Word: underworld
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When the prices were higher, hit-men used to be solely the domain of the richer, and ever so much classier, Mafia-types. They remained shadowy underworld figures who hid Uzis under their trench coats and worked for world terrorist organizations...
...coke reaching the U.S. today, according to the DEA, and 90% of the drug sold in Europe. The Cali godfathers have a virtual lock on the global wholesale market in the most lucrative commodity ever conceived by organized crime. The cartel is the best and brightest of the modern underworld: professional, intelligent, efficient, imaginative and nearly impenetrable. Says Robert Bonner, administrator of the DEA: "The Cali cartel is the most powerful criminal organization in the world. No drug organization rivals them today or perhaps any time in history...
...Gordo" (the Fat Man), as Santacruz is known, is a legend in the New York Latin underworld. The word making the rounds is that every so often he materializes in the middle of a drug deal and exchanges a few pleasantries with the customer. Then, as suddenly as he appeared, he is gone again...
Elmore Leonard controls more assets than a Mafia don. He possesses a gift for lowlife dialogue, a thorough knowledge of underworld mores and a mastery of high-tension narrative. What he does not have is a gift for whimsy, and that, alas, is the chief ingredient of Maximum Bob (Delacorte; 295 pages; $20). The title character is a sleazoid Florida judge who likes to hit on lady cops and hand out heavy sentences. Someone tries to ice Maximum Bob with a unique weapon: a hungry alligator. There is a long enemies list, including Leanne, the judge's loony wife; Dale...
...spirals into the underworld of hatred and despair, Jungle Fever kicks into movie overdrive. It establishes kinship to those fervid '50s weepies directed with deadpan skill by Douglas Sirk: All That Heaven Allows, with young Rock Hudson and middle-aged Jane Wyman daring a love that flouts convention; and Imitation of Life, in which wannabe white woman Susan Kohner throws herself on her black mother's coffin and sobs out her remorse to the throb of a Mahalia Jackson spiritual. Jungle Fever is no less brazen -- or assured. A righteous man shoots his deranged son, and the man's wife...