Word: sicilian
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...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...
Taken together, these arrests deal a major blow to the Mafia. But this hydra-like organization, also known as Cosa Nostra (Our Thing), is so deeply woven into the fabric of Sicilian society that the Italian state is far from claiming final victory. "Cosa Nostra is built on a capacity to adapt to the time and situation, to camouflage itself and raise its head only when necessary," says a senior Palermo-based investigator who worked on the Lo Piccolo case. Lo Piccolo's takedown shuffles the deck in the organization, but hardly eradicates...
...Sicilian Mafia, founded in the mid-19th century as a protection racket in Palermo, is the master template of the modern organized-crime network. Yet its success is grounded in paradox. Cosa Nostra is a multinational conglomerate based in the backwater of Sicily, an organization bred in violence that accumulates power best when it maintains internal peace. It is an association of men - sometimes men of extraordinary influence and charisma - yet the Thing is always bigger than even its most powerful bosses...
...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...