Word: caf
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...Wednesday, Café de Paris was back in the spotlight for different reasons: Even as sharply dressed customers and summer travelers in shorts sipped cappuccino, police seized the premises on suspicion that it had fallen into the hands of the increasingly powerful Calabrian Mob. The café was one of a dozen pieces of prime Roman real estate, with a combined worth $284 million, sequestered as part of a citywide crackdown on suspected money-laundering and tax-evasion. (See pictures of life in Italy...
...Europe there is no street quite so lively, quite so cosmopolitan or quite so zany as Rome's Via Venetos" So began a 1959 TIME story trumpeting Café de Paris as the new must-see-and-be-seen spot on the then already famous leafy boulevard. Fifty years later, the sidewalk locale is as luxurious as ever (though not quite as lively), attracting both well-heeled Italians and tourists looking for a hint of the breezy, post-War sweet life celebrated in Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita, in which the café was a key location...
...owner is forced to prove, under a special Italian statute, that he is clean of Mob ties. Police allege that top bosses from the Alvaro-Palamara faction of the Calabrian Mafia used a barber from a small rural town in Calabria as a frontman to buy the historic café in 2005 for some $350,000 dollars, though its commercial value is estimated at $60 million. Italian authorities suspect that the difference between the official price tag and real value was passed under the table...
...Just in the past two days, in separate operations, police have made dozens of arrests on drug-trafficking charges in Calabria and Milan. Though no arrests were made in connection with the Café de Paris operation, Colonel Daniele Galimberti of the Carabinieri investigative unit says that following the money trail is a key to breaking the organization, which is largely protected by a widespread vow of silence. "They are more and more diversified," says Galimberti. "Confiscating property is one way to get them to talk." (See pictures of the dangers of printing money...
...Despite the morning's drama, life was back to normal at the famed café by early afternoon. Marcello Scofano, the assistant manager, who has worked there for 26 years, said the current owner appeared to be an upstanding businessman. "This has already been a bad year," Scofano said, citing the economic crisis' impact on tourism. "But I've seen good times and bad times here. We serve it all: espresso and cappuccino, dinner or snack, $1,000 bottles of wine and $40 bottles." But investigators are alleging that Scofano wasn't the only one keeping...