Word: tommaso
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...prosecution relied heavily on 14 Mafia members who broke the code of silence, known as omerta, to describe the organization's workings. The star witness was Tommaso Buscetta, 59, a mobster who once ran some Mafia operations in the U.S. and South America and who also testified in the "Pizza Connection" trial in New York City, which led to the conviction of 17 drug traffickers. Buscetta described to the jury the Mafia's pyramidal structure, capped by a twelve-member cupola, or commission, that ruled on all major gangland murders. There were plenty of those. The prosecution charged that between...
Some of the pentiti brought before the bench in Palermo have been impressive. Tommaso (Don Masino) Buscetta was known as the "Boss of Two Worlds" because he used to control extensive operations in both Italy and Brazil. Buscetta, who testified in New York's "pizza connection" trial about heroin smuggling between U.S. and Sicilian mobsters, provided new evidence about the operations of the Mafia's ruling Commission. A second pentito, the mid-level Mob executive Salvatore (Toto) Contorno, made detailed accusations against defendants based on his firsthand knowledge of the Mafia's internecine warfare over the drug market...
...market of antiquarian fakers, magnet of universal snobbishness and stupidity . . . We want to prepare the birth of an industrial and military Venice. Let us fill the stinking little canals with the rubble of the tottering, infected old palaces! Let us burn the gondolas, rocking chairs for idiots." Thus Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and his friends, the futurist painters, in a manifesto from 1910. It is a delicious irony that the most important exhibition in Europe this summer (or indeed anywhere else) should be a giant display of futurist paintings, sculpture, books, pamphlets, posters and memorabilia in a palace, no longer tottering...
...most important of the turncoats are Tommaso Buscetta and Salvatore ("Toto") Contorno. They testified in December in New York City at the so- called pizza-connection trial, where 22 defendants are charged with distributing Sicilian heroin through a chain of U.S. pizza outlets. Both are expected to make court appearances in Sicily in the spring, though Contorno gave prosecutors a scare last week by suddenly threatening not to. Officials see Contorno's move as a ploy to get better treatment and more security. Nonetheless, they are visibly concerned. Contorno's statements helped indict 160 defendants...
...Palermo, Sicily. One of the four men conducting the ceremony pricked the initiate's finger and rubbed the blood on the picture of a saint. The picture was then set afire. The act meant that "if I should betray the organization, my flesh would burn like this saint," Tommaso Buscetta told fascinated spectators in a jammed federal courtroom in New York City last week. The stocky mobster then coolly proceeded to betray his blood brothers in a most dramatic way, fingering seven of the 22 defendants in the courtroom as Mafia members involved in a conspiracy to import and sell...