It was as complicated to define his fate as solving a two-piece jigsaw puzzle. That he would die violently was a given. When and where are the unknowns. As it goes down, he is one of five who will perish on a hot day in June. Il cacciatore was after
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Camporeale is a mediocre town in a landscape filled with the emptiness of broken dreams. It lies twenty-two miles to the south and west of the city of Palermo. On the island of Sicily, a place of endless despair on the edge of Italy, that makes you a
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“Europe ends at Naples and ends badly,” said French poet August Creuzé de Lesser in 1806. “Calabria, Sicily, and all the rest belong to Africa.”
Antonio Gramsci, in 1926, was even more forthright in his declaration: “Southerners are biologically inf
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In 1935, Charles Lucky Luciano was perched pretty on top of the criminal world. He was the godfather of the powerful Genovese crime family, headed the Commission that oversaw all mafia activities in the U.S. and had taken out fellow mobster, the unpr
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According to the official web page of the New York Police Department:
“There is no delineated time frame for cold cases.”
The killing of police Lieutenant Joseph Petrosino on the evening of March 12, 1909, in the city of Palermo, Sicily, is per
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The FBI and police are currently looking for buried bodies at two horse farms in upstate New York, several news outlets report. The dig is in connection with a recent indictment of ten Gambino crime family mobsters.
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Ten members and associates of New York’s Gambino crime family and the Sicilian Mafia were indicted in Brooklyn federal court this week. They are charged with racketeering conspiracy, extortion, witness retaliation, and union-related crimes committed
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In 1948 when young Alberto dalla Chiesa, a captain in the carabinieri, the military police, arrives in Corleone, in the province of Palermo, one of the first things he organized is a census of all the families who live in the town of about 10,000. He
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Sicilian Mafia boss Matteo Messina Denaro passed away today. He was 61. The elusive Mafioso was viewed as the last man to know the people on both sides of the law involved in some of Italy’s most heinous and profitable crimes. He took those secrets t
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Everyone called him Tommy Brown, but that was not really his name. It was a nickname, a mob monicker, but it really got confused. His name in Italian is Gaetano Lucchese, and the closest we get to that is Guy Lucchese, as the name is pronounced “Guy
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They called them gli scappati “the runaways,” hiding in Venezuela or finding refuge in Miami, drifting through New York, even in the lemon orchards of Monreale. Where they really ended up was New Jersey. At least the ones that were the major targets.
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John Derek, the movie actor, once said, “Live fast, die young, and leave a good looking corpse.” Dominic Di Ciolla managed two out of three, but missed out on the last one. A lesser known player in the field of American organized crime, he came and w
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Colombo crime family consigliere Ralph DiMatteo pleaded guilty to racketeering charges last week. The Mafia leader went viral after his son posted a photo on Twitter showing him lounging in a pool the day after prosecutors had indicted him.
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Two alleged members of New York’s Genovese crime family were sentenced to prison last week. Both men - one a reputed Mafia captain, the other a soldier - had pleaded guilty to racketeering charges earlier this year after being charged in April 2022.
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Truman Capote, the late, famous American novelist and playwright, once said, “Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act.” A more than perfect observation of what took place in New York and various outlier areas of north-eastern Am
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According to Giuseppe Montalbano, a deputy in the Regional Parliament, “Sicilians are by nature delinquents, all mafiosi or tending to mafiosi.” To him, “the mafia constituted an occult middle class with its fingers in every social stratum, imposing
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This is a story about a crime that never exists which triggered another beyond belief in a place saturated with a history of death and betrayal. About a man who organized his own funeral without knowing it and the youth who helped to kill him so he c
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Family is everything. It is how La Cosa Nostra, the American Mafia, managed to dominate the New York underworld for over a century. But in the underworld, family is no match for greed. Vultures and sharks are everywhere, ready to take what’s yours. T
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In the Mafia, people tend to have a long memory. Once you are on a hit list, you never get off. Unless you’re dead. After the murders of Nicolo Rizzuto Sr. and Nicolo Rizzuto Jr. and the death of mob boss Vito Rizzuto, it seems someone still feels th
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Since its beginnings, the Sicilian Mafia was led by and comprised of men. Cosa Nostra was the ultimate “Man’s World.” Men went out to commit crimes while wives sat at home. Sons followed in their fathers’ footsteps, while sisters stayed at home. As t
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