Word: scheme
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...what if your con is certain to fail? Why would any self-respecting scoundrel pick a scheme that's guaranteed to end in handcuffs and a perp walk? That's what a lot of people are asking as 70-year-old Bernie Madoff cools his heels under house arrest, charged with masterminding a decades-long, $50 billion Ponzi scheme that has incinerated wealth around the world. (See the top 10 scandals...
...Ponzi scheme - as anyone smart enough to engineer one knows - is a plan that is uniquely without an exit strategy. It requires a constant infusion of new investors to pay off a growing body of existing ones, and ultimately it becomes impossible to find enough suckers. When that happens, the scam collapses. Sure, you could always flee the country before the roof caves in, but many scammers don't and Madoff famously didn't. The reason lies in the personality - or, more accurately, the personality disorder - that drives them to such frauds in the first place...
...bipolar or manic disorders may be involved as well, particularly since they are characterized by grandiosity and impulsiveness, with little regard for consequences. But grandiosity and impulsiveness can also be self-limiting, and lead to smaller-bore crimes that don't require the patience and plotting of a Ponzi scheme. Madoff, says Galietta, "was very planful...
...Frankovich himself is being charged by the state bar of California on three counts of misconduct, stemming from ADA lawsuits he filed on behalf of Molski. One count alleges that Frankovich's litigation strategy amounted to a "scheme to extort money from defendants." Says Frankovich of the charge: "It's an absolute fabrication based on absolutely no supportive facts. Using the fact that he filed 223 lawsuits as evidence of a scheme is absurd. His rights were violated in 223 cases where significant architectural barriers existed...
...stink from arsehole to breakfast time." Wendy Craig, as the young employer's upper-class fiancée in The Servant, turns her sneering attention to the new butler (Dirk Bogarde) and asks him, "Do you use a deodorant? Do you think you go well with the color scheme?" The father in The Homecoming calls his new lady guest "a stinking pox-ridden slut" as well as a slop bucket and a bedpan. "Take that disease away from me," he commands...