Word: majorcan
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World War I made March the richest man in Spain. He indifferently sold food to the Allies, oil to the Germans. From his war profiteering, March went legitimate: he bought huge tracts of Majorcan real estate, invested in the Spanish sugar trust, chemicals, coal and oil. Though he held government monopolies on the manufacture and sale of cigarettes, he nonetheless continued to smuggle raw tobacco to avoid paying import taxes. Once, according to legend, he imported a shipment of right-hand gloves from Czechoslovakia, later bought a shipment of matching left-hand gloves, thus neatly sidestepping government import duties...
...March had cornered the Spanish oil and petrol business. He sold shoes to the French army, traded coal and munitions to both sides, delivered American wheat in his ships, and built up a spy service that was available to all comers. Some of his profits went into Majorcan real estate, some into the National Sugar Trust. By the time the Spanish revolution broke in 1936 this grasping old man, now an octogenarian, had so compounded his World War profits that he was able to lend General Franco at least $50,000,000, according to an estimate printed last April...
...plodding, militaristic Francisco were too often at opposite political poles to be good friends, but when the civil war started Lieut. Colonel Franco, then Spanish air attaché at Washington, immediately returned to Spain to join his brother. The Generalissimo made him chief of the Rightist Majorcan air base. The job was close to a nominal one, however, for all knew that Majorca was directed, if not owned, by the Italians...