Word: lyons
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...undeniable beauty, partly because they were believed to possess and emanate magical powers. As late as the 15th century, emeralds were prescribed as cures for epilepsy, dysentery and failing eyes, as guards against evil spirits and sure protectors of chastity. By the 20th century, says English Jewelry Expert Peter Lyon, "jewelry had declined to a point where it was only a collection of precious stones. Designing had little or nothing to do with it. The problem was how you could crowd together the greatest number of big stones...
Klaus Barbie, 59, was the Gestapo chief in Lyon. In 1954, a French military court sentenced him to death in absentia for the torture and murder of Jean Moulin, the martyred leader of the French Resistance. Today Barbie lives as a wealthy, naturalized businessman under the name of Klaus Altmann in La Paz, Bolivia. France's request for his extradition has been ignored by the Bolivian government...
...control the world of prostitution is to have intimate relations with it, insisted Louis Tonnot, commander of Lyon's Brigade of Social Protection, as the French call their vice squads. "The best-dressed flic in France," as his colleagues called him, Tonnot made no secret of his own close connections with the underworld. His mistress ran a dubious nightclub, and Tonnot allowed no interference from fellow cops on his beat. Last week Tonnot himself was under arrest in a widening scandal that has so far brought convictions for four madams, five pimps and six bordello operators-three of them...
...arrest added new headlines to a case that had already titillated France and embarrassed President Georges Pompidou's Gaullist party. Prostitution is not illegal per se in France, but pimping and bordellos are. Moreover, the taint of scandal had spread from the flic-operators to party members in Lyon. One Gaullist deputy, Edouard Charret, was implicated when a local newspaper printed a picture of him attending the wedding of close friends. The groom, it turned out, was one of the city's better-known pimps and the groom's mother was a notable madam...
...drove a bourgeois Peugeot 504 and kept his bank account low. In the end, however, exterior wealth was his undoing. The widening investigation turned up the fact that he owned a vineyard in the Jura mountains and a villa by the Mediterranean in addition to a $50,000 Lyon apartment (which alone might have been explained away by simple graft). Now, Tonnot, a Lyon University law graduate, faces a ten-year jail sentence and $50,000 fine: "I'm done for," he sobbed when he was arrested. "I'm going to kill myself." Pending trial, a considerate magistrate...