Word: swag
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Five years were far more than the family had bargained for when Pistone began the undercover operation in September 1976 with the idea of spending six months infiltrating fences who dispose of Mob swag. Pistone's name was erased from agency files, and contact agents were selected to deliver his spending money (sometimes meeting him in the Metropolitan Museum of Art) and to take his phone calls several times a week. Donnie Brasco (Pistone chose the name at random) never took notes and rarely carried a recorder or radio transmitter because they might be discovered when he greeted fellow Mafiosi...
...this building is simple, masculine, direct -- the federal style in all its confidence. This exalted plainness of utterance would permeate crafts other than architecture; it was the general style of the early Republic. Cabinetmakers no less than builders now preferred explicit, abstract shapes: circle, ellipse, square. Deep carving and swag work became flattened and were replaced by abstractions of depth, mimicking light and shade in veneer. Back to basics: antiquity is destiny...
...publisher. All those ads certainly did not hurt. But Leonard's triumph may have a somewhat less expensive explanation: the devoted readers who enjoyed and passed along the writer's early westerns (Hombre) and those who discovered somewhere along the way his ensuing string of crime and mystery novels (Swag, Stick, LaBrava) finally coalesced into a critical, bookstore-stampeding mass...
...result, told largely in Hill's words, has the sound and horror of authenticity, The Godfather minus the glamour. There is no rich, family feeling here, no accretion of loyalties and vendettas. There is only the nostalgia of a successful sociopath for a lawless past. "Truckloads of swag. Fur coats, televisions, clothes--all for the asking," the thug recalls. "When I was broke I just went out and robbed some more. We ran everything. We paid the lawyers. We paid the cops. Everybody had their hands out. We walked out laughing. We had the best of everything...
Detroit Policeman Raymond Cruz of City Primeval (1980), for instance, is mistaken for a high school shop teacher by a girl he tries to pick up in a bar. Ernest Stickley Jr. is a dour Oklahoma hick who, in Swag (1976), conducts a doomed 100-day armed-robbery career. Resurfacing in Stick, seven years and a prison stretch later, he has scarcely improved; he worships Actor Warren Oates and thinks disco is dynamite. But, like all of Leonard's main men, deep down he is as incorrodable as a zinc bar and as heady as the stuff...