IT HAPPENS a lot these days in southern California. A homeowner falls on hard times and has to move from his house, renting it out to make ends meet. But if that house happens to sit on a few acres of Beverly Hills, there may be one difference. The rent is $600,000. A month.That is what Leonard Ross, a financier and socialite—his party buddies include Hugh Hefner and Prince Albert of Monaco-is asking for his Beverly House, as it is called. In the year since he himself moved out, he has already had two tenants, one "a Russian", the other "a Middle-Easterner". They are the sort for whom price hardly matters. What they want instead, he says, are security (bulletproof windows, monitored gates) and the "experience".Crossing the lineNONE of the twinned cities that straddle America's southern border with Mexico are as historically close as Laredo, in Texas, and Nuevo Laredo, in Mexico. The settlement at Laredo predates Texas, and what is now Nuevo Laredo was originally part of it before being separately established on the Mexican side after Mexican-American war of 1847. So on September 13th, when two young Mexicans were found in Nuevo Laredo, hanging from a footbridge and disembowelled (see page 58), it struck rather close to home.
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