Word: palermo
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...infested every aspect of the island's life. Once known for its poverty, Sicily may now be addicted to a rich diet of drug money. Some Sicilians, in fact, wonder how anything will ever get done without the Mafia to navigate a hopelessly tangled bureaucracy. As a Palermo businessman said last week, "Our city administration is so bad that without the 'friends of friends,' how are we ever going to get anything accomplished? At least with the Mafia, you knew how to fiddle...
Dramatic as they may be, Buscetta's revelations have painted only a small part of the big picture of Mafia organization and activity. U.S. and Italian officials point out that Buscetta has revealed far more about the activities of the Corleone families than he has about his own Palermo organization. They suspect that despite his talk about honor, the Sicilian singer may lose his voice once he has finished implicating his rivals. They also note that the loose-tongued Buscetta is a rarity and that most Mafiosi still respect their organization, and value their lives, sufficiently to keep silent...
...Vito Cascio Ferro is said to have traveled to the U.S. in 1900 to help found the Black Hand, a Mafia-affiliated organization. Back home, Don Vito liked to boast of how he murdered New York City Police Detective Giuseppe Petrosino, an Italian American who had traveled to Palermo in 1909 to investigate the links between the Black Hand and the Sicilian Mafia. On the day the policeman arrived, Don Vito broke away from lunch at the house of a Sicilian deputy of the Italian parliament, shot Petrosino outside Palermo's courthouse and returned in the deputy...
...helped form a new organization that was far more interested in the burgeoning international drug market than in old-fashioned "businesses" such as cattle rustling and extortion. The inevitable clash between the new and old Mafia resulted in a sensational series of shootings and stabbings on the streets of Palermo in the mid-1950s. The killings marked a sinister turning point in the history of the honored association: henceforth no code of honor or oath of loyalty would prove stronger than the lure of incalculable profits in the drug trade...
...legal change enacted just days before the Palermo crackdown will enable U.S. and Italian law-enforcement officials to cooperate more fully in the ongoing war against the Mafia. Under a new extradition treaty between the two countries, many of the obstacles that had made it difficult for officials in one country to pursue suspects in the other have been eliminated...