Word: scams
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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...
...their lack of effort, the five players are said to have made at least $19,500. Eads and Johnson, having helped bring the three others into the scam, proceeded to negotiate immunity from prosecution for their testimony. Those they have implicated face up to 30 years in prison if convicted...
...because that was all he could get for it. But his former wife charges that the bank president received a secret bonus of $3 million taken from the coffers of E.S.M. Warner, for his part, claims that he is a victim rather than perpetrator of the E.S.M. scam...