Word: extort
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Criminals still run their operations from behind bars. They communicate with their colleagues by way of visiting family members and lawyers; but the crooks have often been found with cell phones smuggled passed the barbed wire fences and watch towers. Phone calls have even been traced to attempts to extort ransoms from terrified victims on the outside. The Eastern Prison is currently installing a new security device to block cell phone signals inside the prison walls. (See pictures of crime-fighting in Mexico City...
...country's biggest prisons. "We haven't had the hangman for 22 years and these criminals have been very dangerous to society because they are idle," Casper Awuondo, a sociology professor at the University of Nairobi, tells TIME. "They have been using their mobile phones to threaten people, extort money, do all sorts of things, because they are idle." (See pictures of prison life in Baghdad...
...well for him before a jury," Lyon says. If that's not heart-wrenching enough for prospective jurors, Blagojevich et al. are also accused of trying to shake down a teachers' retirement fund, withholding state work from firms that would not do business with his wife and trying to extort money from a Congressman looking for funds for a school. That Congressman has reportedly been identified as Rahm Emanuel, Obama's current chief of staff...
...Cellini, of Springfield, is accused of trying to shake down the Teachers' Retirement System and other firms for campaign funds for Blagojevich, and also of trying to extort one of the producers of the Clint Eastwood film Million Dollar Baby. He has been under indictment since October, the 13th person charged in the ongoing Illinois pay-to-play scandal that prosecutors said traces back to even before Blagojevich became governor. Cellini has denied any wrongdoing. (Read "The Fall of the House of Blagojevich...
...jobs continue to vanish and inflation eats away at wages, it is not going to be as easy to placate those who are being hit the hardest when police attempt to extort them for petty cash. "The police are even more corrupt than they were before," Hanoi taxi driver Nguyen Van Cuong says bitterly. "In one day, I can be stopped several times." And where 100,000 dong, or about $6, might have been enough a few years ago, now nothing less than 200,000 will do. "It means some days I work for nothing, as they take everything...