Word: mobbing
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...trouble began when soldiers rounded up several dozen youths accused of evading the military draft. Some 20 protesters, mostly relatives of the young men taken into custody, surged through the streets chanting "Join us." The mob swelled to about 1,000, stoned a police station and torched several government-owned vehicles. To quell the disturbances, Interior Minister Tomas Borge personally led a force of paramilitary units from the capital of Managua. Authorities detained 16 antigovernment activists...
...series makes some of its most provocative points in two episodes devoted to TV news. Simply by its presence, television sometimes exaggerated the scope of 1960s street demonstrations: a "mob" looks more threatening in closeup, we are shown, than when the camera pulls back to reveal the relatively small number of people involved. There is much fascinating footage of John F. Kennedy's and Richard Nixon's TV appearances, illustrating once again how friendly the medium was to one, cruel to the other. Nixon's "Checkers" speech, one of his rare TV triumphs, is included, of course -- but not just...
...simply remained himself, an Italian American who had grown up in New Jersey around neighborhoods where mobsters lived. He had a sense of their behavior and values. "I knew how to act natural so no alarms would go off," he says. So natural, in fact, that as a Mob hanger-on, he got close to Mafia Soldier Lefty Ruggiero, a neurotic worrier, chronically short of cash, who became Pistone's mentor in check-cashing scams and drug and gambling deals. Pistone also "felt a kind of kinship" with Dominick ("Sonny Black") Napolitano, a killer who kept pigeons on the roof...
Five years were far more than the family had bargained for when Pistone began the undercover operation in September 1976 with the idea of spending six months infiltrating fences who dispose of Mob swag. Pistone's name was erased from agency files, and contact agents were selected to deliver his spending money (sometimes meeting him in the Metropolitan Museum of Art) and to take his phone calls several times a week. Donnie Brasco (Pistone chose the name at random) never took notes and rarely carried a recorder or radio transmitter because they might be discovered when he greeted fellow Mafiosi...
...constant problem was how much Pistone could participate in Mob dealings without breaking the law himself. He could not initiate or encourage crimes, but to win credibility he had to participate in such activities as unloading stolen trucks and buying stolen guns. "What would happen, I thought, if I'm out with Sonny and Lefty and we get caught in a battle," he recalls. The situation never arose, but as he came closer to being initiated into the Mob, he was given a contract by Sonny Black to kill a fellow Mafioso. Before Pistone could run the mobster to earth...