Word: middlemen
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...Cigar Disguise. Etruscan grave robbing is now thought to involve a network of 200 thieves, 25 middlemen and a dozen fences. Last year the government's special contraband corps arrested 89 looters. Not realizing that much of the booty is stolen, and some faked, Americans bought 85% of the Etruscan objects in respectable-looking shops. Customs officers, traditionally easygoing with American tourists, let them pass. "Americans could walk out of Italy with the Colosseum," complained one contraband officer. But last month frontier customs guards caught an Austrian carrying a vase dating from the 6th century...
...famous and unique," just below Rome's Spanish Steps. There was nothing Etruscan to be seen, but the salesman steered them around the corner to a 17th century palace at No. 77 Via della Croce. First, the officers put a watch on No. 77, keeping an eye on middlemen entering and purchasers leaving the place. Last week officers raided No. 77 and confiscated what they called the "greatest hoard of looted archaeological treasures ever found in Italy." In the old palace, crowded with pressed butterflies and Victorian lamps, they found 15,000 antique items without a single legal permit...
...crucial voting, a new wedge was driven in the pro-civil-rights ranks. The driver: no less an advocate than Harlem's Adam Clayton Powell. "Why send Pennsylvania and Ohio Democrats to Congress," he wrote fellow House members, "if they must take their orders from the middlemen who serve the White Citizens' Councils...
...iron curtain that worries me. It's the green curtain that comes down every morning between me and my cabbage." In the argot of workaday Rome, the green curtain is the term used to describe the veil of mystery behind which the shrewd middlemen in the city's huge wholesale vegetable market operate to send the prices of simple foodstuffs soaring...
...roll into the Rome market, and the morning hours when the loads are distributed among the city's retailers. But the prices soar sometimes to triple those paid the wholesaler, thanks to the manipulations of the few insiders. They are the "captains" and the "queens" of the market, middlemen who tightly control prices but seldom keep the food in their own possession for more than half an hour. A wholesaler or retailer who dares to defy his captain or queen may find himself boycotted throughout the market, or, failing that, stuck with a stock of spoiled potatoes or worm...