Word: scams
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Members of Congress expect to be called Honorable, but their claim to that honorific is looking pretty flimsy. First came the check-bouncing scam, when investigators found that lawmakers wrote more than 8,000 rubber checks at their private bank last year, free of charge. Then came word of members' stiffing the House restaurant, where prices are already dirt cheap. Suddenly, talk-show comedians, radio deejays, newspaper editorialists and the mailman were all talking about exactly the same thing: How can members of Congress balance a budget and spend tax dollars wisely when they can't even balance their checkbooks...
ANOTHER YOU. A congenital liar (Gene Wilder) and his con man friend (Richard Pryor) get involved in an elaborate insurance scam. This comedy is complicated too -- but a big why-bother. By now these two gifted farceurs are doing it from memory, not from inspiration. The parts keep moving long after the machine is turned...
...last week, accused General Electric Co. of conspiring with Israeli General Rami Dotan to defraud Washington of $30 million in U.S. military aid by padding invoices and charging for work that was never done. Last March, Dotan was sentenced to 13 years in prison for his role in the scam, which investigators believe diverted into his bank accounts money earmarked for the purchase of F-16 engines...
...Brooks' Life Stinks, a kind of Homeless Alone about a billionaire on the bum, as if it were trying to wipe a rag across their windshield. Brooks' old colleague Gene Wilder has fared no better with Another You, in which he plays a compulsive liar coupled in a complex scam with con man Richard Pryor. On its second weekend of release, this mediocre jape averaged a pathetic $262 per screen; that's about 50 people in each theater all weekend. With those numbers, a moviemaker can go broke, and an usher can get awfully lonely...
...revered sheik wound up at the center of a global scam...