Word: salesman
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...with the state police from 1968 to 1972 and quit shortly after his squad-car windshield was apparently shot out from the inside when he was alone on patrol. His record also included the beating of a man he had arrested. After that, a brief stint as a tobacco salesman came and went amidst claims by his employers that a cache of cigarettes had mysteriously disappeared. Lawrence then managed to get a job as chief of the four-man police force in the small town of Vergennes; he left a year later, this time just before being fired for questionable...
...Arms salesmen apparently can never quite get over the fact that they are the heirs of Sir Basil Zaharoff, the archetypal death merchant who gave the trade its bad name. Bribing, cheating, lying fluently in eight languages and playing upon nations' fears of their neighbors, Zaharoff-as chief salesman for Britain's Vickers company-amassed a huge fortune by selling weapons to both sides in the Boer War, Balkan conflicts and World...
Naturally that lucky salesman did not pocket his entire commission; more than half of it had to be distributed as "gratuities" to the officials in the purchasing country who had smoothed the way for the deal. By and large, weapons these days are sold like any other manufactured product: in straightforward boardroom deals that have been scrutinized by lawyers and checked thoroughly by accountants, and are supervised carefully by government agencies. Where there is keen competition among several suppliers, however, some arms companies try a little harder. "Graft fuels almost every arms transaction," admits a veteran European arms trader...
Like Sir Basil, today's salesmen sometimes try to fill their order books by playing one nation against the other. "What I like doing," admitted a European arms salesman visiting Colombia, "is selling one weapon here in Bogota and then going off to Caracas to sell them the antidote." The most successful modern practitioners of this ploy seem to be the fleet-footed French, who first sold the Exocet antiship missile to Peru's leftist dictatorship in 1973, then leaked the news to neighboring Chile, whose rightist leaders became so jittery that they too bought the missile...
Kennerly made it to the White House on brashness, guts, high-speed hustle and talent. The son of a salesman, he grew up in a middle-class neighborhood in Roseburg, Ore., and was briefly married in 1967. After quitting Portland State University to take pictures for the Oregon Journal, he went on, at the age of 20, to United Press International. UPI sent him to Saigon in 1971, and the next year, his photos showing the desolation of war won him a Pulitzer Prize...