Word: wedtech
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Once upon a time the story of the Wedtech Corp. seemed to be a modern urban fairy tale, a kind of parable showing that America was still the land of opportunity. The story began in New York City in 1965, when John Mariotta, a diemaker, high school dropout, and the Manhattan-born son of Puerto Rican parents, invested $3,000 to start a small manufacturing company in a renovated brick garage in a desolate area of the South Bronx. Five years later Mariotta struck up a partnership with Fred Neuberger, a mechanical engineer who as a boy had escaped Nazi...
...company, which changed its name to Wedtech in 1983, moved to a large, low-slung red brick factory in the shadow of Yankee Stadium. Expanding quickly, it hired more than 1,000 black and Hispanic workers from the neighborhood, a blighted area that had lost 40% of its manufacturing business during the previous decade. Wedtech's profits jumped from $8 million in 1981 to more than $72 million for the first six months of 1986, and the company became a potent symbol of minority achievement. On a 1984 visit to New York City, Ronald Reagan lauded Wedtech's success. "People...
...recent months federal and local prosecutors have made clear that Wedtech is not a fable of small-business success but a morality tale of outsize greed and corruption and the perversion of good intentions. Wedtech prospered, prosecutors say, as a result of promiscuous bribery of city, state and federal officials and a conspiracy to win government contracts by fraudulently depicting itself as a minority-owned business. Wedtech's rise and fall is more than just another example of New York's current convulsion of corruption; the company's overreaching may have stretched even to the White House. A special prosecutor...
...Wedtech, whose net revenues jumped from nearly $10 million in 1981 to $117 million last year largely on the strength of Government contracts, issued stock publicly for the first time in August 1983. Nofziger and his partner Mark Bragg, who had been retained by Wedtech as public relations consultants, had each received 22,500 shares of the stock, then worth $360,000 at $16 per share. Jenkins quit the White House in May 1984, began consulting for Wedtech in October 1985, and now is the company's Washington representative...
...Nofziger. Federal laws prohibit onetime senior employees of the Government from lobbying their former agencies for at least a year after leaving office. Nofziger told the Times he was recovering from a mild stroke in 1982 and did not actually recall his letter to Jenkins. Meanwhile, investigations of Wedtech's ties to influential politicians are under way in New York City and Baltimore; a federal grand jury in New York has called Nofziger to testify. Like Michael Deaver, a fellow Reagan intimate and lobbyist who is already under investigation by a special counsel, Nofziger may have stumbled while walking...