Word: mafia
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Jimmy Hoffa, travelled to Cuba with Syndicate boss Meyer Lansky, and was given an interest in a Lansky casino later shut down by the revolution. Ruby seems to have been a mob hit man sent to silence Oswald after a previous attempt failed. Not only did the Lansky Mafia have a fortune invested in Cuban gambling, but Robert Kennedy was then investigating Hoffa and organized crime, another reason for the mob to join in getting rid of Kennedy. The recent exposes of the CIA show that the agency has been closely involved with the Mafia since Lucky Luciano helped...
...book, written in the months preceding his July 30 disappearance, leaves little doubt about what happened to Hoffa. His indictment against Fitzsimmons includes funneling union benefit funds to the Mafia, and "Fitz's" conspiracy with John Dean and Charles Colson to attach restrictions on union activities to his parole. In the epilogue, Oscar Fraley, Hoffa's transcriber (I don't believe ghostwriter), quotes Anthony (Tony Pro) Provenzano, the ex-Teamster official and Mafia member: "Jimmy was...is...a friend...
...cleverest thing about this book is the title, suggesting, by reference to Higgin's first work, The Friends of Eddie Coyle, that Richard M. Nixon's mentality was comparable to that of a small-time Mafia hood. Disappointingly, this is as close as Higgins comes to explaining Nixon's peculiar behavior duing the Watergate affair...
While conceding that criminal prosecutions are never politically disinterested, and that genuinely "evil" men such as Mafia chiefs should be pursued in all possible ways, Higgins sometimes vacillates into a sophomoric ethical relativism. He hints that there is no difference between John Ehrlichmann's decision to screw Daniel Ellsberg because he sees him as a threat to national security and John Sirica's pursuit of Nixon with only a passing consideration for the appearance of due process...
...films, Wertmuller shows men whose political ideas are contradicted by their emotional and sexual behavior: in Love and Anarchy Giancarlo Giannini fails to shoot Mussolini because he falls in love; in the Seduction of Mimi his machismo belies his communism and ultimately forces him to collaborate with the Mafia; in Swept Away he forsakes his peasant wife and children for the socialite Raffaella. Though Wertmuller sees herself as a political filmmaker, the emotional message of her films is that political ideas and action are irrelevant to people's lives. She offers as an alternative only a romantic pessimism embodied...