Word: palermo
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Early one morning in October 1969, outside the Oratorio of San Lorenzo in Palermo, Sicily, the chapel's caretaker watched in bewilderment as a cat scuttled into the sanctuary through a wide-open door. The building should have been secured against felines, and thieves as well. During the previous night, however, intruders had forced a shutter of one of the chapel windows. Once inside, they cut away the altarpiece with a razor blade and marched out the front door with their prize: an 8-ft. by 7-ft. canvas, the Nativity, painted by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio...
ENTER THE MEN of the cloth, the Roman Catholic hierarchy, into the bloody strife of Palermo. For years, Church and Mafia have made the strangest of political bedfellows. The prelates refrained from outright condemnation because the Sicilian organization was viewed as a strong conservative, anti-communist force, a supporting pillar of peasant society. The mob glady played along...
...Pope was a little more direct in his remarks, blasting the Mafioso by name as "operators of aberrant manifestations of criminality." Hardly an all-out frontal assault, but then this pontiff has never been one for drastic action, Rather, he concluded with a hopeful vision of the future. "Delightful Palermo open haven, secure haven, live in serenity and peace...
...only of containing them." After Dalla Chiesa's assassination, and the flouting of the state's authority that came with it, even containment seems impossible. Last weekend, for example, four new names, including that of a 15-year old boy, were added to the endless list of victims in Palermo's age-old battle for survival against those gangsters who, in John Paul's words, "have spilled so much blood, [and] caused so many dead on your streets...
Only the poorest kids from the toughest circumstances are bold enough to try this way out and naive enough to like their chances. Most fighters are strangely vulnerable. So wishful and sincere, they are eternally easy marks for the users, the chiselers, Frankie Carbo, Blinky Palermo and all their current counterparts. Yet many people regard boxing's corruption as its charm and find the scoundrels colorful and delightful. Nobody really worries...