Word: mafia
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...York City-born Galante, nicknamed "Lillo" and "The Cigar," possesses truly impressive criminal credentials. He has spent almost half his life in prison on charges ranging from gambling, narcotics trafficking and bootlegging to extortion, assault and homicide. Galante first gained respect within the Mafia for his suspected involvement in the murder of Carlo Tresca, an Italian-American newspaper editor and enemy of Benito Mussolini; police believed that Tresca was knocked off at the urging of il Duce himself...
While in Lewisburg, the elder Hiss made his share of friends, the closest being, surprisingly, the Italian convicts who dubbed him "Alberto" and watched after him. At one point, these friends introduced Hiss to Mafia chieftain Tony Costello, who claimed he had been put away on a bum rap, too. There is the chilling story of two cons, incited by a prison guard, who seriously contemplated killing Hiss until talked out of the idea by one of Alberto's friends. Then, after being released, Hiss faced the frustration of trying to find work with a shattered reputation and a disintegrating...
...device, selling for $300 and up, was a Sony AM/FM cassette recorder adapted to receive sounds transmitted by "bugs" small enough to be hidden behind an electric wall socket. Chin's wares were bought by such varied customers as police in Connecticut and New Jersey (some with known Mafia connections), the Communist and Nationalist Chinese, United Nations officials, assorted foreign agents, the CIA and, some say, the White House plumbers of the Nixon years. Bugs installed by Chin in the East Side digs of Prostitute Xaviera Hollander yielded the raw material for her 1972 book, The Happy Hooker...
Inside, the bar was done up Mafia-surreal: big horse-shoe-shaped counter, color t.v. competing with the jukebox in the corner, indoor-outdoor carpet on the floor. A beer cost $2.25. Men in lime-green leisure suits and white patent leather loafers whose porcine faces bulged behind drugstore sunglasses, nodded at us and cackled in a far booth. We took our beers to the cool, shaded back...
...injunction to "greet one another with a holy kiss" until the symbol of fellowship degenerated sometimes into sexual scandal. In the Middle Ages, knights kissed before doing battle, just as boxers touch gloves. The varieties of kisses are numerous: the kiss of treachery (Judas' example), the Mafia kiss of death, the kiss of reverence with which rabbis don their tallithim and priests their stoles. Children hold out a hurt hand for a kiss "to make it well...