what would have been his father's 87th birthday, but also an historic moment in U.S. history - the national debt was shrinking. Because the clock wasn't built to count backwards, Durst pulled the plug. Just two years later, following the burst of the dot-com bubble and the economic fall-out of 9/11, he turned it back on. The billboard has ticked forward ever since...
Over the past 20 years the digital "alarm" clock has been moved four times to make way for bulldozers and wrecking crews. Today, it hangs near the entrance of the city's IRS office. Said the younger Durst in an interview with TIME,"We thought it was a fitting location...