Word: maffia
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Noose & Sword. Few people in the past have thought of the law-obsessed Germans as haunted by a terrorist secret society, older and more dreaded than the Sicilian Maffia. The origins of the Feme go back to the year 1200. Ostensibly an arm of the Holy Roman Empire, the Feme really stemmed from pagan traditions. Its extralegal courts were held under mystic linden trees, on open hilltops or beneath great oaks. The paraphernalia included a two-handed sword on which the members swore, and a noose of linden fibers for the victim. The sentence of its secret tribunals was always...
Semifeudal Latifondisti, powerful landowners long protected by Fascism, saw in independence a chance to prolong their rule. Sicilians in general saw in Italy the source of all their recent grief. They flocked around Andrea Finocchiaro-Aprile, energetic mouthpiece for Sicilian separatism, and nominal head of the maffia...
Called "Flor de la Maffia" (Flower of the Black Hand), Agata came from a distinguished line of scoundrels. Father Juan Galiffi left Italy just ahead of the cops, murdered his way to control of gangland in Rosario, Argentina's second city. He prospered, sent his daughter to a fashionable school in Buenos Aires, planned a socialite wedding...
...Sicily the Allies would find out how effectively, or ineffectively, the Duce had rallied one segment of his countrymen to Fascism's bedraggled banner. A fierce, choleric people, once given to brigandage and secret societies like the Maffia, the Sicilians did not readily take to Fascism. Italy's best haters, they have hated above all the Germans on their island soil...
...goals: larger, healthier families; compulsory temperance, not prohibition; continued Italianization of the provinces absorbed from Austria after the War; suppression of the Black Hand and Maffia, which he declared had been virtually accomplished by the new Fastist police; and finally, as the supreme goal: The Corporative State...