Word: mansion
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Life in the village is like the tale behind the three bullet holes in the wooden door-terrifying, mysterious, obscured by fear. When the shooting began, eight members of the Ramón Portillo family had been squatting as refugees in the shuttered mansion once occupied by the village's wealthiest man, who owned all the cactus fields and a coffee finca (plantation) that stretched as far, it is said, as the volcano four miles away. On New Year's Day, guerrillas swept up the back road, firing into the village as they came. Ramón Portillo...
Portillo was marked, say some residents, because the guerrillas learned that he was a distant relative of the mansion's owner. Others say that he was shot because he refused to open the door, or because the rebels wanted him for something he had done in another village. "It was an accident," insists the village priest, Father Sebastián. But no one really knows. All that remains is three small holes in a door...
...England. He rose in the oil business and at one point worked for American petroleum billionaire John Paul Getty. In the late 1960s, he married the ultra rich Martha "Sunny" Crawford von Auersperg, a Pittsburgh utility heiress, and they lived well, if not happily, in her Rhode Island mansion. But by 1979, he became distrenchanted with her love, or hungry for her money, or both. He tried to murder her twice with insulin injections, during two successive Christmas vacations. By May 1981, doctors had declared that Mrs von Bulow's brain had been damaged irreparably, and that she would never...
...Watt is found guilty in a criminal trial, he could face a year in prison and a $1,000 fine. Meanwhile, the General Accounting Office recommended that Watt replace some $4,342 of federal money spent on two Christmas parties at Arlington House, a National Park Service-owned mansion in Virginia. By this time, Watt was his old combative self: he refused to discuss the matter with a House subcommittee because it was conducting ' 'a media sideshow...
...another imbroglio, Mr. Watt has proven that House committee's assessment of him accurate: he does have contempt for Congress. The secretary, who last December used some $9000 of government funds to hold parties in mansion owned by the government, has made it abundantly clear that he does not care at all if the General Accounting Office (GAO) finds he misused the funds. Dismissing the suggestion that he reimburse the government, Watt says tersely it is the GAO that "is in error." Indeed, the Secretary does not even deign to appear at the Congressional hearing into the matter, sending instead...