Word: baiata
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...Neither Baiata nor his lawyer, one Abraham Karatz who had been a barker all summer at the Hall of Champions, took office. For president of Lincoln Life they dug up a bald, scrubby-mustached man named Gustav Lindquist who had once been Minnesota's insurance director. Installed as treasurer was a young gentle man who ran the dice game at Michelob's Tavern on State Street...
...process the sharpers needed a no-questions-asked bank to act as 1) a depository where loans could be made on the outflowing Lincoln securities, and 2) a reputable vendor of the inflowing "hot" bonds, so that the state insurance department would not be suspicious. With out much trouble, Baiata & friends found a bank for sale in Indianapolis. The dice-playing treasurer swept up an armful of securities from the Lincoln vaults, wrapped them up in a newspaper and hurried to Indianapolis to show the bank's officials he meant business...
Meantime Baiata was having trouble with the second $25,000 instalment. A onetime broker's clerk who was in desperate need of a new set of lower false teeth was outfitted from Boston Dentists and set up as W. W. Ehlers & Co., Investment Brokers. It was his job, through a miraculous system of checks and drafts, to use funds from the Lincoln treasury to pay for the Lincoln company. But the ring-around-the-rosy scheme went askew in St. Paul, where a bank refused to honor Ehlers' signature. President Lindquist scurried up to St. Paul to see his wife...
...Baiata and his cronies were on the point of sealing the deal with the Indianapolis bank?the signal for the looting to start?when they were rounded up and Lincoln Life remained unravished. Last week it was quietly sold to rock-sound Illinois Bankers Life Assurance...
...When the Baiata gang stepped into Lincoln Life the biggest stockholder was Harmey B (for nothing) Hill, who stayed on as board chairman. Supposedly ignorant of the plot, he was nevertheless ousted by the authorities along with the Baiata regime. Last week newshawks found him still at his office, a quid in his cheek, a book on his desk called Why Worry? What did he have to say? "I'll have plenty to say?when the time comes...