Word: gangly
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...previous Prime Minister, the good-natured Keizo Obuchi, unexpectedly suffered a stroke in April of last year. Five senior politicians of Obuchi's venerable Liberal Democratic Party met behind the ornate screens in Tokyo's Akasaka Prince Hotel to decide which of them would get the top job. The Gang of Five, as they are known, hurriedly picked Mori without consulting the rest of the party, much less the nation...
These days Takeshita's old office? complete with its watercolor of Izumo shrine?is occupied by Mikio Aoki, an LDP heavyweight who hails from the same prefecture as Takeshita. But, having little clout and less charisma, Aoki is no Takeshita. He's competing for influence with Hiromu Nonaka?another Gang of Five member and Prime Minister-wannabe, who belongs to the largest party faction (led by former Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto...
...would buy a yarn like that? According to the Philippine police, thousands of gullible Filipinos and others did, coughing up millions of real greenbacks to a group of Mindanao fraudsters now dubbed the Trillion Dollar Gang. The numbers could be higher: police say many victims are probably too embarrassed to come forward. They should be red-faced, having fallen for the crudest of cons. Using computers and rudimentary desktop printers, the gang ran off fake U.S. Federal Reserve notes in denominations from $100 million to $500 million. The total: $2.15 trillion, more than the annual American budget. The scam...
Going by the number of zeros on their notes, the Trillion Dollar Gang were certainly the most ambitious counterfeiters in history. Their victims didn't know that the U.S. government has never printed a bond larger in value than $10 million; nor did it matter that the fake dollar bills copied onto the bonds were sloppy blurs in which Benjamin Franklin looks like a blob from Mars. They were taken in by the tantalizingly credible story. All the fake bonds were dated 1934 and marked to "mature" 30 years later. Each of the hustlers told his victims the bonds were...
...first clues to the Trillion Dollar Gang were detected not in Mindanao but in Los Angeles. In early 1998, customs officials found fake Treasury notes hidden in the suitcase of a Filipino Jesuit priest. Investigators eventually traced the fake bonds to a shantytown on the edges of Cagayan de Oro. There, in the home of a security guard named Archie Mingoc, police found a box containing $1.38 trillion in fake bonds and stacks of counterfeit Japanese, Malaysian and Argentinian currency. A raid on the home of his brother-in-law, Renato Waban, yielded an additional $773 billion in bonds. Mingoc...