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Red Cross officials in Oakland, California issued a public warning in April about the fund-raising activities of George Cox, who planned to induce Red Cross givers to pay a $158 fee by promising to award the top giver $17.5 million. Cox told the Oakland Tribune that his plan was not a pyramid scheme: “In pyramids, a lot of people are making money. Here, only one person will make money.”
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Edwin Meese, who in a 1988 book contract promised May 1989 delivery on his memoirs as attorney general and who told a reporter in June 1989 that he had already completed “a thousand pages,” failed to deliver a single page by April 1990 and had the contract canceled by the publisher.
A police sergeant in Washington, D.C., shot and wounded Carmelo Gomez, 33, in November because Gomez would not drop the gun he was holding. Gomez had just saved himself by wrestling the gun away from a mugger, but he did not understand English.
