Jerry Maren, one of the Munchkins in “The Wizard of Oz” and the last surviving little person from that group. (According to the NYT, some young girls were also hired to fill out the Munchkin ranks, and some of them are still alive.)
With a friend and fellow actor, Billy Barty, Mr. Maren in 1957 founded Little People of America, a nonprofit advocacy organization that says it has roughly 6,000 members.
“He took it as his responsibility to show, through a strong sense of self and speaking out and personal example, that little people are just people,” Mr. Cox said. “All of the other Munchkins had a great deal of respect for Jerry.”
Mel Weinberg, of ABSCAM fame.
A convicted swindler with a Runyonesque persona, Mr. Weinberg, facing prison for fraud, traded his criminal savvy for probation and became a principal orchestrator and actor in the two-year operation code-named Abscam. The operation videotaped politicians and others taking bribes from federal agents posing as oil-rich Arabs seeking favors on immigration problems and investment projects.
…
With chartered jets, limousines and parties to lend verisimilitude, the government-run scam led to convictions and prison terms for Senator Harrison A. Williams, a New Jersey Democrat, as well as the mayor of Camden, N.J., and 17 others. It inspired a revision of guidelines in federal undercover cases and legal and ethical debates over whether the defendants had been unlawfully entrapped.
This entry was posted on Thursday, June 7th, 2018 at 8:25 am and is filed under FBI, Law, Movies, Obits, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Both comments and pings are currently closed.