Word: palermo
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...have no Dew Drop Inn," laments Lucille McClain, the hostess at the Palmer House. She is pouring another cup for Matt Norcia, who has probably heard 3 million times the rest of the 3:30 coffee crowd's joke about his family connections "in Palermo ho ho." It is a sociability with built-in defenses and proscribed limits. At another table some post-'60s people visiting from St. Cloud for the centennial celebration are talking about sharing their feelings. But their "sharing" is as formal and ritualized as the jokes of the coffee crowds, or the refrain echoing around John...
...Ercole, then a malarial Spanish enclave on the coast north of Rome. The last four years of his life were one long paranoiac flight from police and assassins; on the run, working under pressure, he left magnificently realized, death-haunted altarpieces in Mediterranean seaports from Naples to Valletta to Palermo. He killed one man with a dagger in the groin during a ball game in Rome in 1606, and wounded several others, including a guard at Castel Sant'Angelo and a waiter whose face he cut open in a squabble about artichokes. He was sued for libel in Rome...
...Mafia, a 10th century Arabic term meaning sanctuary. A thousand years later, the word is dark with irony. Founded to fight foreign oppressors, the organization has come to include the island's most terrible despots. Their fingers can be found in every business and social institution from Palermo to Catania, their hands behind countless murders. Puzo offers swatches of sad history and exotic sociology. Mussolini nearly wiped out the Mafia, but the U.S. Army ensured its comeback when it unlocked Fascist prisons. Kidnaping is a cottage industry, monks fake relics, and omertà, the code of silence...
Thanks to U.S. Attorney Rudolph Giuliani and Palermo's magistrate Giovanni Falcone for taking on the Mafia and risking their own lives in the process...
...Ambassador to Italy Maxwell Rabb began to press for the treaty after a group of law-enforcement officials in Palermo complained to him that the U.S. was hampering their efforts by failing to take Italian extradition requests seriously. Rabb's previous impression had been exactly the reverse, that Italy had been stonewalling U.S. demands. "What we had here," he says, "was an opportunity to clear up differences where the blame for the past was about equal." U.S. and Italian authorities hope that the new extradition accord will serve as a model for agreements with other countries...