Word: middlemen
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...member, Stephen Young was heartbroken. When he learned how the triggerman got the gun, he was furious. The Bryco 9-mm semiautomatic handgun that killed Andrew Young was one of 40 weapons a suburban gun shop sold to a single purchaser. In gun lingo these are "straw buyers," shady middlemen who do a brisk business reselling guns to convicted felons, minors and others with itchy trigger fingers but no legal right to own a gun. "You want to tell me this guy needs 40 guns for self-protection?" asks Young. "The gun industry knows what's going...
Nine months after evidence of foreign cash in U.S. politics surfaced in the last days of the 1996 campaign, Americans know that both Democrats and Republicans were so desperate for the unrestricted dole of "soft money" that they went overseas to find more. Either directly or through middlemen, both parties turned to Overseas Chinese businessmen with large commercial interests in the People's Republic of China for multimillion-dollar cash infusions. Both parties gave their benefactors a fair hearing on party trade policy toward China, and both maintained elaborate ruses to hide their new sources of cash. Yet the Democrats...
Corruption is biting into everyone's purse as petty officials, communist bureaucrats, soldiers and policemen, middlemen and hucksters greedily siphon off anything they can stuff into their own pockets. The protests that rocked the communist government in 1989 were in part fueled by popular resentment of endemic financial chicanery. Today the failure to establish political or judicial systems that can check corruption is stirring widespread public anger once again...
...occupied areas were risking their life when they illegally sent their money out to Switzerland. To protect themselves they depended not only on the secrecy of numbered accounts but also on intermediaries: Swiss lawyers and accountants who opened the accounts and managed them under power of attorney. If the middlemen were honest brokers, they turned the funds over to their rightful owners after the war. If they were crooked, they embezzled the money long ago or, by making withdrawals or deposits, have fended off investigators looking at dormant accounts. Ten years after an account is closed, banks destroy the records...
...According to the San Jose Mercury News, huge chunks of the $33.6 million the Pentagon has spent in the past four years to track down the 1,609 American military personnel still missing in the country have been diverted into the pockets of various Vietnamese officials, middlemen and hucksters. Among the alleged abuses: entire fleets of U.S.-owned vehicles, designated to drive investigators around, have been rented out to tourists by agents of the Vietnamese government (daily rental fee: $40); village-excavation laborers, slated to receive $30 a day, have often been paid less than...