Word: palermo
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Italians call the Sicilian Mafia "the Octopus," and justly so. As investigative reporter Claire Sterling shows, its tentacles have branched from Palermo over the past 30 years to get a global stranglehold on the $100 billion heroin market -- and a major stake in the new cocaine trade. With billions in profits to launder annually, the Sicilian Mafia also ranks as the world's most profitable multinational, showing a return of 1,600% on its investment...
...Sicilian countryside, helicopters clattered overhead in the early- morning dark as Italian police swooped in to raid a luxurious villa. In the streets of Palermo, Milan, Naples, up and down Italy last week, hundreds of narcotics investigators fanned out to collar scores of reputed Mafia drug traffickers. And across the Atlantic, U.S. FBI agents rounded up still more suspects in eight cities. A trail that began in Buffalo and Philadelphia three years ago had led the two countries to crack open a powerful transatlantic drug ring accused of flooding the U.S. with Italian heroin smuggled in wine bottles, tomato cans...
...central role of the Mafia in spreading the epidemic. Even the heavy blows dealt the Mob in the so-called Pizza Connection trials in the U.S. in 1987 and the mass trial and subsequent imprisonment of more than 300 Mafiosi in Sicily proved to be only temporary victories. Palermo's special investigating magistrates are trying, with little evident success, to untangle the intimate ties between the Sicilian Mob and politicians in the South. Like many legitimate businesses, the Mafia has gone global and uses sophisticated financial strategies to launder drug profits...
Seven months ago, a court in Palermo, Sicily, jailed 338 mafiosi in the biggest trial of its kind in Italian history. Last month, however, eight Sicilian magistrates who have been leading the crackdown requested transfers; they charged that through "omissions and inertia" the government was retreating from the war against organized crime. Among the frustrated judges was Giovanni Falcone, 49, the celebrated Mafia-buster who worked on the Palermo case, as well as the Pizza Connection trial in New York City. Said Minister of Justice Giuliano Vassalli: "The Mafia can hardly fail to exploit this disagreeable episode...
...high commissioner in the fight against the Mafia. In the past two decades, Sica has directed investigations into some of Italy's toughest cases, including the ; attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II and the kidnaping-murder of former Prime Minister Aldo Moro. Sica immediately flew off to Palermo, for a firsthand look at La Piovra, or the octopus, as the mob is known throughout Italy...