Word: scams
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Philadelphia's newly elected district attorney, Ronald Castille, asserts that since 1972, Blay-Miezah and his American "agent," Robert Ellis, have swindled at least $18 million from about 300 investors in the Philadelphia area for a nonexistent Ghanaian trust fund. Says Castille: "It's the biggest scam in the history of Philadelphia." Adds Assistant D.A. William Wolf: "What you had were some of the most successful and intelligent men and women in Philadelphia who bought a treasure map from con men." Some sources say that Philadelphians were not the only suckers: the bogus trust may have taken in as much...
...front of a Carpenter Center audience of 200 Thursday night, McGillis discussed the measures she took to prepare to play the role "Rachel" in Witness, the highly acclaimed film of Amish people caught up in a modern-day murder scam. She chose to live away from the film production company and stay with an Amish widow on a Pennsylvania farm...
There is, and has long been, a strong whiff of scam about the influence- peddling business. Its practitioners like to imply that they have more clout than they truly do. In the post-Watergate era, power has been fractionated on Capitol Hill. Where a few powerful committee chairmen once held sway, Congress has become a loose federation of 535 little fiefdoms. This has made a lobbyist's job more difficult, but it hardly means that Congress has been ! liberated from the thrall of special interests. Well- intentioned congressional reform has been subverted over the years by the proliferation of lobbyists...
With a cold eye and a fine sense of irony, Pileggi records the underside of industry as his informer dashes from scheme to scam, driving from North Carolina to New York with a load of untaxed cigarettes, delivering stolen cars for shipment to Haiti, reburying a murdered colleague whose resting place is threatened by a new housing development. Hill forms no permanent friendships and makes no future plans. Everything is for the moment, and associates, even those who gave him a hand, are betrayed for the sake of the bigger payoff, the easier deal. Only at home is life...
...White Salamander Letter, which purportedly traced some of Mormon Founder Joseph Smith's beliefs to folk magic, rather than to divine revelation as the church teaches. Prosecutors claim that the letter and many other documents that Hofmann peddled to the church were forgeries, and that Christensen learned of the scam. Sheets, they believe, was killed in a diversionary effort to connect Christensen with her husband's controversial business dealings. Hofmann, who was injured a day after the slayings in a car bombing that police say was accidental, maintains that he is innocent of both murders...