More products for 'insurance fraud'
price:
$7.42 (new)
$7.44 (used)
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Gregory McDonald's lightweight mystery novel about an undercover newspaper reporter cracking a police drug ring is transformed by screenwriter Andrew Bergman (Blazing Saddles, and writer/director of The Freshman and Honeymoon in Vegas) into a fairly sarcastic and occasionally very funny Chevy Chase vehicle. Enjoyment of the film pivots on whether you find Chase's flippant, smart-ass brand of verbal humor funny, or merely egocentric. If you don't like Chase, there's really no one else worth watching (Geena Davis is sadly underused). Chase seems born to play I.M. "Fletch" Fletcher, a disillusioned investigative reporter whose cynicism and detached view on life mirrors the actor's understated approach to comedy. Fletcher offers Chase the opportunity to adopt numerous personas, as his job requires numerous (bad) physical disguises, and much of film's humor centers on the ridiculous idea that any of these phony accents or bad hairpieces could fool anyone. These not-so-clever disguises are put to use when Fletch becomes involved in the film's smart but continually self-mocking two-part mystery. As well as trying to gather drug-smuggling evidence against the LAPD for a long-overdue newspaper story, a rich and apparently terminally ill stranger also offers Fletch a large payoff to kill him. While the film does a fairly good job juggling both of these plots, not to mention tossing in a love interest as well, it's subservient, for better or worse, to Chase's memorable one-liners and disguises. Followed by two forgettable sequels that lack both the original's wit and Chase's attention span. --Dave McCoy
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$6.36 (new)
$4.55 (used)
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Millionaire businessman Thomas Crown (Steve McQueen) is also a high-stakes thief; his latest caper is an elaborate heist at a Boston bank. Why does he do it? For the same reason he flies gliders, bets on golf strokes, and races dune buggies: he needs the thrill to feel alive. Insurance investigator Vicky Anderson (Faye Dunaway) gets her own thrills by busting crooks, and she's got Crown in her cross hairs. Naturally, these two will get it on, because they have a lot in common: they're not people, they're walking clothes racks. (McQueen looks like he'd rather be in jeans than Crown's natty three-piece suits.) The Thomas Crown Affair is a catalog of '60s conventions, from its clipped editing style to its photographic trickery (the inventive Haskell Wexler behind the camera) to its mod design. You can almost sense director Norman Jewison deciding to "tell his story visually," like those newfangled European films; this would explain the long passages of Michel Legrand's lounge jazz ladled over endless montages of the pretty Dunaway and McQueen at play. (The opening-credits song, "Windmills of Your Mind," won an Oscar.) It's like a "What Kind of Man Reads Playboy?" ad come to life, and much more interesting as a cultural snapshot than a piece of storytelling. --Robert Horton
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$3.45 (new)
$1.92 (used)
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Whew. Linda Fiorentino is like a home-grown apocalyptic nightmare as the sizzling, sexy dame who thinks "sharing" is a dirty word. Fiorentino, a master of the double-cross, hooks up with naive Peter Berg, a nice guy desperate for a little adventure. There are endless twists to this cleverly vicious story, but the real draw is Fiorentino, whose performance is brilliant. She is the Everywoman you never want to meet: cool as ice, passionate, tough, self-satisfied, smart, and amoral. Bill Pullman is a surprise as a Machiavellian doctor who is almost her match. Definitely not a date flick, as this represents one vicious battle in the sexual wars. --Rochelle O'Gorman
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$7.20 (new)
$7.18 (used)
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This is a true story of personal greed and downfall, corporate greed fueled with economic and social treachery, shareholder waste and discrimination at AIG, 70 Pine Street in the heart of the financial district. This address is known as the AIG Tower, hence the title Tower of Thieves. The central character is a man with a wife, a family, who has cheated his way to the top by doing good. He is responsible for leading a 60 billion dollar organization with over 40,000 employees worldwide at one of the largest companies in the world. What he sees and what he does validates what unchecked power on Wall Street will do to a man and what it has done to an entire company and country. The events at AIG lead right to the CEO and Senior Vice Chairman and how our guy fights an entire corrupt organization and how he became one of those he despised.
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$12.49 (new)
$9.09 (used)
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tres•pass \'tres-p s\ n: a transgression of law involving one’s obligations to God or to one’s neighbor; a violation of moral law; an offense; a sin –Webster’s New International Dictionary (second edition, unabridged)
In what may be her most unsettling novel to date, Sue Grafton’s T is for Trespass is also her most direct confrontation with the forces of evil. Beginning slowly with the day-to-day life of a private eye, Grafton suddenly shifts from the perspective of Kinsey Millhone to that of Solana Rojas, introducing listeners to a chilling sociopath. Rojas is not her birth name. It is an identity she cunningly stole, an identity that gives her access to private care-giving jobs. The true horror of this novel builds with excruciating tension as the listener foresees the awfulness that lies ahead. The wrenching suspense lies in whether Kinsey Millhone will realize what is happening in time to intervene.
T is for Trespass–dealing with issues of identity theft, elder abuse, betrayal of trust, and the breakdown in the institutions charged with caring for the weak and the dependent–targets an all-too-real rip in the social fabric. Grafton takes us into far darker territory than she has ever traversed, leaving us with a true sense of the horror embedded in the seeming ordinariness of the world we think we know. The result is terrifying.
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price:
$24.68 (new)
$31.81 (used)
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In 1990, a congressional subcommittee warned of "financial knaves and buccaneers" in the insurance industry-unlicensed and largely unregulated companies that operate out of countries like Antigua and the Cayman Islands and sell hundreds of millions of dollars in worthless insurance policies to unsuspecting Americans every year. Increasingly, when a fire, car accident, or medical emergency strikes, policyholders suddenly find themselves victims of a global con game as phone calls are not returned and claim settlements fall to materialize, resulting in financial ruin if not physical harm. Global Pirates is a critical investigation of international insurance fraud. Robert Tillman portrays the often surreal world of the burgeoning offshore insurance industry; a world in which sophisticated white-collar criminals operate beyond the reach of government regulators to set up elaborately orchestrated scams that drain illegal profits out of the $3 trillion U.S. insurance market. He also describes how the new global economy allows these scam artists to take advantage of rapidly changing financial markets and the regulatory environments that surround them. Drawing on congressional hearings, court documents, published articles, and interviews with law enforcement officials, Tillman uses numerous case studies to illustrate degrees of insurance fraud: simply ignoring auto, medical liability, and worker compensation claims while citing NAFTA exemptions to local regulations; selling bogus policies to businesses in "redlined," low-income neighborhoods and to high-risk drivers abandoned by legitimate auto insurers; and falsifying multinational subsidiaries, assets, and even identities of company principals. He examines how "fantasy islands" are created, explores emerging connections between offshore entities and money laundering, drug cartels, and organized crime, and discusses how outlaw insurers evade prosecution by setting up complex financial networks that crisscross national boundaries. Tillman's timely analysis of this rapidly growing transnational criminal activity concludes with solid recommendations for steps that governments can take to protect their citizens from global insurance fraud.
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Page: insurance fraud
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