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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He was a most outlandish man. Perhaps in the final moments, he had a fleeting glimpse of the horse he murdered, the men he had killed, his glorious days on the dude ranches in Colorado as he played at being a cowboy. The money, the jewels, the raucou
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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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Someone once claimed Plug Shuman said, “Shoot ‘em twice in the back of the neck and they won’t wiggle.” The guy who killed him remembered and faithfully followed the dictum. To the bullet. Albert Shuman was thirty-four when he died and, according to
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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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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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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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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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Down a narrow alleyway off the Via Alloro, in The Kalsa District of Palermo City, is a building that was once a convent. Built in 1601, it now houses the state archives, over a million documents, files, manuscripts, papers that tell the history of Si
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