Word: palermo
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...shepherd, once said the surest cure for a sore finger is to cut off the arm to which it is attached. Last week Italy's organized-crime network was decapitated when the 62-year-old godfather of the Sicilian Mafia was arrested as his car sat stuck in Palermo's rush-hour traffic...
Italians wondered how many deaths would be enough to prod the national government into effective action against the criminals it has long tolerated. A week before his death, Borsellino told friends, "The tnt for me has already arrived in Palermo." With estimated annual profits of $20 billion at stake, the Mob had decided that he knew too much about its inner workings to live...
...third most profitable criminal enterprise, behind drugs and computer theft. More and more, art is becoming a prey of organized crime. Italy's single most valuable missing artwork is a Baroque masterpiece, Caravaggio's 1609 Nativity, which was stolen in 1969 from the Oratory of San Lorenzo in Palermo, Sicily. Investigators in Britain are now convinced that the painting, worth about $50 million today, has been used by the Mafia as security for drug deals over the past 20 years. Kenneth Klug, a deputy special agent for the U.S. Customs Service, says his agency is "sure" that drug lords...
...check on the progress of the 51-unit apartment complex he is developing. In Winter Springs, Fla., Sheelah Ryan, a retired real estate agent, meets with the board of the Ryan Foundation to map programs for what she calls "the new poor." Somewhere in southern Atlantic waters, Anthony Palermo, formerly of the U.S. Navy, cruises with his family aboard his own yacht, joyfully named Picked...
When state-run lotteries first became popular in the late 1970s, "instant millionaires" were the isolated stuff of media sensation. Now Porchia, Ryan and Palermo are part of something else entirely: an expanding niche of American society filled with overnight plutocrats. As lottomania has swept the nation, one result is an entirely new social stratum of millionaires, over 3,000 in all, and more are added each month. With some prizes soaring past nine digits (the largest: $118 million in California last April), a few recipients even approach being superrich. But America's pot-of-gold winners...