Free Republic

The Colombo family boss Carmine "The Snake" Persico died last week. The last tie to the 'Golden Age' of the mafia is gone. And maybe so is the Italian mob's stranglehold on the American imagination. “Michael Corleone says hello.” That line from an iconic scene in “The Godfather 2” is uttered just before an attempted hit on the character Frank Pantageli. The garroting in a bar is broken up by a beat cop who just happens to walk in. The incident is not entirely fiction. In August 1961, Carmine “the Snake” Persico tried to take out Larry Gallo in a...

The bosses of New York's five Mafia families in the mid-1980s came a hair-trigger away from sanctioning a hit on then-federal prosecutor Rudy Giuliani, according to bombshell FBI records made public today. Before cooler heads prevailed - the mob bosses decided by a razor-thin 3-to-2 margin not to try to whack the future mayor and presidential candidate - at least two of the dons argued fervently that the mob-busting U.S. attorney should sleep with the fishes. Bonanno boss Philip “Rusty" Rastelli, Genovese chief Vincent “The Chin" Gigante and Lucchese honcho Anthony “Tony Ducks" Corallo all cast votes to spare the...

The Duty of Lying February 28, 2002 by Joe Sobran Wartime always brings expansions of state power, together with erosions of moral and constitutional standards. No sooner had the 9/11 attacks occurred than the Federal Government started assuming new powers and abridging old freedoms in the name of national security. And voices in the press were quick not only to defend these measures, but to call for even more of them. Last fall an essay in the WALL STREET JOURNAL pointed out that Presidents Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt had, during wartime, grossly violated the Constitution they were...