His appearance was intimidating not from any single feature but from a lifelong habit of presenting a formidable front to the outside world.
All Sicilians are good eaters, when there is food to be had, and one of the few jokes people dared to make about Don Croce was that he would rather eat well than kill an enemy.
He used the Sicilian phrase of the Mafia, “Fari vagnari a pizzu.” Pizzu means the beak of any small bird such as a canary. The phrase itself was a demand for part of the loot.
Ah, Sicily, Sicily, he thought, you destroy your best and bring them to dust.
He reminded him that whatever sins were committed here on earth, no man must forget that eternal forgiveness awaited him if he were a proper Christian.
The Cleveland syndicate, perhaps the most powerful of the strictly gambling operations in the United States, was represented by a sensitive-looking elderly man with gaunt features and snow-white hair. He was known, of course not to his face, as “the Jew” because he had surrounded himself with Jewish assistants rather than Sicilians. It was even rumored that he would have named a Jew as his Consigliere if he had dared.
Christian forgiveness was a contemptible refuge of the coward.
My only business is to save souls in danger of hell. What a man does is his own business.
I was forty-five years old and tired of being an artist. Besides, I owed $20,000 to relatives, finance companies, banks and assorted bookmakers and shylocks. It was really time to grow up and sell out as Lenny Bruce once advised. So I told my editors ‘OK, I’ll write a book about the mafia, just give me some money to get started’.
Mafia,” in Arabic, means a place of sanctuary, and the word took its place in the Sicilian language when the Saracens ruled the country in the tenth century.
You cannot say ‘no’ to the people you love, not often. That’s the secret.
You cannot say ‘no’ to the people you love, not often. That’s the secret. And then when you do, it has to sound like a ’yes.
But there were too many factions, too many special interests that conflicted.
Like any other parent he wanted his children to go to better schools and mix with better companions.
The mouth was not so much cruel as lifeless; thin, rubbery and the color of veal.
After all, education is the key to a higher civilization.
The two men, one so huge, one so tiny, left the cemetery together. Terraced gardens girdled the sides of the surrounding mountains with green ribbons, great white rocks gleamed, a tiny red hawk of Sicily rode down toward them on a shaft of sunlight.
At this point Frisella, the barber, came out of his shop to join in the fun. Behind him was the Maresciallo, pompous and important, rubbing his smooth red face. He was the only man in Montelepre who had himself shaved every day.
I asked god for a bike, but i know god doesn’t work that way. So I stole a bike and asked for forgiveness.
The promised reward of heaven is too far away, men must have some pleasure now. God will forgive them.
Any profession was worthy of respect to men who for centuries earned bread by the sweat of their brows.