Word: fairburn
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Died. William Armstrong Fairburn, 70, eccentric recluse, president of the Diamond Match Co. since 1915-five years after he had perfected a nonpoisonous match; in Center Lovell...
...until this week were the effects of his slick cartel-making wiped out in the U.S. The end came in a consent decree in the Government antitrust suit against Kreuger's old Swedish Match Co. and six companies dominated by secretive U.S. Match King William Armstrong Fairburn. A Federal court in Manhattan ordered a stop to such cartel practices as: ¶ Dividing the world into noncompetitive markets. ¶ Restricting production. ¶ Fixing prices on matches, match machinery and match chemicals. ¶ Suppressing the manufacture of new "everlasting" or re-ignitable matches. The U.S. defendants, headed by big Diamond Match...
...naming of Swedish Match King Kreuger was historically appropriate. But it was more appropriate that the No. 1 corporate defendant should be the U.S.'s Diamond Match Co., and that the first individual named was Diamond's secretive, 67-year-old engineer president, William Armstrong Fairburn. Match King Fairburn, who works most of the time at his secluded, tree-hedged ranch in California's Ojai Valley and rarely appears in Diamond's discreet Manhattan offices, has run Diamond like a Central American dictator since 1910, when he was called in to figure out how to make...
Ivar Kreuger, who shot himself in his Paris apartment twelve years ago, was second to no man in his ability to parlay a bunch of match companies into an international stockmarket bubble. But Fairburn, a slower, solider worker, was the man who could almost always beat Kreuger at the match game-at least in the U.S. market, which is all that Mr. Fairburn ever cared much about. In sundry Kreuger forays into Diamond's bailiwick, Fairburn had a way of selling him U.S. match interests at a fancy price, but ending up with Diamond still in the saddle...
Justice v. Diamond. Besides Fairburn and five other match kings, this week's antitrust action named the five top U.S. match producers (starting with Diamond and all allegedly controlled by it) who account for 83% of all U.S. production, plus two British, one Canadian, and three Swedish companies. This cartel, charged Justice, controls some 75% of the world's match business (the Japanese* and the Russians handle most of the rest). Its members have divided up the world among themselves and, except in rare spasms of greed, scrupulously refrain from trespassing on each other's preserves...