Word: mobbed
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...here was its Capone! And Gotti obsessed over his coverage. TIME put an Andy Warhol portrait of him on its cover in 1986, and Gotti framed it in his office. On one surveillance tape, he and his associates can be heard critiquing a TV re-enactment of the Mob hit that brought him to power. Even that hit was cinematic: his predecessor, Paul Castellano, was gunned down in front of Sparks steak house in crowded midtown Manhattan at Christmastime. All Martin Scorsese would have added were credits and a Shirelles song...
...Good Mob bosses--the ones who lead long careers and die of old age in their own homes--do not act like Mob bosses. Gotti was foolhardy, he was blowhard-y, he talked too proudly and loudly, and the government finally gave him enough blank tape to hang himself. In 1992 he was sent up for murder and racketeering. If his mobster act was his doom, though, it was also his source of legitimacy. Where did he learn what we expect a Mob boss to look like? Well, where did you? Pop culture's fascination with mobsters--in movies...
...watershed was, of course, Francis Ford Coppola's Godfather films of the 1970s--as much a touchstone within the Mob as without. Rudolph Giuliani, the former New York City mayor (and Mob-movie fan), said in his gangbusting prosecutor days that you could tell the difference between surveillance tapes recorded before and after the Godfather movies came out: the hoods started speaking like characters in the films. The movies that mobsters made possible ended up remaking the mobsters...
...criminal association. The sweeping strategy hit Cosa Nostra in the trenches, marking a critical victory for such crusading magistrates as Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino. It was also great theater. Crammed together into a custom-made, bunker-like courtroom, the accused seemed straight from a Hollywood casting call for Mob thugs: often unshaven, sweaty and in short-sleeved leisure shirts, the Mafia men pointed fingers and hollered threats from inside steel cages that ringed the back of the vast, underground trial chamber. Though prosecutors won more than 300 convictions by 1987, both Falcone and Borsellino eventually paid the ultimate price...
...mafiosi who had also been found guilty of Falcone's murder and ordered retrials.) Investigators say that Provenzano - who has been a fugitive since 1963 and is believed to be hiding out in the hills near Trapani on the far western tip of Sicily - decided that the Mob needed to cool its killer instincts after the state cracked down in response to the magistrates' slaying. In a move that symbolizes the shift in the Mafia's strategy, Provenzano - once known as the Tractor for clearing away rivals - is now referred to as the Accountant. Dino Paternostro, a Corleone native...