Jul
06
2007
Producer Joseph Isgro nails the rights to a legendary mobster’s life story.
BEFORE Tony Soprano or Don Corleone or Tony Montana there was Lucky Luciano — the real-life patriarch of modern organized crime.
Luciano was the Sicilian immigrant who rose to power in the Mafia in the U.S. in the 1920s and transformed it into a flourishing enterprise based on legitimate economic models. He ordered gangland killings, consolidated warring crime factions and began laundering profits from narcotics and prostitution through lawful businesses. Continue Reading »
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Jul
05
2007
A Former Cleveland Police Chief Finally Tells The Whole Story
The meeting went down at Burke Lakefront Airport in 1978. A small prop-engine plane owned by the Maryland State Police was parked on the tarmac. Inside was a sergeant from Maryland and “The Old Man,” a professional hitman-turned-rat who was working with Maryland police in sting operations. Cleveland Police detective Ed Kovacic climbed into the plane and sat next to The Old Man. Continue Reading »
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Jul
05
2007
Media baron Conrad Black’s fate is hanging in the balance, as the jury consider whether he is guilty of fraud and what the US authorities call “racketeering”. Continue Reading »
Jul
05
2007
Who Is Lou Sciortino? Ottavio Cappellani Picador, 227pp, £14.99
In April 2006, Italian police captured a 73-year-old man they found hiding in a run-down farmhouse outside the Sicilian town of Corleone. Dressed in jeans and a pullover, he may have looked harmless to the untrained eye, but this man was in fact Mafia boss Bernardo Provenzano, wanted for a string of murders. For years, Provenzano had evaded capture, communicating with his family through a system of handwritten notes and a network of underlings. It’s this mix of the scarily powerful and the banal that drives Ottavio Cappellani’s farcical tale of Mafia life in modern-day Sicily. So much so, in fact, that there’s a character who appears to be modelled on Provenzano: Jacobbo Maretta, who hides from police in an underground bunker. “Whenever he has to go out, he takes a tractor as far as the village, where a yellow Fiat 127 is waiting to take him to a dealer in garden statues in Ispica. There he gets on a truck, changes inside it, and when he gets out, usually at Catania airport, he’s all spruced up.” Continue Reading »
Jul
05
2007
The races, in which the horses are frequently injured, are run over the hard asphalt or slippery cobbles of cities including Palermo, Catania and Siracuse.
The police seized a hippodrome full of horses, and 10,000 crates of performance-enhancing drugs, last year but managed to stop only seven out of an estimated 300 races. Continue Reading »
Jul
03
2007
Says evidence was withheld at trial Chief US District Judge Mark L. Wolf, in a rare rebuke to the US Justice Department, has asked the Massachusetts Board of Bar Overseers to launch disciplinary proceedings against a veteran federal prosecutor who withheld key evidence in a New England Mafia case from the early 1990s. Continue Reading »
