Word: ganglander
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...opening was Henry Kissinger. So many people wanted to be seen talking to the White House adviser that the curtain was delayed about 15 minutes. Kissinger was also the power and glory of the party afterward at the St. Regis Hotel, where the waiters passed the pasta, dressed in gangland pinstripes with black shirts and white ties. "I thought I was going to get away from all this by coming to New York," said Henry the K, happily...
Interest in the Mafia knows no social or intellectual boundary. The Harvard Business Review has included an instructional primer entitled "How lock out the Mafia." A recent issue of Commentary carried a lengthy article entitled "Browsing in Gangland" by Joseph Epstein, who invoked such disparate sources as Sigmund Freud and Al Capone to prove that "we are all hooked on crime, because in our innermost beings most of us partly wish to be gangsters ourselves...
...becoming scrape-prone butler and cook to an anachronistic family of plutocrats (David Wayne and Hermione Baddeley). The plot smacks of those 1930s films that had fun with the Depression. Teddy Bears attempts to cash in on the nostalgia binge for the by-now-boring '20s, playing the gangland speakeasy scene for slapstick laughs. An apter title for this show would be The Unwatchables...
...early jazz-band accompaniments nearly drive his tin ears crazy. Prohibition bootlegging eventually accounts for his real power and fortune. While it must be said that Oliver is not Italian, his partners are called Manzini and Lamotta, and he marries into a thriving Sicilian clan. Gradually, all the standard gangland props are assembled: henchmen, reprisals, shootouts at the warehouse, payoffs and protection rackets. The author even seems to have anticipated the recent caveats of the Italian-American Civil Rights League: the world Mafia is missing. Indeed, when his wife dies, leaving only two daughters, Oliver "adopts" a handsome young Cajun...
...Mafia has always operated in secrecy. Sworn to an omertd ? the oath of silence ? in a ceremony of blood and fire, the old-line Mafiosi cultivated their anonymity as the first line of defense against ar rest and prosecution. Despite the publicity caused by Prohibition gangland wars, the Mafia was still able to maintain a cloak of secrecy around its activities. Behind this shield, Mafia leaders gained control of gambling and narcotics, some labor unions and legitimate businesses. When the first systematic crackdowns by law-enforcement agencies started ten years ago, the bosses deemed their facelessness more important...