Word: octopus
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...Because it simultaneously acts as agent for most of Hollywood's top talent, is the nation's largest producer and distributor of TV films, and holds TV rights to Paramount's pre-1948 film library, MCA Inc. is uneasily known in the film capital as "The Octopus." Though MCA's elusive President Lew Wasserman, 49, has refused to admit it, show-biz savants have long suspected that the octopus would like to stretch its tentacles into movie production. Last week directors of New York's Decca Records, Inc. approved Wasserman's offer...
Survivors know it was slow because the P.A. system blared the victims' screams throughout the cell blocks. A variant was the Pulpo (Octopus), a many-armed electrical device attached by means of small screws inserted into the skull. Trujillo's men also employed a rubber "collar" that could be tightened enough to sever a man's head, an 18-in. electrified rod ("the Cane") for shocking the genitals, nail extractors, leather-thonged whips, small rubber hammers, scissors for castration...
Assembling an Octopus. Moore, who bosses his expanding empire from a foam-rubber bus seat ("It's the best desk chair I've found") in Continental's Dallas head quarters, started out at 18 as a ticket agent in the Little Rock bus depot. In those days the U.S. bus business consisted largely of a patchwork of local companies that seldom traveled more than a few towns down the road. Recalls Moore: "In my first year a man wanted to buy a ticket to Dallas. I told him he couldn't get there...
Because Greyhound had a virtual monopoly of existing long-haul interstate routes and the ICC was unwilling to franchise new ones, Moore was obliged to build up his system by buying small local bus lines in a careful pattern that linked them into new long-haul routes. Octopus-like, Continental stretched its tentacles across the Southeast and into the Midwest; by 1953 the company had its first transcontinental route (it now operates five). At that point Moore found that his fledgling system lacked the equipment to capitalize on the bus industry's greatest potential asset: the growing U.S. network...
...Ground. In its early years, Unilever was so tightly controlled from the home office that it was bitingly called "Dear Octopus" by its employees. ("You had to cable London before you went to the bathroom," complained a Canadian executive.) But now autonomy is the rule. "Once the managers clear their estimates at the end of the year," says Co-Chairman Tempel. "they are free to go ahead...