Word: monsignors
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...image. But Carril actually did try, taking up orange-and-black bow ties at one point. That is Armond Hill's first memory of him, when Hill was a senior at Bishop Ford High School in Brooklyn. (Carrilism: Always recruit at schools whose names begin with Bishop or Monsignor.) "I saw this short guy with a bow tie and a big cigar lying down in the bleachers," Hill recalls. "After the game he came down and told me everything I did wrong and that he could make me a better player. It was that, more than the mystique of Princeton...
Ordinarily Monsignor Jose Sebastian Laboa, the Vatican's Ambassador to Panama, greets visitors with a tray of coffee and cake. But when General Manuel Antonio Noriega strode into the papal embassy on Christmas Eve, such hospitality was hardly appropriate. The fugitive strongman was agitated, pacing the nunciature's marble floors like a caged tiger. The four aides who accompanied him were carrying suspicious vials of injectable liquids and an assortment of guns. Laboa demanded that Noriega relinquish the weapons. At first he refused, but then he apparently complied -- although a submachine gun was later found under...
Laboa then stepped up the pressure. He told Noriega, quietly but forcefully, that no country would give him refuge. (That was not entirely accurate; Cuba might have been willing, but Washington had told the Vatican that sending him there would be unacceptable.) The monsignor pointed out that the troops surrounding the embassy made an escape from the building impossible. Noriega was told he had only two choices: to walk out and surrender to the Americans or to let Laboa arrange for him to be delivered to the new Panamanian government. Asked Noriega: Did it really matter...
...with rock music, which to the opera-loving Noriega must have been sheer cacophony. Among the titles: No Place to Run, Voodoo Chile and You're No Good. The G.I.s harassed the nunciature in other ways too: they shot out a garden light and repeatedly stopped the papal legate, Monsignor Jose Sebastian Laboa, as he came and went...
...Luis del Cid, who surrendered to U.S. forces in the western province of Chiriqui rather than organize a resistance. Noriega, accompanied by two bodyguards, drove to a Dairy Queen ice-cream store in Paitilla, a commercial neighborhood of Panama City. He dialed the nunciature's number and spoke to Monsignor Laboa. As a non-American diplomat who has been in touch with Laboa paraphrased the conversation, Noriega requested sanctuary. On what grounds? asked Laboa. Look, Noriega replied, at this moment the Pope is beginning to celebrate Christmas in Rome. He will be preaching about the inn where Joseph and Mary...