Word: buscetta
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Palermo, Sicily. One of the four men conducting the ceremony pricked the initiate's finger and rubbed the blood on the picture of a saint. The picture was then set afire. The act meant that "if I should betray the organization, my flesh would burn like this saint," Tommaso Buscetta told fascinated spectators in a jammed federal courtroom in New York City last week. The stocky mobster then coolly proceeded to betray his blood brothers in a most dramatic way, fingering seven of the 22 defendants in the courtroom as Mafia members involved in a conspiracy to import and sell...
...Buscetta, the highest Mafia figure ever to inform on the Mob, said that breaking the organization's vow of silence was punishable by "morte--death." For his safety, he is being kept under close guard by the FBI in an undisclosed location while he testifies at the trial of some of the Mafia's top members from Sicily and the U.S.'s East Coast. They are charged in what has been called the "pizza connection" heroin case, since some of the drugs were allegedly peddled from pizza storefronts. Buscetta, 57, hopes his cooperation with prosecutors will lead to freedom...
Speaking in Italian through a translator, Buscetta began his testimony by describing the Mafia's structure and bylaws. Both in Sicily, where it began, and in the U.S., the criminal organization at one time imposed a strict, almost old-fashioned, moral code. Starting as a low-ranking "soldier," Buscetta said, "I was to be silent, not to look at other men's wives or women, not to steal." All "men of honor," as members called themselves, pledged never to lie to one another. Buscetta was suspended from Mafia activities for six months in 1952 for breaking the code. "I betrayed...
Palermo's men of honor had long since abandoned their ideals by the late '70s, when savage gang wars broke out over control of the U.S. heroin trade. Two of Buscetta's sons, a brother and four other relatives were killed during the bloodletting in Sicily. Buscetta, by then a Mafia chieftain, fled to Brazil, where he was arrested in 1983 on a fugitive warrant from Italy. He was talking now, he explained, because he wanted "security for my family." Some undisclosed survivors in his family (which includes his Brazilian-born third wife) are under U.S. protection...
...Gaetano Badalamenti, 50, a Mafia capo who fled Sicily after a bloody gang war erupted in the late 1970s over control of the heroin trade. Badalamenti and his son Vito were ^ arrested in Spain and extradited to the U.S. for trial. The star witness against them will be Tommaso Buscetta, the first Sicilian don to break the Mafia's code of silence and turn informant. The same bloodletting that chased Badalamenti from Sicily drove Buscetta to the protection of the authorities. Since he began talking last year, Buscetta has been shuttled back and forth between the U.S. and Italy, fingering...