And this is the lead which finally broke the case after Perry and Dick had drifted down to Mexico, back to the midwest, been seen in Kansas City, and were finally picked up in Las Vegas. Capote's alternating dossier Shifts from the victims, the Clutter family, to the boy who had loved Nancy Clutter, and her best friend, to the neighbors, and to the recently paroled perpetrators: Perry, with a stunted child's legs and a changeling's face, and Dick, who had one squinting eye but a "smile that works." They had been cellmates at the Kansas State Penitentiary where another prisoner had told them about the Clutters-he'd hired out once on Mr. The natives refer to it as "out there." It occurred in 1959 and Capote has spent five years, almost all of the time which has since elapsed, in following up this crime which made no sense, had no motive, left few clues-just a footprint and a remembered conversation. This small pogrom took place in Holcomb, Kansas, a lonesome town on a flat, limitless landscape: a depot, a store, a cafe, two filling stations, 270 inhabitants. A couple of days before they had bought a 100 foot rope to garrote them-enough for ten people if necessary. They're as sick a pair as Leopold and Loeb and together they killed a mother, a father, a pretty 17-year-old and her brother, none of whom they'd seen before, in cold blood. "Deal me out, baby.I'm a normal." This is Richard Eugene Hickock, talking about himself. "There's got to be something wrong with somebody who'd do a thing like that." This is Perry Edward Smith, talking about himself. Within a few months more than 250 had broken the “law of silence” and accepted witness protection and other measures to protect informants.Īn important contribution to the documentation of how low the lowlife can get. The government achieved this difficult feat, writes Follain, with the help of “supergrasses”-well-placed informants within the Mafia, such as the prominent “soldier” Giuseppe Marchese. The Italian state cracked down hard, and the heads of the Corleone mob-including Luciano Leggio, Salvatore Riina and Bernardo Provenzano-went into hiding and were eventually ferreted out one by one. But, the author writes, it all unraveled when a state-appointed special judge, Giovanni Falcone, began to dismantle the mobsters’ power judicially-a campaign that, in May 1992, led to Falcone’s assassination, as well as the deaths of dozens of other judges, prosecutors and police officials. The postwar Sicilian mob, strengthened by being installed in positions of political authority by the Allied occupation forces, institutionalized this parasitism. As Follain notes, the Mafia-“ ‘men of honor’ as they like to call themselves”-began as hired goons for absentee landowners who helped oppress the ordinary people, and thus they have remained, parasites and leeches. The name Corleone is strongly associated with Mario Puzo’s The Godfather and the films it begat, but Marlon Brando’s quasi-chivalric padrino is far from the reality. The gang that could shoot straight-and bomb, maim, steal, cheat, bribe and otherwise wreak havoc-documented by a capable chronicler of organized crime in Italy.Ĭomplementing Roberto Saviano’s Gomorrah (2007), Rome-based Sunday Times correspondent Follain, by deromanticizing it straightaway, performs a valuable service in this account of the Sicilian Mafia’s Corleone clan.
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