Word: ransoms
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...many observers of American Government, the practice of secrecy is as serious a threat to a free society as wiretapping. "Complacency about this problem," declares Vanderbilt University Professor Harry Howe Ransom, "can destroy the nation." In view of Daniel Ellsberg, who should know, people who have access to Government secrets tend to develop an "arrogance and contempt" for people who are not similarly plugged in. It is obvious that this criticism is not limited to the Nixon Administration; one has only to recall the way Lyndon Johnson used to chuckle over the FBI dossiers of friends, foes and the famous...
...though, Foreign Service officers may be a bit apprehensive about the assignment. Two weeks ago, while returning home from a local police exhibition on law enforcement, U.S. Consul General Terrance Leonhardy (a 21-year career man) was kidnaped by four armed men. An hour after he was spirited away, ransom notes turned up, demanding on behalf of the "Revolutionary Armed Forces of the People" that 30 political prisoners be released from prisons across the country and flown to Cuba. Warned the terrorists: "Any delay in fulfilling these demands will result in the execution of the bourgeois...
...Havana, the proclamation duly printed, the police leashed. Cuba's chargé d'affaires appeared, as specified, on television to report that the freed rebels had safely arrived in Havana. But then Leonhardy's captors made an additional demand for his freedom: $80,000 in ransom money. A day later, the ransom was paid; nine hours afterward, Leonhardy was found, exhausted and unshaven, in a Guadalajara street. He called his 76-hour captivity a "terrible ordeal. I prayed a lot. I didn't know when they might put a bullet through my head...
...thieves picked three locks to open a steel door and an iron grille, then chiseled the urn off its marble pedestal-all without attracting the security guards. It was a sort of grisly Rififi; yet no motive has been discerned. A local newspaper received demands for $50,000 in ransom, but they apparently came from cranks. By last week, although Montreal police still had two detectives on the case, the oratory's priests had given up hope. Whatever the motive, the thief may have been doing Brother André a favor. Enshrined in the templed glories of package-tour...
...beautiful Laurel Lennox, third generation heiress to an immense oil fortune. Laurel is slightly unbalanced (sensitive, if you prefer), and at first it seems she might have vanished in reaction to an oil slick formed by the family company's offshore drilling operation. Then her father receives a ransom call, which would suggest this is a kidnapping. But fifteen years ago, Laurel was involved in a similar kidnapping which, it turns out, she masterminded herself to extort money from her parents...