Word: plante
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Maybe it was his Runyonesque swagger, or the 6-ft. 6-in., 350-lb. former football linebacker who served as his bodyguard, or his expert craft, which included hiding a key in a potted plant. Whatever the case, Gary Hipple, a U.S. Customs agent based in San Francisco, convinced a group of Chinese arms dealers that he was a Mafia big shot who was in the market to buy guns for drug rings and street gangs. By the time the undercover deal was over, Hipple and his partner, a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agent who also posed...
...Packer Byron Braggs. Ku allegedly set up a test: he had a suitcase of weapons parts flown from China to the San Francisco airport. Hipple duly carried the case past Customs and stashed it in a locker, telling Ku he would find the key in a nearby potted plant...
...believe that too. Where Grisham really stumbles is in grafting an adventure tale's hero and heroine--both young and good looking, she slightly smarter than he--onto the stiff frame of a civil trial. The awkward premise is that this pair of secretive anti-tobacco activists manages to plant him on the jury. He then easily takes control, getting an exceedingly dim judge to banish balky jurors and drugging another uncooperative panelist himself. She, meanwhile, remains offstage (not an asset in the sort of novel in which at least a modest degree of bodice ripping is expected) but does...
...going character, Mr. Burns, the snooty nuclear plant owner, has been recently exposed as a Yale man, as has Sideshow Bob, Bart's sociopathic nemesis...
...well as employees, suppliers, customers and local communities. But in the '80s some of these stakes were crushed in the machinery of mergers or restructuring. Cities lost powerful corporate allies, that were relegated to subsidiary status by headquarters in distant places. In industries such as textiles and steel, plant shutdowns destroyed forever the notion that the company takes care of its own. Steel towns in Pennsylvania, like Duquesne, collapsed when their blast furnaces went cold. Those were thought to be singular events, industrial catastrophes that wouldn't be repeated. But in the harsh global economy, layoffs will not go away...