Word: mafiosi
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Mafia fighter was gunned down in 1982, a badly shaken government asked Arlacchi to devise a plan to confiscate the organization's assets. After the Mob fought back with bombs that killed Italy's top two prosecutors, Arlacchi helped create a program to arrest hundreds of top Mafiosi and imprison them on a remote island off the coast. They failed in an attempt to kill him with a bomb planted in a tollbooth on the autostrada. These days when Arlacchi cruises in the Mediterranean on his 40-ft. sailboat, the Italian navy often sends a cutter as an escort...
...money is, in its way, amazing stuff. It is, for instance, easily transferable and widely accepted. You can pay the baby sitter without even thinking about the complex financial dynamics underlying the transaction. Cash--especially U.S. dollars--is also portable, storable and exchangeable. (Just ask the thousands of Russian mafiosi who pay for nearly everything with crisp $100 bills.) And it holds up pretty well. If you're afraid of banks, you can still grab a coffee can, dig a hole in the backyard and have a pretty secure deposit. But paper cash does have some awful drawbacks. Lose...
...mafia and security connections called a "krysha," or "roof." The high-level people, usually well established in the Russian Mafia world, are paid to look out for the establishment's interests. In a city where media mogul Vladimir Gusinsky runs his business out of Mayor Yuri Luzhkov's office, mafiosi sit in the Duma--Russia's national legislature--and the sale of pirated videos is a quasi-legitimate business, the line between legal and illegal procedure is hopelessly fuzzy...
...enough to have generated two spin-offs. Almost as violent and twice as profane as "Scud" is "La Cosa Nostroid." Illustrated by one Edvis (whose goofy, facile style is as reminiscent of Phil Foglio as it is of Schrab), the book somehow manages to make immature, violent, half-cyborg mafiosi extraordinarily lovable. And Scud's silent sidekick Drywall--a little creature whose zippered skin leads into a infinitely large inner warehouse where he can store anything he needs--has for some reason become extremely popular among the readers of "Scud", and recently merited his own book (called, of course, "Drywall...
...keep records," says Tobon. "I don't ask questions. I just make sure these people who have been used by the mafiosi are brought to a funeral home, get a Mass and a Christian burial. If we can find their families, I arrange to send them home." He adds, "Each case is a tragedy...