Word: sicilian
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...SICILIAN CAROUSEL...
...father was an electrician who worked for the union and made good money, but not good enough that he could throw it away on his son's snot-nosed college unless there was a damn good reasons. But there was a good reason. Carlo's father, a leathery-faced Sicilian immigrant named Luigi--call him Lou--wanted his son to grow up to be a cultured gentleman, to smoke cigars and read good books. Lou knew a lot about Harvard, he had seen the picture of the bell tower on the glossy catalogue cover, had read every Louis Auchincloss novel...
...rise by murder and treachery and can never feel secure. But these are days of even greater tension than usual. The crime organization is going through one of its most crucial internal struggles since Prohibition, when the fight for control led to the bloody Castellammarese War (named for the Sicilian town of Castellammare del Golfo, birthplace of many of the leading thugs). Only when the smoke cleared from that battle and a nationwide commission of Mafia dons was set up to coordinate criminal operations did the closed brotherhood, which was imported by Sicilian immigrants in the 1860s, begin dominating...
...balmy night last July, a statuesque Sicilian brunette, Graziella Quartuccio, 43, was snatched away in her nightgown from her Monreale home near Palermo by a machine-gun-toting gang of ski-masked Mafiosi. A kidnaping is no surprise in Italy. It has become such a way of life since 1970 that police now freeze the assets of the victim's family in an effort to prevent payoffs. Million-dollar ransoms are routine. But this case rocked Palermo; it is not honorable to involve women in such matters, and the victim's husband, Contractor Giuseppe Quartuccio, 66, was known...
...Apparently the kidnapers were younger Mafiosi, who in recent years have grown markedly disrespectful of their elders' feelings. Even the favored nephew of Giuseppe Garda ("Don Peppino"), the boss of Monreale and an associate of Quartuccio's, was kidnaped in 1974 and ransomed for $1.5 million. To Sicilian police, the wave of killings suggested that the dons were at last losing patience with the punks...