Word: units
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Even more impressive are the intimate glimpses Auletta provides of the men at the very top and his nuanced picture of the different corporate cultures they fostered. Welch, the brusque, combative chairman of GE, which took over NBC in 1986, treated the network as another GE unit to be whipped into shape. (Why, Welch wondered, was there so much agonizing over layoffs at NBC when hundreds of people were getting axed at GE's turbines division? "You think they're happy?" he snapped.) Tisch, the Loews chairman who had never fired an employee before taking over...
...months residents sensed that all was not right at the Oxford Apartments, a 49-unit low-rise building on Milwaukee's crime-infested west side. A power saw buzzed at odd hours. The putrid odor of rotting meat flooded the corridors. Occasionally, a tenant would hear a cry or the thump of a falling object on the second floor...
...typical operation took place in April 1989, when a container ship from Colombia docked during the night at Karachi, Pakistan. Black-unit operatives met the ship after paying $100,000 in bribes to Pakistani customs officials. The band unloaded large wooden crates from several containers. "They were so heavy we had to use a crane rather than a forklift," says a participant. The crates were trucked to a "secure airport" and loaded aboard an unmarked 707 jet, where an American, believed by the black-unit members to be a CIA agent, supervised the frantic activity...
...last minute by prearrangement. The 707's radar transponder was altered to beep out the code of a commercial airliner, which enabled the plane to overfly several countries without arousing suspicion. "From Czechoslovakia the 707 flew to the U.S.," said the informant, insisting that none of the black-unit workers had any knowledge of what was in the heavy wooden crates. "It could have been gold. It could have been drugs. It could have been guns. We dealt in those commodities," Mustafa told U.S. authorities...
...black unit's mission eventually became the pursuit of power and influence for its own sake, but its primary purpose was to foster a global looting operation that bilked depositors of billions of dollars. Price Waterhouse, the accounting firm whose audit triggered the worldwide seizure of B.C.C.I. assets earlier this month, says the disarray is so extreme that the firm cannot even put together a coherent financial statement. But investigators believe $10 billion or more is missing, fully half of B.C.C.I.'s worldwide assets...