Word: paesanos
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...with two decades gone by, the Runaways were in the process of quietly coming home to Italy - or so the authorities believed. The exiles had good reasons: Gotti was dead and buried in the States; and Riina and Bernardo Provenzano, his successor and lifelong Corleone paesano, are both serving life terms in Italy. They were allegedly about to rebuild their "Old Bridge" between America and Sicily, reestablishing the business and drug trafficking ties between the Sicilian and American mobs. For a while, that relationship had been paramount in the netherworld as the Gambinos reigned supreme in the 1970s and 1980s...
Provenzano grew up poor in Corleone. The real-life don began his rise after World War II, when he and his paesano Totò Riina did much of the whacking for rising boss Luciano Liggio. In 1958 Riina and Provenzano led a deadly ambush on the ruling boss Michele Navarra, leaving Liggio the undisputed godfather. Provenzano disappeared into the hills in 1963 after an internal Mafia feud erupted. When Liggio died in prison in 1993, Riina took over as top boss, with Provenzano as his No. 2. Riina was captured the same year and remains behind bars. Provenzano transformed the Mafia...
Evangelist. Back in Washington he made time with the representatives of the National Federation of Italian-American Organizations (Paesano Frank Sinatra is also a Humphrey booster) and got long and loud applause from a U.S. Chamber of Commerce group of 1,200. He criticized "unbelievably high deficits" in the federal budget, charged that the "present welfare system all too often fails both the test of compassion and the test of efficiency." The War on Poverty is not the Office of Economic Opportunity, he said. "The War on Poverty...
...reason for the quiet was the shift of election emphasis from the heavily Communist cities (where minds seem already made up) to the countryside. Out in the hill villages, living in bleak cottages and scratching a bare living from the thin soil of the peninsula, the poverty-stricken paesano was the man of the hour. His vote might tip the scales...
Five or ten years ago when Louis Prima was still involved in the unprofitable business of playing jazz, he was no more important than any other "paesano" to the vast Italian population of this country. But just two weeks ago, when the agents of WHCN went in town to get the New Orleans-born trumpet man for their Jazz Orgy, the stage entrance was literally jammed with enthusiastic autograph seekers from Hanover Street...