Word: 80s
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...late 1970s and early '80s, thrifts were struggling under the old rules because of inflation. Forced to pay high rates to attract deposits but dependent on low-interest, long-term home loans for revenue, the S&Ls saw their profits erode. Under constant pressure from thrift lobbyists, the old rules were felled one by one: in 1980 federal deposit insurance was increased from $40,000 to $100,000, money brokers were allowed to bundle massive deposits and thrifts were freed to make commercial loans...
...energy boom of the late 1970s and early '80s provided Silverado with plenty of opportunities for long-shot ventures with big returns. "It was a real Western boom that made the gold and silver days look pale by comparison," remembers Jim Thomas, executive director of Colorado's Independent Bankers Association. "We attracted all the con men, promoters, hucksters and sleaze artists in sight...
What's going on here? Why is Hollywood once again married to the Mob? It's not that the genre is especially popular these days. (The Untouchables was the only gangster blockbuster of the '80s.) Nor is it that the Italian underworld taps a nerve in today's body politic. Drug lords, often black or Hispanic, are the civic scourge of the moment, and they get their movie due only in Abel Ferrara's rancid, megaviolent King of New York, in which a white man (Christopher Walken) leads a rainbow coalition of pushers. Whatever charm the Mafia boss still possesses...
Leave it to the Coen brothers -- the writer-producer-director team who were the film finds of the '80s -- to discover ferocious drama in words, character, atmosphere. Their inspiration for Miller's Crossing was a pair of Dashiell Hammett novels: Red Harvest (which provided the milieu of a corrupt city ruled by warring gangsters) and The Glass Key (which provided the plot of an aging boss and his young adviser involved with the same woman). To this blend the Coens have brought a teeming cast of sharpies, most of them spectacularly, thoughtfully venal. They speak wittily but often...
...tales would rattle even the sturdiest confessional. First came the story of seven Roman Catholic priests who were charged in the mid-'80s with sexually abusing young boys in Louisiana. Then there was this year's scandal at New York City's Covenant House, culminating in a commissioned report stating that Father Bruce Ritter, founder of the renowned shelter for runaways, had a pattern of improper sexual conduct with youths going back to 1970. Last month came the news that Atlanta's Archbishop Eugene Marino and one of his priests had resigned because both men had been intimate with...