Word: ponzi
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...institutions had a symbiotic relationship, according to sources inside B.C.C.I. The corrupt organization used Bank of America as an important resource in a global Ponzi scheme to collect deposits, funneling most of its cash in the U.S. into Bank of America accounts. At the same time, the flow of deposits helped prop up the struggling California bank during its hard times in the mid-1980s. "The B.C.C.I. headquarters money always flowed through Bank of America," says a former B.C.C.I. executive...
Superlatives are quickly exhausted: it is the largest corporate criminal enterprise ever, the biggest Ponzi scheme, the most pervasive money-laundering operation and financial supermarket ever created for the likes of Manuel Noriega, Ferdinand Marcos, Saddam Hussein and the Colombian drug barons. B.C.C.I. even accomplished a Stealth-like invasion of the U.S. banking industry by secretly buying First American Bankshares, a Washington-based holding company with offices stretching from Florida to New York, whose chairman is former U.S. Defense Secretary Clark Clifford...
B.C.C.I.'s downfall was inevitable because it was essentially a planetary Ponzi scheme, a rip-off technique pioneered by American flimflam man Charles Ponzi in 1920. B.C.C.I. gathered deposits, looted most of them, but kept enough new deposits flowing in so that there was always sufficient cash on hand to pay anyone who asked for his money. During the years of its most explosive growth in the late 1970s and mid-1980s, B.C.C.I. became a magnet for drug money, capital-flight money, tax-evading money and money from corrupt government officials. B.C.C.I. quickly gained a reputation as a bank that...
...Charles Ponzi promised a return of 50% in less than two months. The plot was ingeniously simple: he paid the early customers (and himself) with money from the later ones. When the whistle blew he was $3 million in arrears. Ponzi served a three-year sentence. Paroled, he advertised a new scheme, 200% in 60 days. He was rearrested and eventually deported to his native Italy. Only two things were left behind: the usual dupes and the name Ponzi schemes, still used to describe illegal methods of fleecing the sheep...