Word: ivars
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...seemed to be wrapped in a shroud of melancholy over the passing of the great democrat-all but a luncheon party of American. British and Swedish bankers who waited in edgy silence at the Hotel du Rhin to confer with an autocratic emperor of finance. "Match King'' Ivar Kreuger. If they had cause for melancholy, they did not yet know it. They were somewhat nervous about some bookkeeping discrepancies that had cropped up in one of Kreuger's subsidiary companies, and there had been Ivar's strange breakdown on his recent trip to New York when...
...Ivar. like Aristide. was past thinking and past explaining. At 11 a.m. he had shuttered the blinds of his unostentatiously elegant flat at No. 5 Avenue Victor Emmanuel and lain down neatly on his bed. Then he had drawn aside his black coat and the leather locket with the gold coin that always rested on his breast like a superstitious token of his only god. and shot himself with a 9-mm. Browning pistol, neatly through the middle of his heart...
...neither popes nor accounting firms could fully resolve the why and how of Ivar Kreuger. Perhaps the French came closest when they dubbed him L'Olseleur, the bird charmer. In disinterring the Kreuger story, Author Allen Churchill (no kin to Winston), onetime managing editor of the American Mercury, enjoys the valuable quarter-century distance that lends disenchantment. His research is sometimes superficial and his prose tabloidish, but he captures the flair and flavor of the Napoleonic con man who was the Match King...
Enter, Caesar. Born in 1880, one of six children, Ivar Kreuger enjoyed a comfortable, humdrum boyhood in the forest-encircled town of Kalmar, Sweden. After cheating his way through school, and with an engineer's diploma in his pocket, Ivar began ricocheting around the globe. He did wiring jobs on Manhattan's Plaza and St. Regis Hotels, operated a restaurant -in Johannesburg. Back in Stockholm in 1908, he co-founded the building firm of Kreuger & Toll. Then he took over his family's three match factories, was shortly gobbling up competitors and building his giant Swedish match...
...with his own hand $143 million in Italian government bonds. By now, Kreuger's Depression-gored empire was bleeding cash too fast to be saved by bogus credit plasma. A sprinkling of embarrassing questions began. As they sat in the Hotel du Rhin waiting to hear his answers. Ivar Kreuger fobbed off his creditors with one final, non-negotiable note: "Goodbye now and thanks...