Word: sicilian
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...walks back and forth along the aisles of the theater, gabbling into a microphone about the auteurist theory of stage direction. Then he drags recalcitrant actors from the wings and introduces them by their real names. After angry debate, they undertake to improvise scenes that will define their 1920s Sicilian characters, only to have the speaker break in and say they have talked enough. All the while, an impish man uses a video camera to record the proceedings and simultaneously project them onto a screen at center stage. The cameraman narrates a "documentary" of random black-and-white footage...
...gang warfare that had wiped out at least 40 mobsters in just two days in September of that year. Before that, top gangsters like Salvatore Maranzano had conspired to shoot their way into becoming the capo di tutti capi ("Boss of Bosses"). Maranzano, who had organized New York's Sicilian gangsters into five families, was the first victim of Luciano's new order...
...vendor in a Mafia neighborhood in New York City discovered which public telephone was being used by gangsters to call sources in Sicily about heroin shipments. The phone was quickly tapped, and the evidence it provided has been used in the ongoing "pizza connection" heroin trial against U.S. and Sicilian mobsters...
...brought before the bench in Palermo have been impressive. Tommaso (Don Masino) Buscetta was known as the "Boss of Two Worlds" because he used to control extensive operations in both Italy and Brazil. Buscetta, who testified in New York's "pizza connection" trial about heroin smuggling between U.S. and Sicilian mobsters, provided new evidence about the operations of the Mafia's ruling Commission. A second pentito, the mid-level Mob executive Salvatore (Toto) Contorno, made detailed accusations against defendants based on his firsthand knowledge of the Mafia's internecine warfare over the drug market in the early 1980s, when Sicily...
...Sciacchitano. "It wasn't born yesterday, and it may not end with this. You can't destroy the Mafia with just one trial." Nonetheless, Italian and U.S. authorities are optimistic that the Palermo trial will at least choke back some of the Syndicate's activities. "The New York and Sicilian trials are two sides of the same coin," says Sciacchitano. "We have had a continual swapping of help and information. We are prosecuting the same organization...