Word: odessa
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Miguel Chavez, ODESSA, TEXAS...
...last two decades have witnessed an astonishing proliferation in organized criminal activity around the world. From Mumbai to Odessa and from South Africa to Canada, cities and countries that were never associated with the "classical" mafia in the postwar period have been swamped by syndicates shifting huge quantities of illicit goods and services around the world. "We have an exponential growth in serious and organized crime," said Commander Sharon Kerr, head of the specialist crime directorate of Britain's Metropolitan Police, at a conference in Liverpool earlier this year, "manifesting itself in all kinds of ways; from Chinese DVD sellers...
...Night. New Yorker James Gray makes grimy melodramas (Little Odessa, The Yards) about working-class guys from the outer boroughs who are forced to face moral dilemmas or brutally erase them. The main characters in this new one are a cop father (Robert Duvall) and his two sons, one a cop (Mark Wahlberg), the other (Joaquin Phoenix) the manager of a Brighton Beach nightclub crawling with Russian mobsters. The police are portrayed as stalwart but mostly dewy do-gooders, so they fade in screen appeal next to the Russky tough guys - nothing like a monster mobster with a guttural accent...
...Ukrainian, majored in foreign languages at college, and now writes essays in Russian, Ukrainian, English and German. He also speaks Japanese, his fluency in which nearly landed him a stint monitoring Japanese radio traffic for the kgb in 1985. To avoid that, he worked as a prison guard in Odessa, where his job was to write papers for political indoctrination classes. That took about 30 minutes a day. For the rest of his remaining 18 months at the prison, Kurkov penned children's books. Writerly recognition took many years. Beginning in 1980, he mailed out 1,000 manuscripts, only...
...Odessa Permian 13, Midland Robert E. Lee 7. --By Gregory Jaynes