Word: sicilian
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...only the product of territorial rivalries but 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...
Buscetta's revelations offered authorities in both the U.S. and Italy a deeper understanding of the ties between the New York and Sicilian Mobs. They challenge the widely held view of the Mafia as a centrally organized entity with branches in the U.S. and Sicily. Instead, they depict it as a looser network of groups in Sicily, the U.S. and elsewhere, linked by a combination of business, personal and family connections. Buscetta's disclosures, in fact, confirmed what investigators had first suspected several years ago, that there are really two Mafia groups working in the U.S.: one composed...
...federal authorities. With their sons and heirs becoming assimilated and choosing the boardroom over the back room, and with their ranks depleted by the Government's limited but expanding success at prosecution, U.S. capi since the early '60s have found themselves increasingly short of manpower. The Sicilian families have provided the new blood, sending over a generation of immigrants who are very tough and far more willing than their U.S. counterparts to submit to the discipline required of anyone who joins the Mafia's underground army...
...Sicilian Mafia began to provide heroin. In the old days, say federal authorities, opium was grown in Turkey, shipped to Marseilles, France, where it was processed by Corsicans, and then imported into the U.S. by American Mafia families headed by the Genovese family and others. The cracking of the so-called French connection in the early 1970s and the virtual elimination, under U.S. pressure, of opium growing in Turkey all but closed that international trade route...
...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...