January 12 Five Held in Irish pork enquiry

After a glass or two of the brown stuff Ernst Krenek would talk of his snake oil days, living on his wits, travelling by boxcar and jumping out of bored wives bedrooms in the nick of time. He was, he'd say to anyone who would listen, an entrepreneur when it was still a term of abuse with warranties shorter than the time it took to close a door. A westerner in all but nationality.

Most, if not all of this, was hogwash. Krenek, for all his bluff and bluster, never had the bottle to place himself in real jeopardy. A bit of creative accounting sometimes, exaggeration of the benefits of the various items he sold door to door and shortness of windows of opportunities but nothing more dangerous than that.

Until that is, he was made an offer by Otakar Zich, one of the most trustworthy souls between here and the afterlife. That reputation was enough to convince Ernst Krenek to buy fifteen hundred pounds of Irish Pork and led to the epidemic of Salmonella that hospitalised fifteen members of the Czech royal family.