Word: mafia
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...seems improbable that a brotherhood as violent as the Mafia is becoming still more savage. It also seems unlikely that teams of professional hit men armed with silencer-equipped .22-cal. automatic pistols are roaming the land, with at least 20 "executions" to their credit in the past two years. Finally, it seems unthinkable that the case of the .22 hits could be a direct challenge by the Mob to the U.S. Government...
...fears all this is true, with good reason. Two of the victims were FBI informants. Four others were potential prosecution witnesses. Two of the killings - five months apart - were committed with the same gun. Says an FBI agent: "Keeping a murder gun is risky business. The Mafia has a reason for doing that. They're giving us a message...
...Mafia Hot Line. Detective fiction has it that the .22-cal. pistol with its tiny one-ounce slug is a gnat swatter, at its worst a woman's weapon snatched from a purse to dispatch an errant lover. No self-respecting all-pro killer would carry one. The facts, however, are otherwise. The CIA has long preferred the .22. The agency's predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services, developed a silencer-equipped Hi-Standard .22-cal. automatic pistol during World War II. It turned out to be the only production-model handgun that can be effectively silenced...
...with the advent of the Georgia mafia and lots of rhetoric about new faces, that kind of mass migration was just not going to be repeated. Those few Harvard academics who started preaching peanut power last spring seemed genuinely pessimistic about their own chances for an administration post, so administrators like Champion--who had supported other candidates--were largely ignored...
...members of the IRE team documented all this further. The Mafia, they report, has staged an "invasion" of Arizona; 171 known gangsters, most of whom have arrived in the past ten years, reside in Phoenix and Tucson alone. They deal in prostitution, illegal gambling and narcotics smuggling; Arizona, in fact, has become the chief corridor for narcotics entering the U.S. now that Mexico has replaced Turkey as the leading source of heroin. The mobsters have gone unmolested, says the report, because "until recently the prosecutorial system has been marked by incompetence, fuzzy or nonexistent law and brazen bribe taking...