Word: mafia
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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PEOPLE MAY FIND it surprising to hear Father Louis Gigante say that there is no Mafia. Gigante, chaplain of the Italian American Civil Rights League, New York City councilman, and a fellow at the Institute of Politics this week, will explain this view at several places around Harvard...
...recently published Harris poll data, 78 per cent of the American people dispute Father Gigante's position. In 1970 and 1971, Joe Columbo and the Italian American, Civil Rights League picketed the FBI in New York City loudly proclaiming that there is no organized crime syndicate known as the Mafia currently active in the United States. These efforts seem to have had little effect...
What really is at issue is the form organized crime takes in American society. None of the protesters would seriously try to deny the existence of organized crime. What they object to is its characterization. The federal government, newspapers, and most organized crime watchers have viewed "the Mafia" as a formally organized bureaucratic structure with the ability to design and construct rational, highly efficient programs for amassing illicit wealth. Individuals are not really important to the organization's success, in this view. It is the structure, and not people, that give the Mafia its self-perpetuating character...
Mancuso was one of eight members of a Mafia-style gang arrested last week in coordinated raids in both Calabria and Rome on charges relating to the kidnaping of Eugene Paul Getty II, 17, grandson of the American oil billionaire. After almost six months of captivity, young Getty-minus his right ear-was released last month when his grandfather paid $2,890,000 in ransom. The kidnapers, following an old custom of Calabrian bandits, had cut off his ear. They then sent it to a Rome newspaper to convince his grandfather that they meant business...
Another arrested suspect was Vincenzo Mammoliti, 43, an olive-oil dealer from the Calabrian coastal town of Gioia Tauro, who reportedly spent 22 years in the U.S. and is said to be a member of a Mafia-like family of Calabrian criminals. His brother, Saverio Mammoliti, an escaped convict with a criminal record that includes armed robbery, vanished before the police sprang their trap. Of the eight men arrested, at least three were found with some of the marked ransom money. But police so far have refused to divulge how much of the ransom has been recovered...