Word: mafiosi
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Giancana became boss of the Chicago Mafia family in 1955, and ruled a three-state empire of some 1,500 Mafiosi who ran gambling, narcotics, prostitution, loan sharking and other underworld ventures. At the height of his power, Giancana lived relatively modestly in Oak Park with his three daughters-his wife died in 1954-but vacationed on a lavish scale: Miami Beach and Europe in the winter, Paradise Valley near Las Vegas in the summer. While visiting Las Vegas' Desert Inn in 1960, the don noticed Singer Phyllis McGuire standing at a blackjack table, seemingly bewildered by the game...
...Mafiosi were Russell Bufalino, now the mob boss in Scranton, Pa., and two lesser fry: James Plumeri and Salvatore ("Sally Burns") Granello, of New York City. Before Castro overthrew Dictator Fulgencio Batista in 1959, the three men controlled a race track and a huge gambling casino near Havana. When Castro took power, he banished the three. The trio left behind $450,000, which they asked friends to hold for them. The money, the take from the casino's last days, belonged to Mafia clans in New York, Chicago and Pittsburgh...
...spies helped neither the Mafiosi nor the CIA. The information they turned up, says one knowing source, "was a lot of garbage. They claimed that they had found that an insurrection was in the works, but, of course, it never came off. And you didn't need spies to tell you about the roads. There was only one road to the beach that Castro could have used...
...Godfather II has the ring of authenticity about it. Its mafiosi mix 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...
...whole. What he complains about in America's tribes-within-the-tribe is not that they are too idiosyncratic but that they are not idiosyncratic enough. "Mobsters and bishops" share the same "heavy disingenuousness." Labor threatens to form an "Establishment troika with business and government." Fiery young Mafiosi will be left to "man the switchboard and analyze the computer, and be snuffed out at last by a missing credit card." Everything is losing its edge, dissolving into "uni-state." Poor Homo Americanus, looking for clues to himself in the codes of his sub-tribes, is getting less and less...