Word: maffia
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Lucky Luciano, deported super-pimp of Manhattan, was having cop trouble again. Palermo (Sicily) police picked him up and quizzed him for three days about his Maffia connections. Then they let him go again till next time...
Interior Minister Mario Scelba (Christian Democrat) reported to his fellow assemblymen that, so far as the police could determine, the Sicilian shooting was nonpolitical. The valley in which it occurred was notoriously infested by bandits. Sicilian Communist Deputy Girolamo Licausi disagreed. He charged that the Maffia (Sicily's ancient, bloody secret society) had perpetrated the attack, in cahoots with monarchists and the rightist Uomo Qualunque Party...
...loafer and crook in Greece will consider himself the ally of the American General Staff-to be fed and kept in style by. the American taxpayer. . . . See to it that the money is used for the reconstruction of [Greece] and does not get into the hands of the Athens maffia...
Some 15 years ago Benito Mussolini tried and failed to destroy the Maffia. He jailed its leaders in cages, marched them in chain gangs through the streets. But at last he had to concede: "The struggle against the Maffia will cease, not when the Maffia has ceased to exist, but when all memory of the Maffia has vanished from the minds of Sicilians." Last week the Maffia was making new memories which might keep Sicily in turmoil for some time to come. The Maffia had seldom had more volcanic soil to work...
Separatists claim a membership of 30,000 in their party. They claimed 20 times that number of followers. Among these New York Times Correspondent Herbert Matthews last week found the Maffia "deeply involved." The separatists claim that Sicily would be better off if free of Rome's remote control. The Maffia favors freedom too-to carry on its own peculiar stiletto justice...