Word: holdup
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Lying in the vault were about 50 Ibs. of paper money from the Commerzbank of Frankfurt to the Chase Manhattan Bank. It was a treasure far bigger than the $2.78 million taken in the Brink's holdup of 1950, bigger even than the $4.3 million Purolator heist in 1974 in Chicago. The Lufthansa bandits' haul: about $5 million in American dollars, nearly $1 million in jewelry, as well as an undetermined amount of foreign currency...
...year model-gun manufacturers turned out a $25 million arsenal of 600,000 ersatz weapons, among them exact replicas of the Luger PO8, the Walther P38 and the Mauser Military 7.63 mm. According to law, all barrels of metal models were colored yellow or white so as to discourage holdup men from fooling the public...
...much to the consternation of the Japan Model Gun Collectors Association (36,000 members), the National Police Agency is considering a ban on model guns too. The police are fed up, because holdup victims cannot tell the difference between a model pistol and the genuine article. If the ban succeeds, robbers may have to resort to rubber knives and bamboo bludgeons...
...three-day appearance in a jammed House hearing room, guarded by 30 U.S. marshals, was nonetheless enlightening. Understandably jittery upon emerging from seclusion into the glare of Washington publicity, the scrawny ex-holdup man stumbled almost incoherently through a 90-minute statement that he had written himself. But as the more skeptical committee members questioned Ray, he turned out to be a patient, polite and cooperative, if unpersuasive witness. By contrast, his attorney, professional Conspiracy Theorist Mark Lane, loaded his frequent objections to the questioning with such sneering sarcasm that he angered even the most sympathetic members of the committee...
...Mostly, the sources of his book are an unsavory lot, greedy and loutish. One, however, had a taste for Flaubert and Wittgenstein, another the skill and nerve to become a professional racing-car driver, and a third possessed a spontaneously poetic soul. He greeted the dawn after the successful holdup with lines from Omar Khayyám: "Awake! for Morning in the Bowl of Night/ Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight...