Word: buscetta
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...assassination of an uncooperative Mafioso in New York. Sometimes this system works. But on numerous occasions, says Pino Arlacchi, a sociologist on the staff of the Italian legislature's anti-Mafia commission, it does not. In fact, Arlacchi warns against giving too much importance to the structure Buscetta has described. "Certainly there are divisions of territory, and Mafia chieftains do meet periodically to coordinate activities," says Arlacchi. "But more than 500 murders in two years of the Mafia's internal wars offer ample evidence that there is no structure that can always impose peaceful settlements of internal dispute...
Such murders, Buscetta told authorities, were not only the product of territorial rivalries but also the result of battles for top positions between new bosses, who had not previously been accepted by the majority of Mafia members, and old bosses, who often found themselves abandoned by their families. Much of the combat was between the Sicilian Mafia's two major factions, the Palermo gangs and the Corleone families. This ended a year ago, when the Corleone groups established a degree of hegemony and took four places on the ten-member commission...
...Buscetta's revelations offered authorities in both the U.S. and Italy a deeper understanding of the ties between the New York and Sicilian Mobs. They challenge the widely held view of the Mafia as a centrally organized entity with branches in the U.S. and Sicily. Instead, they depict it as a looser network of groups in Sicily, the U.S. and elsewhere, linked by a combination of business, personal and family connections. Buscetta's disclosures, in fact, confirmed what investigators had first suspected several years ago, that there are really two Mafia groups working in the U.S.: one composed...
...Buscetta showed, though, that these two Mafias need each other. The traditional U.S. families began with the immigrant "mustache Petes." They were succeeded by the gangsters of the 1920s and '30s, who were quick to settle their differences with violence. These founding godfathers eventually gave way to more sophisticated criminals, who discovered that buying politicians and law-enforcement officials was just as easy as, and more effective than, shooting them. But the modern U.S. Mafia has fallen on hard times, say federal authorities. With their sons and heirs becoming assimilated and choosing the boardroom over the back room...
...consequence was that by the mid-1970s there was a vacuum that the Sicilian Mafia was all too eager to fill. As law-enforcement authorities have suspected-and Buscetta has now confirmed-Palermo has replaced Marseilles as the center of Europe's heroin business. Authorities estimate that some two tons of pure heroin (worth billions of dollars at street prices) are produced in Palermo each year from opium smuggled into Italy from the Golden Crescent of Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Heroin can often be bought in New York City's Times Square 48 hours after it leaves Sicily...