Word: rackets
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...ever be forgotten what a racket was made with the Citizen Genêt?" wrote a Pennsylvanian about the tour of the U.S. put on by the French revolutionary republic's new ambassador in 1793. "What hugging and tugging! What addressing and caressing! With liberty caps and the other wretched trumpery of sans culotte foolery!" But President George Washington soon had his fill of Citizen Genêt's pleading with the American people for U.S. help to France over the heads of the U.S. Government, and the nuisance he was making of himself trying to kick...
...public eye, Arkansas' John L. (for Little) McClellan is a cold-eyed, stone-voiced, racket-busting U.S. Senator. But his few close friends know him for a sensitive, compassionate man who keeps his feelings hidden deep because they have been so sorely tested by sorrow. McClellan's mother died bearing him; his first wife died after they were unhappily divorced; his second wife died in 1935 of spinal meningitis. Son Max, by the first marriage, also died of meningitis while serving with the Army in North Africa in 1943. And in 1949, three days after Max was reburied...
...real estate has been one of the happiest hunting grounds of all for the Great American Confidence Man. Last week in Washington members of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations sat spellbound as witnesses unfolded a vivid account of the latest and biggest real-estate con game: the "advance fee" racket. From its birthplace in Chicago more than five years ago, the racket has expanded to all 48 states until some 70 firms now bilk unwary U.S. property owners of an estimated $25 million-$50 million a year...
Deceptive Words. The advance-fee racket begins, explained William Parker, a onetime "salesman" who spent 2½ years in prison, when a smooth-talking salesman finds a small property owner anxious to sell out. He ridicules his victim's low asking price, insists that his agency can get much more. After determining the prospect's wealth, he then asks an advance fee of about 1% of the newly inflated asking price, pressures the hopeful property owner into signing a contract on the spot...
...cease and desist" agreement with only five of 30 firms it investigated. To give FTC some teeth, the subcommittee is considering a bill providing a maximum penalty of $5,000 fine and/or five years' imprisonment for advance-fee operators, hopes that new public awareness will weaken the racket...