Word: underworld
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...sure, such a lavish tribute seems wholly inappropriate for a ruthless killer who made his living through hijacking, racketeering, extortion and drugs. Yet the virtual lionization of underworld figures is nothing new. During the 1920s, America’s mass media helped transform certain groups of brutal outlaws—namely, ethnic Irish and Italian hoods that operated within highly structured criminal syndicates—into pop culture icons. For many impoverished European immigrants, the rags-to-riches, Horatio Alger-like tales of powerful mobsters such as Big Jim Colosimo and the infamous Al Capone seemed to epitomize the American...
...dark side. The Emperor of Ocean Park begins with a corpse: Oliver Garland, a prominent black judge, is found dead of a heart attack at his desk. At the height of his career Garland was up for the Supreme Court, but his bid was scuttled by rumors of underworld ties, leaving him angry and embittered--he's the Clarence Thomas who might have been. Garland's son Talcott is a moody, middle-aged law professor saddled with a flagging career and a failing marriage. Growing up in the shadow of his famous failure of a dad has made...
...criminal underground; in Tucson, Ariz. Born in Sicily, he made his start as an enforcer among the speakeasies of Brooklyn before becoming head of the Bonanno family at 26. He disliked his nickname in the press, "Joe Bananas," but he was one of the lords of the underworld from the 1930s until the "banana wars" of the '60s resulted in his exile to Arizona. He always denied that the Mafia existed and, in his autobiography, described himself as a "venture capitalist...
...thinks it will be long before they start appearing. All the ingredients are there. State oppression. Poverty and disadvantage fueled by wholesale discrimination. Fertile recruiting grounds in the camps and ghettos. A ready weapons supply. (Gujarat lies on a major arms smuggling route from Pakistan to the Bombay underworld.) And enough past conflict for both communities to nurse historic grievances. The calls for intifadeh and jihad have started?"I am telling people to fight," says Imam Mohammed Ismail, 72, who lives at a refugee camp?and are being answered. "This is not communal violence," says Javed Saiyed, a Muslim from...
...dynamic characters—Lois, a Harvard-educated painter, Shintaro, the buraku, and a stockbroker usually known as Max or Jack. She deftly uncovers the seediness of the cosmopolitan gaijin (foreigner) world of nightclubs and gin-and-tonics, blackmail and insider trading. Her most delightful descriptions are of these underworld dealings and of the intrigues in the personal lives of the protagonists, each of whom loves the one member of the trio who doesn’t love him or her in return...