Word: gang
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Drug leaders, gang leaders, crime leaders, bad guys. Cocaine and a drug lord--must be a Latin American. A criminal plus a heavy accent--must be another...
...plan, and just 64 minutes to execute. On Friday, May 13 -- a date chosen in a spirit of mischief -- an $18,000-a-year clerk at First National Bank of Chicago set in motion a simple scheme that nearly bilked his employer out of $68.7 million. Aided by a gang of accomplices and his knowledge of a few secret codes, Gabriel Taylor, 27, electronically transferred the money from accounts belonging to Merrill Lynch, United Airlines and Brown-Forman distillers to accounts that some of the conspirators had set up under assumed names at two banks in Vienna. Before the gang...
...banks, transfers require that a First Chicago employee call back another executive at the customer's offices to reconfirm the order, using various code numbers. All such calls are automatically taped. Taylor had access to the codes and knew the names of the appropriate executives at various corporations. The gang's original plan called for stealing $232 million from the accounts of quite a few companies, including Hilton, but the group eventually settled on taking the $68.7 million from United, Brown-Forman and Merrill Lynch. The Chairman was able to recruit Taylor, who had no previous police record or employment...
...gang member posing as a Merrill Lynch executive called First Chicago to arrange the transfer of $24 million to the account of "Lord Investments" in Vienna's Creditanstalt bank. He first heard a taped message: "This is First Chicago transfer operations. Your transaction is being recorded." Unfazed, the caller placed the order with one of Taylor's unwitting co-workers. Taylor pretended to phone another Merrill Lynch official for backup confirmation. He really called the Chicago home of Bailey, who gave an authentic-sounding "approval" as the tape rolled. The $24 million was promptly wired to New York's Citibank...
Investigators were amazed at how far the scheme proceeded before being discovered. If the gang had settled for smaller amounts or picked accounts that were less active, the crime might have gone undetected long enough for the culprits to withdraw the money from the Viennese banks. Says an investigator connected with the case: "They came a lot closer than the banks want to acknowledge...