Milestones

By Melissa August, ELIZABETH L. BLAND, Jeninne Lee-St. John, Elspeth Reeve, Sora Song

INDICTED. JACK ABRAMOFF, 40, a top Republican lobbyist enmeshed in ethics investigations of his close friend, House majority leader Tom DeLay; on unrelated charges of defrauding lenders in the $147.5 million purchase of a casino cruise line in Florida five years ago; in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

SENTENCED. SCOTT SULLIVAN, 43, former chief financial officer who admitted to engineering Worldcom's $11 billion accounting fraud; to five years in prison; in New York City. Sullivan, who had been facing a jail term five times as long, received leniency in return for his pivotal testimony against the telecom's former CEO, Bernie Ebbers, who was sentenced last month to 25 years in prison.

RELIEVED. KEVIN BYRNES, 55, four-star general and decorated Vietnam veteran; of his command as head of Army training, following an investigation into his alleged adulterous affair with a civilian; in Fort Monroe, Va. In a rare removal of such a senior officer, the Army booted Byrnes three months before he was set to retire after 36 years of service.

DIED. GENE MAUCH, 79, hot-tempered but shrewd baseball manager known as the Little General, who used statistics to match batters with pitchers long before such computer analyses became customary; of lung cancer; in Rancho Mirage, Calif. The most winning manager never to make it to the World Series, he came agonizingly close three times, with the Philadelphia Phillies and twice with the Los Angeles Angels, only to suffer wrenching season-end losses. "I've been disappointed," he once said, "but I've never disappointed myself."

DIED. BARBARA BEL GEDDES, 82, Emmy-winning actress who rose to stardom on the big screen and Broadway but was best known for playing Miss Ellie Ewing, matriarch of the wildly dysfunctional oil family on the nighttime TV soap opera Dallas; in Northeast Harbor, Maine. Bel Geddes wowed critics in George Stevens' 1948 film I Remember Mama and in 1955 originated the role of Maggie in Tennessee Williams' play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. In 1978 she moved to Dallas for the paycheck and took home an Emmy two years later.

DIED. ABE HIRSCHFELD, 85, oddball real estate tycoon and publicity hound, who offered $1 million to Paula Jones to settle her sexual harassment suit against President Bill Clinton in 1998; in New York City. The irascible eccentric amassed his fortune developing semi-enclosed parking garages in Manhattan, and his increasingly bizarre behavior--he was jailed in 2000 for ordering a hit on a business partner--always kept him in the papers, including the pages of the New York Post, which he owned for two tumultuous weeks in 1993. During his brief tenure, a disgruntled staff ran the headline WHO IS THIS NUT?

DIED. JOHN JOHNSON, 87, rags-to-riches publishing entrepreneur who launched Ebony and Jet a half-century ago to inject positive images of African Americans into mass media, and whose life was perhaps more inspiring than that of any of the people featured on the cover of his magazines; in Chicago. The grandson of slaves, Johnson used his mother's furniture to get a $500 loan in 1942 that 40 years later had grown into a publishing empire big enough to make him the first African American to snag a spot on the Forbes 400 list of the wealthiest Americans. "Money," he wrote in his 1989 autobiography, Succeeding Against the Odds, "is perhaps the greatest of all civil rights bills."

By Melissa August, Elizabeth L. Bland, Jeninne Lee-St. John, Elspeth Reeve and Sora Song