Word: thief
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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This Boy's Life proves good enough to be unforgettable. Tobias Wolff, 43, is the author of two collections of stories and The Barracks Thief (1984), a critically acclaimed novella. He is also the younger brother of Geoffrey Wolff, whose own memoir, The Duke of Deception (1979), introduced tens of thousands of readers to the bizarre saga of the Wolff family. Although these two narratives have kinship and blood in common, they spring from dissimilar circumstances. The parents split up when the brothers were young. Geoffrey stayed east with his flamboyantly fraudulent father; Tobias drifted west with his mother...
...written surveys usually include a few ringers (example: "Do you always tell the truth?") to determine whether a job seeker is being candid. No single answer brands a person as a liar or thief, but those who administer the test watch for ominous patterns. Observes Arthur Le Blanc, a California psychologist who helped screen new employees hired for the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles: "If you score in a certain range, you're more likely to be dishonest...
Bell Laboratories has long been proud of its thief-resistant pay telephone, boasting that the only way to break into it was to haul the whole contraption away and work on it with sledgehammers or explosives. According to the FBI, John Clark, 49, a former Ohio machinist who wears a shoulder-length ponytail and cowboy clothes, discovered otherwise. He is the only person known to have devised a tool that can pick pay-phone locks. It afforded him a comfortable, if itinerant, living. The FBI estimates that Clark, who sometimes used the alias Billy Bell, may have stolen as much...
Michael Keaton plays Daryl Poynter, the very model of a white-collar slime mold: he's a thief, an accessory to murder and a meanie to his mom. He can't even admit he has a drug problem -- cocaine and alcohol -- until a tough-love therapist (Morgan Freeman), an A.A. veteran (M. Emmet Walsh) and a nervy fellow addict (Kathy Baker) help him see the dark before the light. Some of the early scenes ring as inauthentic as the Philadelphia accents; each supporting junkie pushes too hard, as if he were part of an Actors Lab experiment that failed...
...FISH CALLED WANDA. High-gloss farce is topped by Kevin Kline as an oafish jewel thief and John Cleese as a proper barrister gone bonkers...