Word: took
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...story was Horatio Alger with a gun, an ice pick and a dark vision of Big Business. He was nine when the family immigrated from Sicily, where his father had labored in the sulphur pits, to New York City. He took to the streets early, was busted almost at once for shoplifting, later for delivering drugs. Luciano was a tough teenage hoodlum on the Lower East Side when his gang targeted a skinny Jewish kid whose bold defiance won their respect. The encounter led to a merger of Jewish and Italian gangs and a lifelong friendship. When Luciano rebuilt...
...took Hitler to win Lucky his freedom. After Pearl Harbor, German U-boats off the U.S. coast were sinking merchant ships regularly. U.S. intelligence suspected they were aided by spies or Nazi sympathizers. Then the Normandie, a French liner being retrofitted into a troop ship, sank in the Hudson River, sparking fears of sabotage...
Eventually, a deal was reached that included deportation--Luciano had never become a citizen--and he was sent to Italy in February 1946. He surfaced months later in sunny, pre-Castro Cuba. Lansky, Sinatra and other pals paid visits--so many, in fact, that the press took note, and in February 1947 the U.S. Bureau of Narcotics learned of Luciano's reappearance in the Americas. U.S. authorities claimed that he planned to headquarter a worldwide drug-smuggling operation in Cuba. Lucky was again packed off to Italy...
Throughout his career, Juan Trippe had been driven by the great American instinct for seeing a market before it happened--and then making it happen. In a real sense, he fathered the international airline business. To do so, he took on the entire airline industry, and risked his company to see his vision through. You've just got to admire a guy like that...
...years later, Watson not only succeeded his father but also would eventually surpass him. IBM is now synonymous with computers, even though the company did not invent the device that would change our life, nor had it shipped a single computer before Tom Jr. took over...