Mafia

CRIME FIVE FAMILIES: THE RISE, DECLINE AND RESURGENCE OF AMERICA'S MOST POWERFUL MAFIA EMPIRES By Selwyn Raab. St. Martin's Press. 784 pages. Sometimes, you have to whack someone if you don't want to get killed yourself. But if that "piece of work" involves another made man -- another inducted member of La Cosa Nostra -- you'd better get permission from the boss first. Those are the rules. So are these: The money trickles up. The family comes first. No hits on honest lawmen. And never, ever break the code of omerta -- silence.

CORLEONE, Italy - Here in the harsh, tawny hills of central Sicily, proud residents of Corleone are trying to take back the name that has become synonymous with the Cosa Nostra. That nasty reputation of their town as a home for murderous thugs is simply mistaken, they say. Oh, sure, directions are often given in relation to the sites of famous slayings ("turn right where they offed the Bandito Giuliano ... "). And the wives and children of some of Sicily's most notorious Mafia dons (jailed or on the lam)

For American organized crime, the beginning of the end came in 1992. That's when the feds, armed with RICO, the anti-racketeering law, and the blood-drenched testimony of serial mob hitter Sammy "The Bull" Gravano, finally proved that while New York's last big don was indisputably dapper, he was not, after all, Teflon. Convicted on a wide-ranging racketeering indictment, John Gotti was sentenced to life without parole, solitary confinement 23 hours a day, the hardest of hard time. By the time throat cancer finally killed Gotti in 2002, it was widely accepted that the mob was also dead, ravaged by the same lethal combination of RICO and rats that had toppled Gotti.

Vincent Guastaferro is a card-carrying member of what has been called the "Mamet Mafia." Reaching into his briefcase, the actor removes an engraved notecard on which playwright David Mamet has written: Yo Vincenz -- Mazel tov! Front sight, squeeze the trigger. Give 'em hell in B'more. Love, Dave. Mamet is referring to Guastaferro's role in Center Stage's production of the playwright's Speed-the-Plow, which begins performances Friday. Over the last 2 1/2 decades, Guastaferro has appeared in a dozen Mamet plays or movies, beginning with a 1979 production of Sexual Perversity in Chicago and continuing through Mamet's just-released movie, Spartan.

DONA de Sanctis and I sat down in a quiet restaurant in northeast Washington and had a Catholic-on-Catholic discussion that started with a reference to that movie. Well, it was almost Catholic-on-Catholic. De Sanctis said her family converted to the Episcopal faith when she was a teen-ager. I'm a Catholic who has promised to find his way to Mass before the next time Halley's comet appears. But both of us know what the Stations of the Cross are, and their relevance to Mel Gibson's disputed but profitable The Passion of the Christ.

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina - Police Cpl. Mariano Lewicki has made a habit of looking over his shoulder. Seated in an upscale cafe in a suburb north of Buenos Aires, the 31-year-old Lewicki glances nervously at passing waiters and a handful of other customers. When a dark-haired man enters the cafe and sits behind him, Lewicki stops in mid-sentence, slowly cranes his head sideways to get a glimpse of the suspected eavesdropper, and then motions with his eyes to move to another table. Lewicki, a short man with a boyish face, takes no chances.

LOS ANGELES - A national strategy similar to those used against organized crime and in counterterrorism efforts must be created to fight street gangs, federal and local law enforcement officials said yesterday at the start of a two-day conference. The conference, sponsored by the Los Angeles Police Department and the FBI, was organized to help change long-standing perceptions as gangs expand beyond their traditional territories. Gangs are growing, becoming more sophisticated and migrating into smaller cities and towns, officials said, and law enforcement agencies must find a unified approach to fight them.

I wrote my first news article about the Mafia in 1959 as a green Federal Courts reporter for the late, lamented City News Bureau of Chicago. That smudged-purple Mimeograph copy, shuttled to the city's four daily newspapers by underground pneumatic tubes, has long since been lost, but I believe it was related to a grand jury Fifth-Amendment plea by Jimmy ("The Monk") Allegretti, a top lieutenant of Tony Accardo. It has been followed by thousands of news stories, columns and editorials of mine on the mob, all written with fascination.

In a fiery resignation note, former Oklahoma Gov. Frank Keating insisted yesterday that his comparison of secretive Roman Catholic bishops to the Mafia was "deadly accurate," even, as expected, he bowed to pressure to step down as chief of a U.S. bishop watchdog panel on sexual abuse. "I make no apology," Keating wrote in a short letter to Bishop Wilton Gregory of Belleville, Ill., president of the U.S. bishops, who had selected him to lead a newly created oversight group last June. "To resist grand jury subpoenas, to suppress the names of offending clerics, to deny, to obfuscate, to explain away: that is the model of a criminal organization, not my church."

The predawn fire that destroyed the Rosedale nightclub Strawberry's 5000 on a cold January morning two years ago appeared at first to be little more than a bad ending to a business troubled by rowdy crowds, parking lot fights and sagging profits. As they sifted through the bar's charred remains, however, investigators began uncovering the outline of what they later would describe as a violent and highly organized crime ring with a series of legitimate business fronts, connections to prominent Baltimore figures and ties to the city's drug trade reaching back more than a decade.