Word: palermo
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During the past several years, three judges, five police officers, a journalist specializing in Mafia investigations, and uncounted mobsters have been murdered as rival families have attempted to ward off investigations and settle territorial disputes. In 1982 General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, the prefect of Palermo and the man credited with striking the first serious blows at the Red Brigades, which had terrorized Italy for a decade, was gunned down with his young wife as he drove along one of the city's main streets. The assassination angered even those who had grudgingly tolerated the Mafia. It outraged...
...Buscetta explained it, the second tier of the pyramid is made up of provincial commissions throughout Sicily. These, he said, play a mediating and coordinating role among the families. The Palermo commission used to be the most important, Buscetta went on, but in recent years, the Corleone commission has displaced...
...pyramid is the so-called cupola, or commission of ten. Headed by the chief of the Palermo provincial council, the cupola is the body that settles jurisdictional conflicts and attempts to coordinate all activities outside Sicily. Dominated by the more powerful of the clans, the commission should sanction the murder of an important judge or politician, or approve the assassination of an uncooperative Mafioso in New York. Sometimes this system works. But on numerous occasions, says Pino Arlacchi, a sociologist on the staff of the Italian legislature's anti-Mafia commission, it does not. In fact, Arlacchi warns against...
...also the result of battles for top positions between new bosses, who had not previously been accepted by the majority of Mafia members, and old bosses, who often found themselves abandoned by their families. Much of the combat was between the Sicilian Mafia's two major factions, the Palermo gangs and the Corleone families. This ended a year ago, when the Corleone groups established a degree of hegemony and took four places on the ten-member commission...
...consequence was that by the mid-1970s there was a vacuum that the Sicilian Mafia was all too eager to fill. As law-enforcement authorities have suspected-and Buscetta has now confirmed-Palermo has replaced Marseilles as the center of Europe's heroin business. Authorities estimate that some two tons of pure heroin (worth billions of dollars at street prices) are produced in Palermo each year from opium smuggled into Italy from the Golden Crescent of Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Heroin can often be bought in New York City's Times Square 48 hours after it leaves Sicily...