Word: scheme
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
When U.S. agents do uncover a shipment, the cartel adopts new shippers, different routes and more ingenious deceptions. Federal agents took nine years to crack a Santacruz-designed lumber scheme. In 1979, a Cali operative was arrested with the name of a Baltimore lumberyard in his pocket. There, agents saw piles of mahogany boards sliced end to end, with pockets hollowed out and the tops veneered on. A few more clues popped up over the years, but nothing to pinpoint which planks, among the tons of lumber imported from South America, contained contraband...
Document specialists obtain clean driver's licenses and car registrations. In 1989 the FBI and New York City prosecutors cracked a scheme in which employees of the state Department of Motor Vehicles were taking bribes of $100 to write phony registration papers. Hundreds of falsely documented cartel vehicles, fitted with hidden compartments, moved drugs north from Mexico and returned south with cash...
Bilbeisi's smuggling scheme, undetected by U.S. authorities, began with bribes to coffee growers in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador to obtain beans not subject to tariff agreements. The coffee, available at bargain rates, was ostensibly for domestic consumption or export to nontariff nations. To move the contraband through Central America, Bilbeisi's agents, financed by B.C.C.I. letters of credit, paid bribes to truckers, checkpoint officials and port officials. The coffee was marked for delivery to Jordan or Syria but was routed through Miami or New Orleans, where it was secretly off-loaded. Former U.S. shipping agents who testified before...
...Bilbeisi scheme reaches into corporate America as well. The grand jury is investigating Arthur Berman, who was president of Chase & Sanborn in 1981-84 and Chock Full o' Nuts in 1984-85. The Lloyd's lawsuit contends that the executive, knowing the coffee was smuggled, accepted "substantial commissions" from Bilbeisi and Coffee Inc. to facilitate sales to Chase & Sanborn and Chock Full o' Nuts. Bilbeisi's company ledgers show $160,000 in cash and checks paid to Berman. In a 1988 deposition, Berman denied the payments were illegal commissions, insisting they were merely loans that he used to support...
Within the moral scheme of the movie, writer Khouri's choice of this particular crime as the motive for the women's "crime spree," instead of, say, grand theft -- auto, has other advantages as well. For one thing, it ironically restores Thelma and Louise to equality with men -- at least in one realm of action. Says Martha Nussbaum, a philosophy professor at Brown and an expert on women in antiquity: "I think the modern idea that women are gentle and sweet is parochial. Just look at Medea." The Greeks, Nussbaum suggests, understood that crimes are committed by those with...