All Blog Posts Tagged 'Palermo' (48)

By Thom L. Jones for Gangsters Inc.

There are more than a million people buried in this graveyard. There are no stones or memorials to remember them. It’s not the biggest…

By Thom L. Jones for Gangsters Inc.              

“You never know what enough is unless you know what is more than enough.” - William Blake     

It’s a story with more twists and turns than a novel by Agatha Christie. A list of…

This is part 2 of Five Minutes to Midnight. Read part 1 here.

By Thom L. Jones for…

By Thom L. Jones for Gangsters Inc.

This is part 2. To read…

By Thom L. Jones for Gangsters Inc.

“Without evidence there is nothing.” - Friedrich Nietzsche                

The train rumbled into the night, hugging the cliff top, the illuminated carriages reflecting in the wine-dark sea. A few…

By Thom L. Jones

• Back to part 1

As the famous song goes, “The Party's’ Over it’s Time to Call it a…

By Thom L. Jones

The Texas Almanac claims the heart of the territory lies near a small town called Brady, in McCulloch County. In square miles, Texas is the largest mainland state in the Union. Only Alaska tops it in size. “Bigger than Texas” is a somewhat overused expression, but hits the spot. It’s bigger than France and…

By Thom L. Jones

"By knowing the men of honor, I have learned ……..that Mafia logic is the logic of power, and it always works towards a purpose. Sometimes those Mafiosi strike me as the only rational beings in the world populated by madmen." - Giovanni Falcone to Marcello Padovani

"You’re the Maradona of the law:…

This is part 2 of Three good men and their fight to the death against the Sicilian Mafia: Giovanni Falcone. To read part 1 click here.

By Thom L.…

By David Amoruso

A secret pact between the Sicilian Mafia and the Italian State has resulted in the conviction of eight men, including Mafia bosses and police and government officials, among them a close political associate of Silvio Berlusconi. The pact was made in the 1990s to bring a halt to Cosa Nostra’s bloody war…

By David Amoruso

Organized crime in New Jersey goes way back and features some of the most colorful characters and powerhouses one can imagine. Gangsters Inc. sat down with mob author Scott Deitche, who details this rich and violent history in his new book Garden State Gangland: The Rise of the Mob in New…

By Thom L. Jones

The media called them raggazzi di una stagione ‘straordinaria: “The boys of an extraordinary season.”

Beppe Montana and Calogero Zucchetto and Pippo Giordano and Roberto Antiochia and Natale Mondo and Ninni Cassarà and the rest of the Squadra Mobile, the Flying Squad. They knew what they had to do and lived their lives doing…

By Thom L. Jones

Sometimes, history makes us remember and then, at times, helps us to forget.

It’s easy to recall the first iPhone that was launched in 2007 and would come to change everything we have ever known about personal communication. Mention a judge who was blown up by the Mafia in 1983, and eyes glaze and heads shake and no one…

By Thom L. Jones

If you Google ‘Mafia’ you will get 163,000,000 hits.

If you Google ‘Cosa Nostra’ you will get 5,280,000 hits.

In 1950 the Mafia did not exist, publicly that is. Sicily knew about it, but even then, to the…

By David Amoruso

Enough is enough. In the land of Cosa Nostra and omerta, a growing number of citizens is successfully standing up to the Mafia, creating a new mindset among Sicilians. “The idea that now it is possible not to pay, that it’s safe to rebel against the Mafia, that the institutions are by your side.”

For over a…

By Thom L. Jones

These are murderers who killed a man, killed a thought, a hope, a way of being, the very idea of humanity.

- Lorenzo Matassa. Public Prosecutor. Court of Palermo, February 23rd, 1998.

In the early 1990s, a courageous Catholic priest, Giuseppe 'Pino' Puglisi, took over…

By David Amoruso

Tommaso Buscetta was the first boss of the Sicilian Mafia to break omerta and tell authorities (almost) all he knew about the secretive criminal brotherhood. Now, Italian filmmakers will produce a big-budget film to tell the story of his life and how he became The Traitor.

That, by the way, is also the movie’s…

By David Amoruso

Giuseppe Salvatore Riina, the son of Salvatore “Toto” Riina, the former boss of bosses of the Sicilian Mafia, is causing outrage in Italy this week with the release and promotion of his book Riina Family Life. While calling his father a “hero,” he refuses to discuss Cosa Nostra or his father’s murderous acts, which caused…

By David Amoruso

Mario Cuomo would’ve made an excellent cadaver, Sicilian Mafia bosses thought. The New York governor was targeted for assassination by Cosa Nostra during a trip to Italy in 1992, a time when the Sicilian mob was waging an all-out war on the Italian state, resulting in the deaths of countless policemen, judges, and…

By David Amoruso

Vincenzo Bontà, the son-in-law of Sicilian Mafioso Giovanni Bontade, was shot dead in Palermo yesterday. Bontà (45) was killed along with 53-year-old Giuseppe Vella. The pair was murdered in a very narrow part of the Via Falsomiele in Palermo, leaving them no chance to escape. Two suspects have been arrested by…