Cosa Nostra News

Roberto Saviano wrote an acclaimed best seller -- and has lived under severe restrictions ever since.  REVISED In October 2006, precisely 10 years ago yesterday, Roberto Saviano, the award-winning Italian writer who lives under police protection, received the phone call that changed his life. Saviano's widely lauded  Gomorrah  was issued earlier that year in his homeland by Mondadori, one of Italy's top publishing houses. (It wouldn't be available in the U.S. until 2008.) It was the source material for an acclaimed film, an award-winning play and a television series in production today . The Camorra, the Mafia in Naples -- the inner working of which Saviano's book had laid bare --initially chose to ignore the writer, reportedly under the belief that simply shooting him dead in the street wasn't worth the heat from both law enforcement and the media, which are feared equally in Italy, unlike in the U.S. But Saviano's influence continued to grow, whic...

The Bay of Pigs, a Cold War incident that gave the John F. Kennedy administration a black eye it will forever wear, has been and will continue to be studied and debated. But, for 50 years, details about this event were still hidden away in top-secret CIA files that were finally released this month and reviewed by Newsweek. So reports The Daily Beast . "The disclosure is the handiwork of the dogged researcher Peter Kornbluh and his Washington-based National Security Archive. The right-to-know group used the Freedom of Information Act and lawsuits to force the CIA to release all its major documents on Kennedy’s failed efforts to overthrow Castro, who this month turned 85 and stands as a living reminder of America’s failure to repel communism on an island just 90 miles from Florida," the site reports. One classified piece of information has to do with how a CIA official transferred funds from the invasion budget to “pay the mafia types” as part of an assassination plot again...