Word: mafia
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Hughes' present sanctuary at the Britannia, like his old penthouse at the Desert Inn in Las Vegas, is something from a James Bond movie set. Hughes occupies the western end of the Britannia's ninth floor, attended 24 hours a day by the Mormon Mafia. His suite is decorated with the usual hotel furniture, plus a humming array of several hundred thousand dollars worth of electronic equipment, including a radio-telephone hookup to the U.S. mainland and telephone scramblers to prevent his phone conversations from being bugged. The roof bristles with antennas. At night all eleven of Hughes' balconies...
...public at large--at least the dominantly liberal public of the Cambridge vicinity--NRC's standing vies with that of the Mafia. Hardly a single one of their posters has not been visited by angry pens of thumbnails, or ripped down completely. A recent rally for "laissez-faire" in Harvard Square ended when street people drenched an NRC Revolutionary War flag with lighter fluid, lit it, and fled as pieces of the burning flag fell on an NRC member. On TV and radio talk shows, more than the normal number of hostile listeners call...
...blame for his decline popularity. Unwise administrative appointments and scandals in several departments caused widespread resentment. Possibility the worst move of all was the appointment of a new Police Chief who was forced to resign nine days later when strong evidence revealed he was linked to the Detroit Mafia. Scandals in the Civil Service Commission and the Department of Weights and Measures contributed to a growing feeling among whites that Stokes was getting rich off the city. A gut feeling that someone is a crook cannot be destroyed by factual evidence, and the power of rumors of Stokes' supposed financial...
...compelling contemporary theme. Navasky wishes, for instance, that Kennedy had applied the same determination to getting J. Edgar Hoover into retirement that he spent getting James Hoffa into jail. He would like Kennedy to have been as consistently intransigent toward foes of integration as he was toward the Mafia. Ideally, the Attorney General should have been as sensitive to individual rights when considering wiretapping and bugging as Candidate Kennedy later became on many other issues...
Naturally enough in this best-engineered of all possible worlds, Hailey ends his book on a happy note. The black factory worker character has been duly dispatched (kidnapped by the Mafia), Erica has decided to give up shoplifting in order to devote full time to her husband, and Adam--realizing this means that he can have his wife and inanimate objects too--begins planning for a new baby and a new car, code-named the Farstar. (The baby, one presumed, will have to settle for Buick.) Adam and Erica kiss, in a car, in a driveway...