Word: silver
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Catching a mountain lion in a coyote trap is quite a surprise. Finance Minister Ramon Beteta last week found how it feels. He had set out to run down the silver smugglers who had been cheating the government of export taxes and dollar earnings. He ended up with the ultra-conservative Banco de Comercio, S.A., the country's biggest private banking house, on his hands...
...Mexican silver production is strictly regulated by the government, which imposes a 15% tax on exports to support the value of silver in the Manhattan free market.* For more than a year Mexican treasury officials had suspected a big leak in silver shipments. Despite controls, there always seemed to be enough high-grade Mexican silver in Manhattan to cause prices to fluctuate between 70 and 77.5 cents an ounce. Earlier this year, Beteta put some of his best investigators on the problem...
Across the Border. Three months ago, with the investigation beginning to simmer, Beteta had a visit from Anibal de Iturbide, manager of the Banco de Comercio. Without his knowledge, Iturbide said, his chief of exchange had been enriching the bank by illegal silver sales...
Following up this lead, Beteta's agents traced some 80 sales totaling more than 9,000,000 silver pesos, with an estimated profit of more than $1,000,000. All the silver had been turned over to a notorious smuggler named Roberto Maese, who moved it across the border to El Paso. Each deal had at least two profitable angles: 1) it evaded the export tax; 2) the bank sent out old-style silver pesos, whose metal value is now higher than the face value, and replaced them in its own accounts with paper money...
...night they watched graceful Siamese dance exhibitions or sipped drinks under the fake banana trees of the Silver Palm Club. The more adventurous let fleet-tongued, fleet-footed samlor (pedicab) boys wheel them off to the Cathay Night Club, where they jitterbugged the night away with wriggly Siamese taxi dancers. (Lest the visitors get any improper ideas, signs at their hotels informed them sternly: "It is forbidden to entertain lady guests in the bedroom without permission of the management...