Word: flimflammed
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...direction. And if some of them stick, it won't simply be because they call into question Bush's character. It will be because four years in the White House have transformed Bush's carefully managed image as a square- shouldered Dudley Do-Right into something closer to the Flimflam...
...most prominent victim of Abedi's flimflam operation was the man whose wealth helped finance B.C.C.I.: Sheik Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahayan of Abu Dhabi, President of the United Arab Emirates. Investigators say approximately $2 billion of Zayed's own money, along with $7 billion in Abu Dhabi state funds, has disappeared into the bank's black hole. In the U.S., B.C.C.I.'s secret ownership of Washington's largest bank, First American, implicated former Defense Secretary Clark Clifford. As chairman of First American, Clifford had denied that B.C.C.I. controlled the Washington bank; he and his partner, Robert Altman, now face...
B.C.C.I.'s downfall was inevitable because it was essentially a planetary Ponzi scheme, a rip-off technique pioneered by American flimflam man Charles Ponzi in 1920. B.C.C.I. gathered deposits, looted most of them, but kept enough new deposits flowing in so that there was always sufficient cash on hand to pay anyone who asked for his money. During the years of its most explosive growth in the late 1970s and mid-1980s, B.C.C.I. became a magnet for drug money, capital-flight money, tax-evading money and money from corrupt government officials. B.C.C.I. quickly gained a reputation as a bank that...
...founder of this enterprise was part storyteller, part flimflam man. Born in Nebraska in 1911, Hubbard served in the Navy during World War II and soon afterward complained to the Veterans Administration about his "suicidal inclinations" and his "seriously affected" mind. Nevertheless, Hubbard was a moderately successful writer of pulp science fiction. Years later, church brochures described him falsely as an "extensively decorated" World War II hero who was crippled and blinded in action, twice pronounced dead and miraculously cured through Scientology. Hubbard's "doctorate" from "Sequoia University" was a fake mail-order degree. In a 1984 case in which...
...sensational heist of old-master paintings, including a Vermeer and two Rembrandts, from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston last week showed that there is still some respect for the law. All the thieves needed was two rented cops' uniforms and some flimflam at the security entrance on a Saturday night, and -- presto! -- in they walked. They ) immobilized the two night guards, ignored the museum's security system (which was not connected to the police precinct) and then spent two hours pulling paintings off the walls and out of their frames. Then exeunt: a clean getaway...