Word: kreugered
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...wrapped in a shroud of melancholy over the passing of the great democrat-all but a luncheon party of American. British and Swedish bankers who waited in edgy silence at the Hotel du Rhin to confer with an autocratic emperor of finance. "Match King'' Ivar Kreuger. If they had cause for melancholy, they did not yet know it. They were somewhat nervous about some bookkeeping discrepancies that had cropped up in one of Kreuger's subsidiary companies, and there had been Ivar's strange breakdown on his recent trip to New York when he babbled...
...Bird Charmer. Though the suicide was hushed up that afternoon to allow the New York Stock Exchange to close, the market opened the following Monday to a flood of "sell" orders on Kreuger stocks and bonds, to which hardheaded U.S. financiers and softheaded speculators alike had subscribed some $250 million. Prices plummeted; one issue of Kreuger stock opened at 5, off 37½ points from the previous close. In little over a month after his death, it was clear that Kreuger had been the world's greatest swindler, having "misappropriated" some $1,168,000,000 in nine years...
...neither popes nor accounting firms could fully resolve the why and how of Ivar Kreuger. Perhaps the French came closest when they dubbed him L'Olseleur, the bird charmer. In disinterring the Kreuger story, Author Allen Churchill (no kin to Winston), onetime managing editor of the American Mercury, enjoys the valuable quarter-century distance that lends disenchantment. His research is sometimes superficial and his prose tabloidish, but he captures the flair and flavor of the Napoleonic con man who was the Match King...
Enter, Caesar. Born in 1880, one of six children, Ivar Kreuger enjoyed a comfortable, humdrum boyhood in the forest-encircled town of Kalmar, Sweden. After cheating his way through school, and with an engineer's diploma in his pocket, Ivar began ricocheting around the globe. He did wiring jobs on Manhattan's Plaza and St. Regis Hotels, operated a restaurant -in Johannesburg. Back in Stockholm in 1908, he co-founded the building firm of Kreuger & Toll. Then he took over his family's three match factories, was shortly gobbling up competitors and building his giant Swedish match...
...branched into iron and gold mines, newspapers and film companies (Greta Garbo got her first job as an extra in a Kreuger-financed film). Up to this time, Kreuger was an aggressive industrialist, but not the dishonest manipulator he later became. Yet he was in the grip of a grandiose passion-to make and sell every match in the world. He had always thought of himself as a superman, and in 1922 he had a superidea. He would personally shore up the tottering, post-World War I governments of Europe with loans, in return for match monopolies...