The most fantastic tale of global cooperation involves helicopters, submarines and cocaine. "The big joke at the Armenian conclave," writes Friedman, "was, 'Why rob a bank when you can own one?'" All attending agreed that Russian banks should become their official money laundry. Chartered jets brought Sicilians, Russians and Colombians to Yerevan, Armenia, to divide up turf. Friedman describes a 1995 confab in San Juan, Puerto Rico, where delegates from the North American and mother-country factions discussed, in the words of one, "who we will kill, fuck." A summit two years earlier was a conspiracy nut's dream. Do you think anything you're going to do is going to bother me?" Another vocalized his contempt: "I did time on the Arctic Circle. One suspect chewed on bullets during a police interrogation. The shorthand versions of some Friedman anecdotes follow: "Arm hacked off with ax." "Castrated with crescent-shaped knife." "Gutted like sheep." "Buried to the neck in gravel." "Forced to eat gravel." "Bit off booking sergeant's nose." The Russians are so hard-boiled it gives American cops the willies. Not only are the Russians smarter, they're meaner. "The Italians play bocce," says one of Friedman's sources. Sophisticated, versatile and just plain huge, it has compromised governments and threatens the integrity of world banking. The Mafiya is into everything from Wall Street to African diamonds to tropical casinos to the NHL. Friedman, the don of investigative reporters, you'll learn why you should care. Sometime in the '90s, the number of Russian mobsters in New York surpassed the head count of all five famiglias combined, and in this excellent primer by Robert I. The real wiseguys are the strangers among us. We've kept our enemies so close through pop culture that we've graduated from dog-earing page 26 of "The Godfather" to name-checking godfathers in rap songs to eavesdropping on their shrink raps.Īfter you read "Red Mafiya," however, you'll know that such gangsta love is mere nostalgia. La Cosa Nostra means this "thing of ours," and the old-school Italian mob really does belong to all of us.
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