Word: expression
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Renato Grassi was not the kind of traveler who heeds the advice of the American Express Co. to carry no more than $50 in cash. A slim, 36-year-old Italian with a weakness for tall brunettes, fast Lancias, and all-night stands at the roulette tables, Grassi liked to have as much as $250,000 worth of francs in his little black briefcase when he took off for weekends at French casinos. The trouble was, Grassi invariably lost-and the cash belonged to the American Express...
Convicted on a forgery charge in his native Italy, Grassi started commuting to Paris in 1955, lived in style and passed himself off as a "director of Fiat." His connections seemed to impress George Allen, the modestly salaried chief cashier of American Express in Paris. Allen, who comes from Philadelphia, was a model of American-in-Paris respectability, living in a plainly furnished apartment, his biggest extravagance a Sunday picnic in Fontainebleau forest with his wife and two little girls, after passing the plate at Sunday morning services at the American Church...
...flashy Grassi asked Allen for a loan of $30,000 for a month, saying it would save him the trouble of bank charges. Allen obliged with a check drawn on the American Express bank in Rome. Punctually at month's end, Grassi repaid it. After a second $30,000 loan, which he also repaid promptly, Grassi had Allen completely gulled. Grassi rapidly obtained three successive "loans" of American Express funds totaling an incredible $670,000, and Allen concealed the transactions...
...money, he was even better at losing it. Last month, in one three-day spree in Monte Carlo, he dropped $490,000. A few days later, at Le Touquet, he lost heavily again, this time ironically playing beside an American businessman on vacation-Ralph Thomas Reed, president of American Express Co. Reed was not the only one who wondered at the recklessness of the mysteriously affluent Italian. A Parisian gossip columnist wrote an item about "a young Italian, Mr. Grassi, who never bets less than one million francs at a time at roulette," and makes the casino manager "shudder...
Another who shuddered, at reading the item, was Cashier Allen. In alarm, he phoned Grassi and asked him to return the money. When Grassi could fork up only $50,000 of it, Allen worried for three weeks, finally confessed to American Express officials, and then to the police. Had Allen given Grassi the money to speculate on promise of a share of the profit? The hapless Allen would only say, "I had no idea he was a gambler . . . He lived at the Georges V Hotel. How could I have any suspicion that he wasn't honest...