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There was a time when rich and powerful men were expected to have a few flings on the side–or, if they were really classy, a long-term mistress with her own conveniently located house. Those days are gone, though, and I can’t say I’m too upset about it. Now a sex scandal is a career-breaker for most of the high-profile philanderers who actually get caught. Over on The Daily Beast, they’ve been crunching numbers. What does an illicit affair cost a less-than-discreet public figure?
The price of fame is most striking in the aftermath of scandal. A damage control campaign—staffed by a legion of lawyers, press representatives and aides—is expensive, but so is losing a high-power job and any hope of professional redemption. In the last five years, sex scandals have ended the careers of at least two governors, six Congressional members and one CEO, while countless others remain in office despite allegations, admissions or lawsuits.
Find out who had the 10 Most Expensive Sex Scandals and what they cost; click through for the gallery.
While many towns were built on corruption, greed and scandal, few are as embracing of these embarrassing roots as the residents of Seattle. Of course, it wasn’t always this way, around fifty years ago, most of the city’s residents only knew of the white-washed town history that was (and still is) retold in school history books. Fortunately, when the city threatened to tear down the city’s gorgeous Victorian and Edwardian buildings in the historical Pioneer Square area, residents rushed to save their town’s heritage. To help protect this historical area, one amateur historian and professional journalist, Bill Speidel, set out to uncover the back story of the slum-ridden district. In the end, his findings resulted in the famous Underground Tour and helped establish the neighborhood as a preservation district, ensuring the continued protection of all the historical buildings in the area.
So what is so important about Pioneer Square and why should anyone outside of the city care? Read on, my friends, read on.
In 1851, a troupe of pioneers known as the Denny Party established the first white settlement in the area at Alki Point. The group was led by Arthur A Denny, who soon realized that Alki Point wasn’t a good place for a settlement and then moved his party to a tide flat off of Elliot Bay, which they named Duwamps, after the local Native American tribe.
Within the first few years of settlement, another leader, Doctor David Swinson Maynard moved in from Cleveland. Whereas the members of the Denny Party were dedicated teetotalism Methodists, Doc Maynard was a heavy drinker who believed vice was one of the most effective industries in a frontier town. Maynard convinced the other townspeople to rename the city Seattle after the Duwamps Chief Seattle, who was a friend of his. He did so not only to help honor his friend, but also because he knew Seattle would be a lot easier to promote to people back East than Duwamps, which sounded like a swamp.
In 1852, Maynard built his cabin, and contained a store inside of it, establishing the first shop in Seattle. He soon obtained the right to host a post office in his store, meaning everyone had to visit his store to get their mail. Throughout his life, Maynard helped build a number of important establishments in Seattle, building the first pharmacy, hotel, casino, saloon, brothel and hospital in the area.
When plots of land were officially established, Denny’s property stretched north of Pioneer Square, while Maynard’s extended to the south. Because each established their streets according to their piece of shoreline, the streets now have an awkward bend at what is now Yesler Way and that area of town is noticeably jumbled when it comes to driving.
Maynard helped jump start the city’s industry by offering his land at exceptionally cheap prices, provided the buyer started building a business on it immediately. He attracted critical business professionals such as blacksmiths into town, along with purveyors of vice, which helped attract more frontiersmen to the city. Early real estate records show that 90% of the city’s first businesses were built on Maynard’s land or immediately adjacent to his plot.
While Maynard obviously did a lot to help establish the town, he was left out of history books and almost completely forgotten about until Bill Speidel’s research helped bring his contributions to light. So why would such a key figure in the town’s founding be forgotten? Mostly because he was seen to be amoral.
When Maynard left Cleveland in 1850, he was married to a woman named Lydia. She eventually filed for divorce on grounds of desertion, but she never completed the divorce. Before arriving in Seattle, the good doctor circulated amongst several wagon trains, helping to fight cholera. While serving as the leader on a small wagon train that brought him to Puget Sound, he fell in love with a widow, Catherine Troutman Broshears. At first, her brother refused her permission to remarry, but after Maynard made a good deal of money in Seattle, he relented and the couple was married.
Years latter, Maynard’s first wife sold off her share of property and the man who purchased it then went after Maynard, claiming he was owed everything that was Lydia’s since the couple was never officially divorced. Lydia came to Seattle to help defend her husband and Catherine and the doctor became friends with her and let her live in their home. According to Speidel, Doc Maynard was the only resident that was commonly seen with one wife on each arm.
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Having a Swiss bank account always seemed a romanticized concept, lavish secrete vaults with long lost art and jewels of the stupidly rich. For five years a Geneva-based bank director for UBS, Bradley Birkenfeld, lived the well-heeled life of an insider of Swiss banking—that is, before he turned whistleblower and shook that secret world to its foundation.
Bradley Birkenfeld was one of the few Americans who held the keys to the kingdom. A Boston-born, high-flying, cross-border banker at Switzerland’s premier financial institution, UBS, he had access to the kind of secret account information that American law enforcement had only dreamed of through all the decades that terrorists, dictators, arms dealers, mafia dons and wealthy tax cheats had hidden behind the fortress of secrecy that Swiss banking promised.
Subterranean bomb-proof vaults and state-of-the-art security systems are the superficial trappings of Swiss banking and its culture of secrecy, but the cornerstone of protection for its clients is the numbered account system that offers all but foolproof privacy. Or so they thought.
From the Upcoming 
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There has been a rash of corporate scandals and greed over the past decade, but it is hardly new. Here are a few financial scandals that made news long before Enron and Worldcom.
Back in 1864, Credit Mobilier was a construction company started by executives of Union Pacific Railroad. They then had Union Pacific make contracts with Credit Mobilier to build railroads at inflated prices. These payments would in turn go to buy Union Pacific stock at par value and sell them at market value, generating huge profits to the tune of over $43 million.
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Sad as it is, doping is so prevalent in sports that it comes to no surprise when an athlete is busted … but chess? CHESS? Yes, folks, here’s the Great Chess Doping Scandal of grandmaster Vassily Ivanchuk, ranked third of the world:
Who knows what was going through Ivanchuk’s head when, on Nov. 25 in Dresden, the last day of the Chess Olympiad, he lost to Gata Kamsky? What we do know, however, is that when the game against the American ended, a judge asked Ivanchuk to submit to a drug test. Instead, he stormed out of the room in the conference center, kicked a concrete pillar in the lobby, pounded a countertop in the cafeteria with his fists and then vanished into the coatroom. Throughout this performance, he was followed by a handful of officials.
No one could convince Ivanchuk to provide a small amount of urine for the test. And because refusal is treated as a positive test result, he is now considered guilty of doping and could be barred from professional chess for two years.
Photo: erral [Flickr]
