Word: sicilianism
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...private train was slowly chugging across Nevada one day last week on the final stretch of a six-hour trip from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. The 150 passengers, guests of West Coast Mobster "Big Jim" Valenti, had lunched on a buffet of "selected Sicilian meat and cheese cuts," and they were looking forward to an evening at Valenti's hotel speakeasy, The Boiler Room. Big Jim, trigger-tempered head of the notorious "Doo Dah" gang, had arranged the party for the opening-night floor show starring his bride, a former Detroit showgirl named Boo Boo O'Hare...
...revolt reigns in the south of France," warned Emmanuel Maffre-Bauge, president of the French Table Wine Association. "There are grapes of wrath in the Midi." Not only there. In the Mediterranean port of Sete, 30,000 irate French farmers rioted, protesting imports of Italian wine. In the Sicilian town of Marsala, schools were closed, anti-French demonstrations broke out in public squares, and local unions called for a general strike of the area's 20,000 workers. From Marseille to Perpignan near the Spanish border, French growers, meanwhile, set up roadblocks of burning tires to halt the influx...
...picture frames lying flat on the parquet floor. In fact, it was another Italian spe cialita della casa-art theft. In the hours before dawn, thieves had broken in through a window and spirited off about $2.3 million worth of paintings left to the museum in 1956 by Sicilian Industrialist Carlo Grassi. The haul included a Cezanne, a Bonnard, a Renoir, a Vuillard, a Van Gogh, a Gauguin, a Millet and a brace of Corots. The thieves, said Director Mercedes Garberi, "displayed a very refined taste." Giovanni Spadolini, Italy's Minister of the Cultural Patrimony, was already in shock...
...divisions in it between Jewish mobsters in Miami Beach and Italian ones in Las Vegas; that the distaff side of the family is protected from the unpleasant side of the business; that everyone--including the Godfather--lives in constant danger of sudden death; that the protective function of the Sicilian mafia was not wholly lost in America. But he introduces some new themes as well: the struggle for legitimacy (Michael opens himself up to five counts of perjury by denying charges rather than take the fifth); the intimate connection with "legitimate" business ("United Telephone and Telegraph"); and a sense...
...sword may not always die by the sword (Marion Brando died of a heart attack in a tomato garden) but they are forced to go on living by the sword. Vito's father, we learn in the beginning of this film, was an honest man killed by a Sicilian don for refusing to be intimidated, twenty years later. Vito returns to draw an ugly line down the old man's belly with a stiletto. He has succumbed to the revenge ethic. The final five minutes of the film show three of Michael's closest associates dying by his command...