Word: mafia
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...cultural footnote: the Yakuza in Japan is very much like the Mafia Stateside: a clandestine and very powerful criminal organization with heavy political connections. The Yakuza has its own code of conduct but, typically, the code has a kind of fearful stringency that makes the Mafia look by comparison like a gang of clubhouse rowdies...
...Kill, Ltd., has left more than a dozen victims pie-eyed. In St. Petersburg, Fla., Pies Unlimited has claimed 78 victims, among them the assistant metropolitan editor of the St. Petersburg Times, billing clients from $50 to as high as $300 per job. San Diego's whipped cream mafia, which charges only $20, has scored 20 times, including a celebrated hit of a cable-television executive at a city council meeting...
Soft Hats. Widespread corruption has squelched whatever hope there may have once been among the people to control their own destinies. Foreign diplomats speak openly of the "military Mafia"-high-ranking officers who sell deferments to rich Sino-Khmer fathers and draw the pay of thousands of phantom troops on their rolls. Out on Route 5 and Highway 7, and down in besieged Neak Luong, government soldiers are fighting the war in rubber sandals and soft hats. One corporal complained about the lack of boots and fatigues and how corrupt officers tried to make his wife pay 5,000 riels...
...between Jewish mobsters in Miami Beach and Italian ones in Las Vegas; that the distaff side of the family is protected from the unpleasant side of the business; that everyone--including the Godfather--lives in constant danger of sudden death; that the protective function of the Sicilian mafia was not wholly lost in America. But he introduces some new themes as well: the struggle for legitimacy (Michael opens himself up to five counts of perjury by denying charges rather than take the fifth); the intimate connection with "legitimate" business ("United Telephone and Telegraph"); and a sense of history. An aging...
...well with the shadier elements of our government--string-tie western senators up to their ears in corruption, concupiscent executives of multinational corporations, opera buffa, Chiquita-banana-republic dictators. Perhaps the perspective is a strange one for most Americans, brought up on The FBI and The Untouchable--seeing the Mafia and the FBI as merely two competing organizations, more like Macy's and Gimbel's than good and evil. But The Godfather II is not a morally subversive movie--nobody would want to be Michael Corleone after seeing it, and no one would want to know him. It's just...