Word: lumbering
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...been steeped in the revolution. Born Arvo Kusta Halberg, son of a carpenter in Minnesota's iron range, he went to work after the eighth grade as a lumberjack to help support his family. Long hours in the deep woods at a dollar a day educated him. "Working in lumber camps in those days," he recalls, "would make a communist out of anybody." He joined the party in 1927 and spent several years in the early 1930s at Moscow's Marx- Engels-Lenin Institute. When he returned, the brash youngster started organizing workers and getting in trouble. In the Little...
When U.S. agents do uncover a shipment, the cartel adopts new shippers, different routes and more ingenious deceptions. Federal agents took nine years to crack a Santacruz-designed lumber scheme. In 1979, a Cali operative was arrested with the name of a Baltimore lumberyard in his pocket. There, agents saw piles of mahogany boards sliced end to end, with pockets hollowed out and the tops veneered on. A few more clues popped up over the years, but nothing to pinpoint which planks, among the tons of lumber imported from South America, contained contraband...
Then in April 1988, a load of Brazilian cedar boards arrived in Tarpon Springs, Fla., aboard the freighter Amazon Sky. DEA alerted Tampa Customs that an informer had reported drugs were aboard. Inspectors drilled holes in stacks of lumber planks, but found nothing. At the last moment, a Customs man saw a crew member drop a plank and glance about nervously. The inspector drilled into the board and hit white powder. The seizure was a record 3,270 kg of cocaine, but just 700 of the 9,000 planks held any drugs...
...Hechinger Co., a major Maryland- based chain of 115 centers, lost $800,000 in last year's fourth quarter before rebounding with a $7.2 million profit in the first quarter this year. That was down from $8.4 million in the same period a year ago. In California the National Lumber and Supply Co. closed last year when its 60,000-sq.-ft. home-improvement centers proved unable to compete with larger, more efficiently run stores like Home Depot...
During its heyday, Executive Life swam with the sharks. When raider Charles Hurwitz took over San Francisco-based Pacific Lumber in 1986 with the help of $900 million in Drexel junk bonds, for example, First Executive Corporation, bought more than one-third of those bonds. Once in charge, Hurwitz terminated the pension plan and grabbed the $55 million worth of surplus pension funds to pay down part of his buyout debt. He then bought $38 million worth of Executive Life annuities to cover 2,500 people, thus shedding his obligations and saving himself the cost of the premiums...