In 1961, 22-year old college dropout Calisto Tanzi opened a small pasteurization plant in Parma, Italy. As time went on, the business, Parmalat, grew and grew, branching out from dairy products to include bakery items, juices and other beverages. The company began trading on the Milan Stock Exchange as its expansion continued, mostly by acquisition.

In the early 2000s, a majority of Parmalat’s new divisions were operating at a loss. A bit of complicated and “creative” accounting told otherwise. Under Calisto’s direction, company executive officers were shifted around or fired and replaced. The monetary results of fund-raising efforts were shuffled through off-shore banks and other financial entities. Financial statements were forged. Goverment auditors detained Calisto and some of his colleagues, investigating Parmalat’s books. They discovered an actual debt of over 14.3 billion Euros, nearly eight times the company’s official report. In 2008, it was revealed that Calisto had embezzled 800 million Euros from the company. He was convicted of fraud and sentenced to 18 years in prison. After two years, he was placed under house arrest.

In 2011, Calisto was sentenced to an additional nine years for bankruptcy fraud and criminal association. A large cache of artwork by Picasso, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne, and Matisse was discovered at Calisto’s home — works he denied owning. The art was seized before it could be put up for sale.

In the wake of Calisto’s sentencing, several honorary titles and degrees were withdrawn by their issuing organizations.

In January 2022, Calisto passed away from pneumonia at the age of 82.

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Poor Sal Mineo.

After a couple of film roles (including one for which he beat out another up-and-coming actor named Clint Eastwood), Sal Mineo was cast as “John ‘Plato’ Crawford” in Rebel Without a Cause alongside James Dean and Natalie Wood. The film earned Sal an Academy Award nomination and made him a household name, cementing his stardom as the quintessential “troubled teen.”

Sal soon found he was being typecast, something he wanted no parts of. He purposely sought out roles that went against the iconic role for which he gained his initial fame. He portrayed a Native American boy in the Disney film Tonka and later embodied drummer Gene Krupa in a biopic. In the epic Exodus, Sal played a Jewish holocaust survivor and earned his second Oscar nomination. He also recorded a couple of albums and released several singles, one of which hit the Top Ten on the Billboard Pop chart.

In the early 60s, rumors of homosexuality were attached to Sal. He blamed this on being turned down for several high-profile film roles. Actually, he was aging out of the “angry youth” roles that were once his bread-and-butter. He appeared briefly in the war drama The Longest Day, but missed out on a part in Lawrence of Arabia. He soon turned to television and appeared on episodes of Combat! and The Patty Duke Show. As the 60s came to a close, he directed the gripping drama Fortune and Men’s Eyes, a play about prison life with a focus on homosexuality.

In 1971, Sal took a small part in the second sequel in the lucrative Planet of the Apes franchise, Escape from the Planet of the Apes. Under heavy, constricting make-up, Sal reluctantly played “Dr. Milo,” a role he admitted doing purely for the money. The character was killed off early in the film, much to Sal’s delight. This would prove to be Sal’s final big-screen role. He continued to take parts in episodic television, including a powerful turn as a Manson-like cult leader in a 1975 episode of S.W.A.T.

Sal’s career began to show signs of a resurgence. He was appearing in Los Angeles in the comedic play P.S. Your Cat is Dead to positive reviews. On February 12, 1976, Sal was returning to his West Hollywood apartment after play rehearsal. After parking his car in the building garage, he was attacked and stabbed to death by a mugger who quickly fled. Sal Mineo was just 37 years old. The second act of his career ended abruptly.

There were rumors of “sexual motivation” regarding the attack, but after career criminal Lionel Ray Williams was arrested and later confessed, it was revealed that Williams didn’t know who Sal was.

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Alma Rubens rose to stardom after her role opposite Douglas Fairbanks in the 1916 film The Half-Breed. She made a run of pictures for Triangle Studios before signing with William Randolph Hearst’s Cosmopolitan Productions. Hearst had his publicity team tout Alma as a direct descendant of Flemish Baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens. (She was not.)

Her first three films for Cosmopolitan were hits. But, Alma developed an addiction to heroin. Her drug use made her difficult to work with and unreliable on the set. She managed to complete three more pictures before Hearst let her out of her contract in 1922.

By the late 1920s, Alma’s drug use increased and was out of control. She was in and out of sanitariums. She escaped from a few and attempted to stab a physician at one. But, by 1930, she announced she had kicked her drug habit. She was appearing in a play, but two weeks later, she was arrested for trying to smuggle morphine and cocaine into Mexico. Shortly after her release from jail, she contracted pneumonia and bronchitis and fell into a coma. Alma never regained consciousness. She died on January 21, 1931, just a few days after her 33rd birthday.

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