Word: underworld
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What's going on here? Why is Hollywood once again married to the Mob? It's not that the genre is especially popular these days. (The Untouchables was the only gangster blockbuster of the '80s.) Nor is it that the Italian underworld taps a nerve in today's body politic. Drug lords, often black or Hispanic, are the civic scourge of the moment, and they get their movie due only in Abel Ferrara's rancid, megaviolent King of New York, in which a white man (Christopher Walken) leads a rainbow coalition of pushers. Whatever charm the Mafia boss still possesses...
...million libel award to the resident king of the Las Vegas strip was overturned by a federal appeals court. A lower-court jury had decided that an ( October 1980 NBC broadcast falsely linked the singer's purchase of a casino to underworld assistance...
...underworld's most powerful force is the quieter and more sophisticated Genovese clan, with its entrenched army of more than 1,500 "made" members and associated underworld entrepreneurs. "You keep hearing all this crap about Gotti being the boss of the bosses," says Richard Ross, one of the FBI's leading Mafia experts, "but Genovese has always been the country's most powerful family." Says Joseph Coffey, a top investigator at the New York State Organized Crime Task Force: "The Genovese gang more or less invented labor racketeering. I consider them the Ivy League of the underworld...
...Genovese family's quiet, pervasive power is a long-standing tradition. After years of Mob warfare, the family's founding godfather, Charles (Lucky) Luciano, took charge of the entire underworld in 1931. He imposed a panel of bosses, the so-called Commission, that oversaw all the rackets in the U.S. Luciano was considered "first among equals," and few Mob ventures went forward in the 1930s without his approval -- and without his getting a piece of the action...
...World Financial Center in Manhattan but was "laid off for lack of work." Cirillo is far from unemployed, crime fighters contend, since Gigante may be bogged down in court for some time. As Cirillo's friends down at the fish market would say, if they were talking: the underworld may soon be his oyster...