Word: buscetta
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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...
...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...
...confession of high-level Mafioso Tommaso Buscetta [WORLD, Oct. 15] is a victory for Italian and American authorities. However, we should remember that the Mafia is similar to Communism, fascism or any form of terrorism. It is an alternative political system that arises out of poverty, ignorance, anarchy and corrupted institutions...
...Buscetta's disclosures, and the very fact that he was willing to make them, indicate that the seemingly solid facade of the Mafia has its cracks. By continuing the cooperation that has brought them this far, U.S. and Italian authorities can widen the gaps. With patience and persistence they may even widen them to the point that the Mafia's facade crumbles. Doing so will be neither quick nor easy. But as last week's events show, the goal is worth pursuing...