Word: payoff
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Nearly four years ago, Mikhail Gorbachev pledged that the payoff for perestroika (economic restructuring) would be an increase in the quality and availability of consumer goods. So far, to the profound distress of Gorbachev's supporters and the growing impatience of Soviet citizenry, precisely the opposite has taken place. The arrival of the new year, traditionally a time of gift giving and feasting in the Soviet Union, served only to highlight the burgeoning list of products that are hard to find, rationed or simply unavailable. Even Gorbachev sounded dispirited over what has turned into the most severe consumer crisis...
...University of Kentucky is now preparing its formal responses to a list of stark charges made by the National Collegiate Athletic Association. They range from a falsified entrance exam to a recruiting payoff that, in what a fan from Indiana might call an act of God, burst in cash from a defective airfreight package. Conviction would probably result in probationary exclusion from tournaments and television. Then Kentucky would be within one felony of the NCAA's newfound "death penalty": a one- or two-year shutdown of the sort that has reduced the football program at Southern Methodist University to intramurals...
...next six weeks, FBI agents blanketed the area, quizzing the friendly folks of Neshoba County. Reporters from all over tested the residents' hospitality. Navy frogmen fished the lakes and ponds, searching for evidence of the local hunters' blood sport. In August, thanks to a $30,000 payoff to an informant, the FBI discovered the bodies in a new earth dam. Four months later, the Philadelphia sheriff, his deputy and 17 others were arrested, and in 1967 seven of the 19 (including the deputy but not his boss) were convicted of conspiracy to murder...
...equity in newly structured companies. By using borrowed money to buy out the stockholders, executives can cash in their old shares at a profit even as they become owners of their firms. The managers are then free to sell parts of the business at a handsome profit. The ultimate payoff comes when they put their companies back on the market. The sale of well-run corporations can return up to 100 times the amount of a manager's original investment. With investors lured by such prospects, the value of completed LBOs soared from just $13.4 billion...
...first blush, the $75-a-share offer seemed generous, compared with the market price of about $56 at the time. But the directors' shock became outrage when they later learned about the huge piece of the action that Johnson and his top executives planned to grab for themselves: a payoff that could conceivably amount to $2.6 billion in five years. The Johnson gang's greedy overreach could wind up entirely undoing the proposed...