Imelda Marcos Among 11 of The Greediest People of All Time

The Newsweek magazine listed the Greediest People of All Time. Eleven people from different countries and different generations were listed. Here is the full list.

1. Marcus Licinius Crassus (115 BC-53 BC). Crassus didn’t need foreclosure proceedings to claim his real state. This Roman general and supporter of Julius Caesar routinely increased his property holdings during “fire slaes.” During the cities occassional fires, he would arrive with his soldiers at a home thatinterested him and offer to buy the burning property for a song. Once the transaction was done, he’d put his mission to work dousing the flames. Crassus is depicted here ransacking the Temple of Jerusalem.

2. Genghis Khan (1162-1227). He wanted to own the whole world, and came closer to accomplishing that than anybody else, before or since. After his death, his kingdom stretched from the Pacific Ocean to Adriatic Sea.

3. Pope Sixtus IV (1471). This pope greatly enriched himself and his top cardinals (who may have been his sons) by licensing and taxing brothels and claiming he could retroactively get the troubled souls of dead people into heaven by selling indulgences to their living relatives. Oh, and he sanctioned the Spanish Inquisition, too.

4. William H. Vanderbilt (1821-1884). He inhereted vast wealth, built it into a whole lot more and lacked any sense of noblesse oblige. Arguably the most wealthy and powerful man of his time, he controlled the world’s largest railroad network and became notorious for saying: “The public be dammed!…I don’t take any stock oon this silly nonsense about working for anybody but our own.”

5. William M. “Boss” Tweed (1823-1878). One of the original fat cats, Tweed weighed in at almost 300 pounds. Tweed used hi Tammany Hall political machine to separate New York taxpayers from as much as $200 million (roughly $8 billion in 2009 dollars). His avarice was regularly lampooned in political cartoons of the day.

6. Empress Dowager Cixi (1835-1908). She started as a concubine but became the de facto ruler of China for nearly 50 years. She all but ran her son’s empire until his death. Then she had her 3-year-old nephew named emperor and kept him locked up so she could continue to run the show–for a profit. Cixi used the navy’s money to build herself a marble banquet boat, aboard which she ate 150-dish dinners with golden chopsticks. She had 3,000 jewelry boxes; who knows how many jewels?

7. Charles Ponzi (1882-1949). He had an entire scheme named after him. Enough said.

8. Imelda Marcos (1949-). She saw it as her duty to provide “some kind of light, a star” for the impoverished Filipino people over whom her husband presided. So she took $5 million shopping sprees to New York and Rome, reportedly owned the worlds largest collections of gems and 3, 000 pairs of shoes.

9. Ivan Boesky (1937-). Boesky made more than $200 million as an arbitrageur and inspired Oliver Stone to create Gordon Gekko, the Greed-is-Good character from “Wall Street.” But it turns out he wasn’t briliant, just using inside info to shoot fish in a barrel.

10. Dennis Kozlowski (1946-). As CEO of Tyco International, he defrauded shareholders of more than $400 million. He once spent $6, 000 in company funds on a gold shower curtain, and had the company pay half the $2 million price tag on his wife’s birthday party, which feared toga-clad hostesses.

11. Bernard Madoff (1938-). He ran what might be the biggest fraud ever, totalling as much as $50 billion. Among his victims were several charities and people he claimed as friends. He and his wife had the yachts, cars, and exclusive Upper East Side apartment and other real state holdings to prove it

Source: Newsweek