The Great Salad Oil Swindle (Baltimore, MD: Penguin Books, 1965) is a book by Wall Street Journal reporter Norman C. Miller about Tino De Angelis, a New York-based commodities trader who bought and sold vegetable oil futures contracts around the world. In 1962, De Angelis started a huge scam, attempting to corner the market for soybean oil, used in salad dressing. In the aftermath of the salad oil scandal, investors in 51 banks learned that he had bilked them out of about $175 million in total ($1.2 billion in year 2000 dollars). Miller won a Pulitzer Prize in 1964 for his reporting on the De Angelis story.
Famous quotes containing the words salad, oil and/or swindle:
“It’s certain that fine women eat
A crazy salad with their meat
Whereby the Horn of Plenty is undone.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“Mr. Chadband is a large yellow man, with a fat smile, and a general appearance of having a good deal of train oil in his system.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
“If Uncle Sam should ever sell that tract for one cent per acre, he will swindle the purchaser outrageously.”
—State of Utah, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)