Word: mafia
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...looms on the Buffalo skyline, a 16-story tower of white stone that will some day be the city's new $12.9 million federal office building. For now, it stands as a monument to the power of the Buffalo Mafia. It is unfinished, one year behind schedule and at least two months from completion; the contractor's losses have mounted to $500,000 while 30 Government agencies wait to move in. Reason for the delays: the Mob in Buffalo has a chokehold on Local 210 of the International Hod Carriers, Building and Common Laborers' Union of America...
...Laborers' Union is a "family" enterprise of the Stefano Magaddino Mob. Its rolls are swelled by the membership of Mafia capos and soldiers; its offices are a haven of bookmakers and shy-locks. The organization's power to call slowdowns and walkouts, to control pilferage and absenteeism, and to enforce threats against contractors runs through the history of the new Government office building...
Best of Health. The memorandum concluded with an example of Mafia morbidity: "Death (other than your own) is no excuse. If the funeral can be held in the late afternoon, we will be glad to let you off for one hour, provided that your share of the work is ahead." Should one of the workers die, Cammillieri wrote, his demise "will be accepted as an excuse. But we would like two weeks' notice, as we feel it is your duty to teach someone else your job." The grim humor was an adequate hint; Cammillieri is not known...
...delays. Leases on present space in other buildings are expiring, and one agency has attempted to move in despite the fact that the building is unfinished. The office workers must pick their way through mud and construction material to reach their still incomplete quarters. The role of the Mafia in the construction of the building-first in slowing down work, then in Cammillieri's speedup-is dismissed with studied ignorance by the contractor. Said Bateson Superintendent Paul Boyd: "Cammillieri kept Local 210 off my back. That alone was worth what we paid...
...treatment techniques by reading TIME. The heroine of Lois Gould's recent novel Such Good Friends observes that the procedures being tried on her stricken husband will make the Medicine section if they work. In Pierre Salinger's present bestselling On Instructions of My Government, a Mafia type reads TIME'S Latin American edition and discovers that he may be the quarry of an FBI manhunt...