Word: grifter
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...wasn't always so blessed. Out of office, Thomas Jefferson found himself buried under crippling debts; James Monroe died destitute; and Ulysses S. Grant, scammed by a Wall Street grifter and battling cancer, hawked his memoirs to Mark Twain to keep his family afloat. Not until 1958 did the Former Presidents Act award ex--Chief Executives a pension and staff...
Ponzi wasn't the scam's first practitioner; that was probably a New York City grifter named William Miller, who fleeced investors out of $1 million--more than $20 million in today's dollars--in 1899. The cons have since grown: a Florida church netted $500 million in a 1990s fraud that promised God would double the money of pious investors. Boy-band impresario Lou Pearlman, in addition to foisting 'N Sync on an unsuspecting public, stole $300 million from clients over two decades. And citizens poured some $1.2 billion into Albanian pyramid schemes after the fall of communism; when...
Though a Boston businessman named Charles Ponzi was the scam's namesake, he wasn't its original practitioner. According to Mitchell Zuckoff, a Ponzi biographer, the reigning king of the "rob Peter to pay Paul" scam was a New York grifter named William Miller, who bilked investors out of $1 million - nearly $25 million in today's dollars - in 1899. After drumming up interest by claiming to have an inside window into the way profitable companies operated, Miller - who earned the nickname "520 percent" due to the astonishing rate of return he promised investors over the course of a year...
...drama is a chrome-plated time machine back to the mid-'60s. In the spirit of Catch Me If You Can, it signals its retro intentions with midcentury-modern production design, a jazz sound track and the casting of Robert Vaughn (The Man from U.N.C.L.E.) as an aging grifter ("You're never too old to cheat, my dear"). Adrian Lester (Primary Colors) is ice cool as Mickey, a Zen master of con who treats his work more as philosophy than fraud. It's all delightfully phony, but will win your faith on charm and panache. Just watch your wallet...
...intellectual facade. For all their outward differences, the two politicians stumbled into the two great sex scandals of the early Republic. In 1797 a journalist named James T. Callender exposed that Hamilton, while Treasury Secretary and a married man with four children, had entered into a yearlong affair with grifter Maria Reynolds, who was 23 when it began. In a 95page pamphlet, Hamilton confessed to the affair at what many regarded as inordinate length. He wished to show that the money he had paid to Reynolds' husband James had been for the favor of her company and not for illicit...