Word: mobbed
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...what we might call our criminal economy. Talk of this corruption crisis never goes beyond expressions of solidarity with the victims, praise for the valiant police, and generic appeals to morality. All of which leads nowhere. Last year, a report by the Italian business association Confesercenti estimated that the Mob in Italy generated more than $125 billion of annual revenue, a figure equal to 7% of the country's gross domestic product. That's more than double the annual income of Italy's entire agricultural sector...
Mafia networks now exert such strong control over local politics that they no longer need protection at the national level. They have learned that throwing their weight around in Palermo or Naples is the way to obtain results in Rome. And no government has managed to blunt the Mob's economic power. In today's Italy, going up against organized crime leads not only to a loss of consensus and votes, but also to a world of trouble in getting public works projects completed. Our failure to take on these Mafias risks letting them live on and thrive forever...
...political system so prone to manipulation and myopia is incompatible with an advanced democracy. Is it an advanced democracy if scores of local city councils have been dissolved in recent years because they had been infiltrated by the Mafia? Or where 3,100 people have been killed by the Mob since 1992? That is more victims of violence than in Beirut during the same period...
...though rarely invoked, has Spitzer pinned because it forbids "transportation of a person across state lines for purposes of prostitution." "It's an undeniable Mann Act violation," says Judd Burstein, an attorney whose history with Spitzer dates back to their facing off on opposite sides of the 1992 Gambino "mob tax" case...
...most suspensefully threatened when a nearby ham radio operator picks up walkie talkie transmissions between a dim-witted lookout and the diggers in the tunnel. There has been an attempt to position this movie as something rather light and larkish. But, believe me, it is not The Lavender Hill Mob Redux...