Word: czechoslovak
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Just about every kind of entrepreneur has talked up the emerging opportunities in the new Eastern Europe, but now Colombia's powerful CALI DRUG CARTEL is exploring the possibilities. In October, Czechoslovak authorities seized 100 kg of cocaine hidden in a truckload of Colombian coffee. After the coffee was traced to a Polish ship that had stopped in Colombia, Polish police uncovered another 100 kg in the rest of the shipment, which was sitting in a Warsaw warehouse. U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration officials speculate that the cartel hopes to take advantage of the legal chaos in the region to transship...
Maxwell was deep in hock and struggling to keep his conglomerate afloat in the months before his death. The Czechoslovak-born press baron, who embraced socialism in the 1960s as a Member of Parliament, had run up $4.5 billion in debts to buy everything from American book publishers to British soccer teams to Israeli and German newspapers. But even before Maxwell was interred, reports of financial skulduggery in his shop began to surface. First came the startling revelation that the company was broke. Then came the discovery that Maxwell had pledged the same assets as collateral for various loans...
From France to the Soviet Union, Poland to Czechoslovakia, underground movements harried the Germans -- sometimes at a horrendous cost. On May 27, 1942, two Czechoslovak agents based in London who had been parachuted into Czechoslovakia five months earlier were activated. Their target: Reinhard Heydrich, "the Butcher of Prague," the SS Obergruppenfuhrer who was a major organizer of the Holocaust that was engulfing Europe's Jews. The Czechoslovaks killed Heydrich in a bomb attack as he drove into Prague, but the retribution was terrible: the Nazis murdered 1,300 Czechoslovaks immediately; 3,000 Jews were sent to Poland to be killed...
Germany could afford such a housecleaning because it has skilled noncommunists from the former West Germany to fill critical jobs. But other East European nations need the expertise of old bureaucrats and so are more tolerant of past party ties. In 1989 Czechoslovak President Vaclav Havel appointed Josef Tosovsky, an apparatchik whose star rose under communist rule, to be president of his country's state bank. Other ex-functionaries have found comfortable posts outside the power structure. Jerzy Urban, who ran Polish state television during the last days of the communist regime, now edits a satirical magazine that mocks postcommunist...
...Havel government in Czechoslovakia has begun auctioning off thousands of small businesses and retail shops. The initial round of bidding was limited to Czechoslovak citizens, who must pay only a $1.75 entrance fee to qualify for the auction. A later round of bidding will be open to foreigners...