Word: buffalo
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...looms on the Buffalo skyline, a 16-story tower of white stone that will some day be the city's new $12.9 million federal office building. For now, it stands as a monument to the power of the Buffalo Mafia. It is unfinished, one year behind schedule and at least two months from completion; the contractor's losses have mounted to $500,000 while 30 Government agencies wait to move in. Reason for the delays: the Mob in Buffalo has a chokehold on Local 210 of the International Hod Carriers, Building and Common Laborers' Union of America...
...simply tacked a notice on the bulletin board at Bateson's Buffalo headquarters. In it he stated that the laborers' attendance record was a "disgrace." From then on, wrote Cammillieri, there was to be "no excuse" for missing work-not even illness. "If you are able to go to the doctor, you are able to come to work." Additionally, there would be no more leaves of absence for surgery: "We hired you as you are and to have anything removed would certainly make you less than we bargained for. Anyone having an operation will be fired immediately." Trips...
...workers die, Cammillieri wrote, his demise "will be accepted as an excuse. But we would like two weeks' notice, as we feel it is your duty to teach someone else your job." The grim humor was an adequate hint; Cammillieri is not known as a jokester in Buffalo Mob circles. He closed the notice with the classic Mafia double entendre: "Best of health." The workers had no trouble translating the threat of the Mafioso...
More disciplined communes had better luck. Houriet describes the evolution of New Buffalo, between Albuquerque and Santa Fe in New Mexico, which painfully expelled the hordes of parasitic potheads who had drifted in to live off the efforts of a hard-working minority. A different proposition is Harrad West,* a six-member group-marriage web in Berkeley, Calif. Houriet, who notes regretfully that he missed its "honeymoon" phase, found unsettling resemblances to an erotic soap opera. One feature was "the Chart," which ordained who was to sleep with whom on any particular night. "There's really no other...
...That may well undermine the other identifications, which are to be used only in departmental disciplinary proceedings. No cop is likely to come to trial because such a broad-gauge use of the lineup may violate constitutional rights of the men as individuals. Antagonism between blacks and police in Buffalo has long been exceptionally severe. After the lineups in blue, police tempers are on a hair trigger. And if little or no discipline is meted out to the cops, black tempers will be no less volatile...