Word: sicilian
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Inzerillo mob family of Palermo has long been referred to by a somewhat wistful moniker: gli Scappati, the Runaways. More than 20 years ago, the surviving Inzerillos had been "allowed" to flee their home island by the then Sicilian boss of bosses Toto Riina. The bloodthirsty capo had killed dozens of their brothers, cousins, uncles and fathers in a mob war in the early 1980s, a conflict that cemented Riina's Corleone clan as the supreme rulers of Sicily's crime syndicate, also known as Cosa Nostra. Mafia experts say Riina was on his way to exterminating the rest...
...reasons: Gotti was dead and buried in the States; and Riina and Bernardo Provenzano, his successor and lifelong Corleone paesano, are both serving life terms in Italy. They were allegedly about to rebuild their "Old Bridge" between America and Sicily, reestablishing the business and drug trafficking ties between the Sicilian and American mobs. For a while, that relationship had been paramount in the netherworld as the Gambinos reigned supreme in the 1970s and 1980s. Arriving in the early '80s, the exiled Inzerillos were content to lie low under the protection of their powerful relatives. But the Gambino era would...
...with a gift for creating dust storms that are bound to change nothing once the proverbial dust has settled. The last fatality was in February when a 38-year-old police officer, Filippo Raciti, was killed by a teenage fan in Catania during rioting at the stadium in the Sicilian city. After the death, there was much talk of applying the same techniques that the English Premier League have used to stamp out violence, with more control by stewards in the stadium and swifter punishments such as enforcing legal sentences and banning people from attending games. There are some signs...
...just murderous, but also a major drag on Italy's economic development. A recent report by the Confesercenti small-business association estimated that organized crime accounts for 7% of Italy's GDP, a larger share than any corporate behemoth, even the energy giant ENI. The Sicilian Mob is one of Italy's original multinationals, having partnered with its Italo-American cousins and gangsters around the world to traffic drugs and weapons, launder money and promote other illegal cross-border business...
Italian authorities say Lo Piccolo was working hard to rebuild those transatlantic ties, largely disrupted in the 1980s by U.S. investigations and local Sicilian turf wars. He had allowed members of a historic Mafia family, the Inzerillos, to return to Palermo in recent months from more than two decades of forced exile in the U.S. after former top boss Totò Riina tried to exterminate the entire clan. Piero Angeloni, head of Palermo's police detective unit, says Lo Piccolo's arrest is likely to stall Sicilian efforts to deepen links with the "Americani." But the contacts are sure...