Word: rip-off
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...subterranean society of professional crime, the fence is an economic necessity. Godfather to rip-off artists ranging from truck hijackers to snatch-and-grab junkies, the fence buys their "swag" (stolen goods) for a fraction of its value and unloads it swiftly at slightly below wholesale to respectable folks eager for a bargain. Though he is the underworld's most visible agent, the fence has generally escaped the scrutiny of journalists, cameras and sociologists. Until recently, that is. In The Professional Fence (Free Press; $8.95), Sociologist Carl B. Klockars offers the latest word on the ancient practice of selling...
Bogart. The Brattle began its reading period Bogie festival last week and now To Have Or Have Not is on the bill. To avoid the most frustrating kind of rip-off, check out what the print is like from someone before you see the picture. Judging from the Brattle's Casablanca last week, your favorite lines are liable to be garbled and flashed out. They really shouldn't show mutilated movies...
...stories about the big ruby rip-off have appeared in Kenya's press, and the government apparently wants to keep it that way. Without directly mentioning the ruby affair, the Foreign Ministry warned at week's end that it "will not tolerate any section of the press, whether local or overseas, which tends to discredit the image of Kenya abroad." Kenya is a one-party state, and President Kenyatta has already been declared re-elected to another five-year term for lack of opposition. Still, in the parliamentary elections next week, publicity about high-level hanky-panky over...
...exhibit now under consideration represents something of a curiosity: a rip-off of a ripoff. It will be remembered that the original cartoon feature Fritz the Cat - largely the work of the animator Ralph Bakshi - so enraged Fritz's creator, the underground comic artist R. Crumb, that he disowned the whole movie. Crumb, a stringent satirist, had conjured up Fritz as a way to mock the poses of the pseudo hipster and to lay waste the giddy excess of the culture from which he sprang. Bakshi slicked Fritz up, cooled him out, and turned him into the perfect creature...
...addition, undisguised inflation exists in sectors not subject to iron-fisted government control-imports, goods sold on sanctioned free markets and those peddled in widespread black markets. There is an Orwellian rip-off on the prices of so-called new products. By making the most minute change in any item-even installing a new car heater -a factory manager can get it classified as new and kick up the price. That does not count as an "increase" because the product theoretically has just come to the market. In the Soviet Union, the latest model Volga car costs $12,170, about...