Word: ransoms
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...York, whose Seagram liquor fortune and other assets exceed $1 billion, feared that 21-year-old Samuel Bronfman II was buried in a box with a meager ten-day supply of air and water steadily running out. He had been kidnaped, and the kidnapers had demanded a ransom of $4.6 million, the highest ever asked in the U.S. Frantically the family tried to comply, but hitches kept developing. The wait seemed interminable...
...Brooklyn. The lanky young Bronfman, newly graduated from Williams College and about to set out on his first full-time job, was found. He was weary and hungry but well. Two of his abductors were arrested, one at the scene, and police sought others. The FBI recovered the ransom, which had been arbitrarily reduced to $2.3 million by the conspirators. It had been delivered by Edgar Bronfman some 24 hours earlier in a nightmarish post-midnight rendezvous with a masked kidnaper...
...with no more than half of the bills in an "uncirculated" condition and at least 200,000 of them in $10 denomination. The kidnapers would use the code name "Raven" in making contact with the family and would disguise their voices with speech-altering devices. To signal that the ransom was ready for delivery, the Bronfman family should place a personal ad, signed "Fred Bollard," in New York newspapers...
...letter suggested a purely monetary motive for the kidnaping. It claimed that the abductors were "outcasts"-Viet Nam veterans once hooked on narcotics. They wanted the ransom to "give us a chance in life that we have been denied." A bizarre threat was added. If police sought to capture them before the ransom was paid, the kidnapers would use cyanide-dipped bullets to resist; if captured, they would commit suicide. Any ring member not captured would hunt Edgar Bronfman down and kill...
...European tour as frail aristocrats line up to beg for favors. He is the most powerful man in the world. Meanwhile, a black ragtime pianist, thought to be a Junatic, is holed up in J.P.'s library, ready to blow it up. He is holding all New York at ransom to correct a racial humiliation. He bombs fire stations, dominates the tabloids, and threatens to detonate the Morgan property if he is not avenged. As in Attica, a "representative" is sent in, Booker T.Washington, but the ragtime man is adamant. He has put America into a panic--if this...