Word: sicilian
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...Sicilian connection, say authorities, made heroin smuggling easier because its participants knew each other...
Authorities in Italy and the U.S. had long suspected the existence of the Sicilian connection, and in the late 1970s rapidly expanded joint efforts to expose and eliminate it. The cooperation has become extensive. U.S. authorities have traveled to Italy to share information with their Italian counterparts; Assistant U.S. Attorney Charles Rose flew to Brazil last year after Buscetta's arrest. Only hours after those named in the Italian arrest warrants had been taken into custody in the U.S., top law-enforcement officials from both countries met at the Justice Department in Washington to make plans for combined police...
...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...
...Mafia entered the U.S. along with the wave of immigration that peaked in the first decades of this century. Legendary Sicilian Mafia Chief Don 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...
...Sicilian Mafia came back to life in 1943, however, when U.S. intelligence asked American Mafia leaders to get in touch with their old colleagues on the island and persuade them to facilitate the movement of Allied troops during the invasion of Sicily. In return, the U.S. military government allowed Mafiosi to resume positions of power in a number of key Sicilian towns. Among the top operators in postwar Sicily was Italian-born American Mobster Vito Genovese, who had fled to Italy in 1937 when New York City Special Prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey charged him with several underworld killings...