Word: sams
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Byrne to drive them by limousine into Westchester County on the night of the abduction. Lynch, a friend of Byrne's, went along. The strangers then pulled guns, the arrested men said, and later forced them to pick up young Bronfman and another kidnaper, who apparently had seized Sam at his mother's house...
When Edgar Bronfman was a little boy, his father built a bicycle path behind the wall that surrounded the Bronfman estate rn Montreal. That way Edgar could ride in complete safety from any danger of kidnapers. It was a few years after the Lindbergh kidnaping, and Sam Bronfman was a man who liked to anticipate trouble and take precautions. That was a trait he had inherited from his father, Yechiel, who had been a prosperous miller in Bessarabia in Eastern Europe. When Yechiel went to Montreal in 1889 in flight from Russian antiSemitism, he booked passage not only...
Yechiel went to Western Canada, started dealing in real estate and bought a hotel. Sam soon acquired a hotel of his own, but the coming of Prohibition in Canada in 1916 forced him to close the bar. He also saw that the law permitted alcohol sales across provincial borders. So, although it is just a coincidence that bronfen is the Yiddish word for whisky, the young Bronfman brothers started a wholesale mail-order liquor business. For a time it flourished, but as the Canadian authorities gradually took over all retail liquor sales, the Bronfmans began looking south...
When Prohibition hit the U.S. in 1919, it looked as if the brothers Bronfman had no place left to turn and were out of business. Not for long. They quickly developed a brisk trade with U.S. bootleggers, and Sam snapped up a foundering Canadian competitor called Joseph E. Seagram & Sons. Seagram's represented quality, and even in the days of bathtub gin, Sam always approved of quality. By the end of the '20s, more than 1 million gallons a year of Canadian whisky came illicitly into the U.S., and a sizable proportion of it came from Seagram...
...Sam, having been taught by the rabbi from Bessarabia, gave lavishly to charity and urged his children to do the same. The family gave a $1 million wing to the Israel Museum, and still donates at least another $1 million annually to various worthy institutions. For the making of more money he also relied on his children, particularly his oldest son. Scrappy and assertive, Edgar went south to Williams College in Massachusetts, but after three indifferent years he transferred to Montreal's McGill University to get his B. A. degree...