Word: forte
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...visitor. South Florida still looks like the Sunbelt's shiniest jewel. New hotels and office towers are rising in Miami, and once sleepy towns near by are growing skylines of their own. The Rolls-Royces still roll royally along Palm Beach's Worth Avenue, and Fort Lauderdale is, as ever, where boy meets girl every aster vacation...
Hope Somoza, the widow of the Nicaraguan President, lives in Key Biscayne. Nicole Duvalier, who opposes her brother Baby Doc, owns a sumptuous home in southwest Miami. The son of the late Fulgencio Batista, former President of Cuba, works as a model in Fort Lauderdale. A retired leader of the Tonton Macoute, the Haitian secret police, lives in Miami. Says one leading political exile, alive...
...time Donald Steinberg was 28, he and his Fort Lauderdale "company" owned waterfront homes and office buildings in Florida, apartments in Houston and a town house in New York City that was later sold for $2 million. With his partners, he maintained a fleet of three dozen or more boats-no one kept count-and a cash reserve so large they could shrug off million-dollar business losses. Eventually they had to buy their own turboprop airplane to ferry overflowing cash profits to uninquisitive banks in the Bahamas and Cayman Islands...
...business grew they took precautions: changing telephone numbers frequently, talking in code, using electronic black boxes to conceal the locations from which they spoke. Yet at heart, the dealers remained kids who believed they would never be caught. The downhill slide started when Steinberg directed one operation from a Fort Lauderdale hotel room. Calls to his extension tied up the entire switchboard; a suspicious owner called the police. The gang scrambled out the windows but left behind marijuana, 7 Ibs. of cocaine (value: $180,000) and $1.2 million in cash, plus meticulous account books and records. It took police...
Newly tightened enforcement of bank reporting laws has made it vastly more difficult to send large sums anonymously from the U.S. to Colombia, yet the money still manages to get through. Every week a Colombian air force C-130 transport plane flies to Fort Lauderdale with wooden crates containing up to $10 million from Colombia's central bank. The surplus greenbacks are being legally returned by Bogota to the Federal Reserve System in exchange for credit...