Word: sicilian
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Only four men were even aware of the secret nocturnal meetings last spring in the Vatican's baroque Apostolic Palace. Two were top cardinals in the church hierarchy. Two were key participants: Pope Paul VI and Michele Sindona, the tough Sicilian lawyer who in two decades has risen from obscurity to eminence as a financier and industrialist. It is almost unheard of for a Pope personally to conduct the church's business affairs, but this was no ordinary occasion. Sindona and Pope Paul closed a deal that started a shift of profound consequence in the Holy...
Master of Sign Language. The most renowned play associated with this theater company is Chushingura, an 18th century saga of honor and bloody revenge that is almost Sicilian in tone. In its entirety, the play runs to eleven acts and two days, but only the first four acts are being performed by the Grand Kabuki during its current U.S. tour. The story is transparently simple. Moronao, the governor of Kamakura, lusts after Lady Kaoyo, the wife of Hangan, one of Moronao's deputies. She rebuffs him. Moronao is furious and showers abuse on the unsuspecting and inoffensive Hangan. Pushed...
...Prohibition singlehanded. His reason for doing so is that Prohibition will provide business opportunities. This is instantly understood by "the 18 greediest, the seven most hypocritical and the five wealthiest families in the country." to whom he goes for financing. It is also understood by an elderly and dignified Sicilian, who agrees that his society, the Mafia, will handle distribution of the alcohol that West's combine will buy up before the country goes...
Maybe so, but why not send a telegram? Eddie West dies of Condon's sermonizing. The last half of the book develops a subplot involving West's compulsion to murder Negro women (his mother, who deserted him, was a very dark-skinned Sicilian). It is here that the dreary suspicion of allegory crosses the reader's mind. It may not be true that West is meant to stand for corrupt America, and the Negro women for America's blacks, but the book has been so mishandled by this point that no reader can be sure...
...bound by an elaborate ceremony of medieval hocuspocus. Flanked by the boss and his lieutenants, the initiate and his sponsor may stand in front of a table on which are placed a gun and, on occasion, a knife. The boss picks up the gun and intones in the Sicilian dialect: "Niatri representam La Cosa Nostra. Sta famigghiaè La Cosa Nostra [We represent La Cosa Nostra. This family is Our Thing]." The sponsor then pricks his trigger finger and the trigger finger of the new member, holding both together to symbolize the mixing of blood. After swearing to hold...