Word: pawnshop
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Candid Mike's producer-narrator, Allen Funt, combs Manhattan street corners, hotels, doorsteps, restaurants-any spot where people meet and talk-with his tape recorder. He disguises the mike in a sling, as a hearing aid, hides it under his lapel or sets it on a pawnshop counter covered by a "for sale" sign...
...victim's words have been reeled in on the tape, Funt gently breaks the news to him, plays back the sequence, and tries to get permission to use it on the air. He nearly always succeeds; so far, only three people (all of them in an Eighth Avenue pawnshop) have refused. Once in a while the victim is resentful. By last week, Funt had narrowly avoided a couple of fights but was still unbruised...
...Russians last week wailed like so many wronged Rhine nymphs. The Central State Pawnshop of the Soviet Purchasing Commission had bought gold bullion in Berlin-50 million marks' worth of nice, shiny gold for the depleted Soviet treasury. Last week, a frantic message came from Moscow: the gold was phony! Investigation showed that Germans (among them many D.P.s) had operated an illegal smelter in Berlin, casting a base alloy with a thin gold coating into small "gold" bricks. This week, the Russian assayers who had permitted themselves to be fooled were in jail...
Demonstration. In Boise, Idaho, Don Williams asked to see a pistol in a pawnshop window, asked for some shells, calmly loaded it, held up the place, made off with...
Within a fortnight French taxpayers knew that, with the connivance of Government officials, they had been bilked of some $18,000,000 in pawnshop bonds. Soon some 50 Parisians were killed rioting against "the swindlers and assassins in the Chamber of Deputies." Half a dozen bureaucrats fled, or, like Stavisky, were "found dead." Two French Cabinets crashed. Whatever else he may have done, Stavisky revealed France's inward rottenness to the watchful eye of Hitler...