Word: palermo
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...white bulletproof Alfa Romeo carrying Antonio Cassarà, 38, the head of Palermo's homicide squad, turned into the courtyard of the housing complex, Laura Cassarà waved to her husband from their apartment window. Cassarà and his two escorts sprinted up the steps leading to the building, but before the policeman could turn the doorknob, three Kalashnikov submachine guns sprayed a flood of bullets from the windows of three floors of a building across the street. Cassarà and one of his bodyguards died in the fusillade...
...murder last week came only nine days after the killing of Palermo Police Commissioner Giuseppe Montana. Both men had been active in last year's arrest of a Mafia leader who later turned state's evidence. A deeply shocked Italian Prime Minister Bettino Craxi immediately summoned his top security officials for an emergency meeting. At midweek an 800-man force of police and carabinieri was flown to Palermo. Declared the city's mayor, Luca Orlando: "We cannot cope on our own. Either there is national action against the Mafia, or Palermo and Sicily will be lost...
...absolved the billionaire media mogul of bribing judges during a mid-1980s takeover battle. Still, the judges stopped short of a full acquittal, invoking the statute of limitations on a related bribery charge, implying some degree of guilt. The sunny skies lasted for less than 18 hours before a Palermo court brought some rain by convicting Berlusconi's longtime confidant Marcello Dell'Utri of colluding with the Mafia, and sentenced him to nine years in prison. Dell'Utri was a key executive for Berlusconi's business empire and helped form the Prime Minister's Forza Italia party; he will appeal...
...hung low on a brisk January dawn in 2001, as several dozen police agents silently rolled into position in the rugged hills around Mezzojuso, a sleepy town 40 km south of Palermo. For months, investigators had been casing a red-roofed concrete house where they believed top Mafia bosses were planning an important lunchtime summit. Benedetto Spera, among the most feared and powerful figures in Cosa Nostra, was also scheduled to get a doctor's visit at the hillside farmhouse that day to treat his prostate cancer. The summit was considered so important that authorities suspected Bernardo Provenzano, the Sicilian...
...trail has been thin indeed. Police have fingerprints dating back to the 1950s, photos from 1959 and a computer-generated composite image of what he might look like now. But law-enforcement officials have no personal belongings or telephone recordings. In April 2003, police seized a man in downtown Palermo they were sure was Provenzano, but he turned out to be a doorman who resembled the composite image. And in November, police uncovered a ring of moles, including the assistant to a leading anti-Mafia prosecutor, who were feeding vital information to Mafia bosses, who passed it on to Provenzano...