Word: brigand
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...city of Romans in southeastern France. The year is 1580. France is still recovering from the widespread slaughter of the Huguenots in the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre of 1572; skirmishes still go on between Catholic and Huguenot. Town and countryside are periodically ravaged by roving bands of brigand soldiers. Class bitterness over increasingly burdensome taxes breaks out in tax strikes, urban unrest and peasant revolt. It all coils up toward Mardi Gras, culminating in a bloody midnight clash...
...principal cause of the stealing is the booming art market, which by some estimates totaled a robust $5 billion in the U.S. last year. Increasingly, people are buying art works as hedges against inflation and a weakening dollar. Art prices have risen to levels that even the least cultured brigand can appreciate. Says FBI Art Thefts Investigator Thomas McShane: "Thieves read about these prices and they realize they can cut themselves in on some very valuable booty...
World War III has happened again, and as usual, the earth has been nuked to dusty desert ruled by violent brigand bands...
Raisuli, Sherif of the Berbers ("The blood of the prophets flows in me") kidnaps a beautiful American woman, Eden Pedecaris ("He is a brigand and a lout") and sweeps her off to his castle in the desert. President Theodore Roosevelt is outraged ("Arabian thief! I want respect!"), and the U.S. Government dispatches an ultimatum to the powers in Morocco: "Mrs. Pedecaris alive, or Raisuli dead." There follow fights, betrayals, skirmishes, duels, U.S. Marine action and a couple of full-fledged battles. Nothing much like it ever happened in history, but it makes for a lovely adventure...
CENTURIES before La Cosa Nostra was heard of in the U.S., the Mafia operated-even as it does today-as a brigand government in much of Sicily. Though many Italian immigrants had come to the U.S. to avoid just such oppression as the Mafia offers, a few among them formed a new Mafia in the new country. In the crowded "Little Italys" of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the thugs found easy prey among people who had been taught to dread the terrorists' Black Hand...