Word: mafiosi
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...around Mafia hangouts and listened to endless hours of tiresome chatter about horses, cars and point spreads while waiting patiently for incriminating comments. They pressured mobsters into becoming informants. They carefully charted the secret family ties, linking odd bits of evidence to reveal criminal patterns. They helped put numerous mafiosi, one by one and in groups, behind bars. But last week, after a half-century in business, the American Mafia itself finally went on trial...
From 1981 through last year, federal prosecutors brought 1,025 indictments against 2,554 mafiosi, and have convicted 809 Mafia members or their uninitiated "associates." Many of the remaining cases are still pending. Among all criminal organizations, including such non-Mafia types as motorcycle gangs and Chinese and Latin American drug traffickers, the FBI compiled evidence that last year alone led to 3,803 indictments and 2,960 convictions. At the least, observes the FBI's Hogan, all this legal action means the traditional crime families "are bleeding, they're demoralized...
...adjacent L'Ucciardone Prison into a succession of holding pens in the enormous courtroom. The scene is Palermo, Sicily, where for seven months a Mafia trial that dwarfs the various legal proceedings in New York has been under way. In the homeland of the Cosa Nostra, 474 alleged Mafiosi, whose ranks range from the reputed "Boss of Bosses," Luciano Liggio, to a corps of picciotti, or soldiers, are in the dock for crimes as high as assassination and as low as auto theft...
...night for chest pains," said one federal investigator about the arrests on racketeering charges of nine New York City mobsters, including the leaders of the five Mafia families in the city. U.S. Attorney Rudolph Giuliani, who brought the indictments, suspects that the Mafiosi were trying to establish a record of illness in hope of proving they are too ill to stand trial or to endure imprisonment if convicted. Several, in fact, do have | various illnesses, including heart ailments. "If a guy claims he's sick and, like Dellacroce, he looks sick, we take him to a hospital," said the investigator...
...apparently was a coincidence, but mobsters worried about informants who might cooperate with prosecutors to lessen their own penalties could take no comfort from hearings conducted in Miami last week by the President's Commission on Organized Crime. That group paraded a number of former Mafiosi who publicly regretted their criminal past. Luigi Ronsisvalle, 44, told of growing up in Sicily, where he followed Mafia developments "like an American kid follows baseball." He said he spent 13 years in the syndicate, mostly as a hit man, after moving to New York City, and eventually killed 13 people. He also took...