Word: exception
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...organization's code of conduct was partly Maranzano and partly Mafia omerta, a combination of such qualities as manliness, honor and willingness to keep secrets. Its requirements have never changed. The penalty for breaching the code: death. Except for the Chicago branch, which has always disdained the ornate, members are bound by an elaborate ceremony of medieval hocuspocus. Flanked by the boss and his lieutenants, the initiate and his sponsor may stand in front of a table on which are placed a gun and, on occasion, a knife. The boss picks up the gun and intones in the Sicilian...
...Except for Hill, whose blond good looks, shaggy hair and modish clothes could easily mark him as a jet-setter, there is almost no one else around. It is a sad contrast to his high-rolling days, when prominent clergymen, judges and politicians felt it an honor to be entertained at the home of the mobster known as Joe Bananas. When the Government tried to deport Bonanno in 1954, for instance, among those who testified as character witnesses were the Most Rev. Francis Green, former Congressman Harold Patten and former Arizona Supreme Court Justice Evo DeConcini (the Most Rev. Francis...
...change shows at the Detective Bureau press room. The Sun-Times' Walter Spirko and the Tribune's Johnny Paster, among the last of the 30-year veterans, are still there. Otherwise, except for the "City News kid," the place is virtually deserted during the late-night dog watch. "Everything's changed," says Paster. "Ever since the riots at the convention, the cops are very leary about talking to us. I've put in for early retirement next year. Things aren't like they used to be." "Yeah," says Spirko. "We used to cabaret around with...
From their polar positions, Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley Jr. see themselves as witty, wily intellectuals magnificently equipped to interpret (respectively) the left and right of U.S. life. Except when they confront each other directly, the notion is not entirely absurd. But when they fence on television or in type, bitchiness erodes their polish and learned discourse dissolves into tantrums...
...heterosexuality," he writes, "or, for that matter, heterosexuality to homosexuality . . . But regardless of tribal taboos, homosexuality is a constant fact of the human condition and it is not a sickness, not a sin, not a crime." Vidal insists that "I am not an evangelist of anything in sexual matters except a decent withdrawal of the state from the bedroom." He calls Buckley one of those "morbid, twisted men" who are always "sniggering and giggling and speculating on the sexual lives of others...