{"id":6357,"date":"2009-12-03T13:00:46","date_gmt":"2009-12-03T18:00:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=6357"},"modified":"2009-12-02T12:20:22","modified_gmt":"2009-12-02T17:20:22","slug":"de-godenfar-the-norwegian-mob-in-america-part-i","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=6357","title":{"rendered":"De Godenfar: The Norwegian Mob In America, Part I"},"content":{"rendered":"

Everyone’s heard of “The Mob”.\u00a0 The “Cosa Nostra”.\u00a0 The “Mafia”.\u00a0 The Italian organized crime syndicate, ostensibly established on the principles of Omerta, <\/em>the fabled, iron-clad code of silence, is ironically the most famous, best-publicized organized crime syndicate in the world.\u00a0 The “secret brotherhood” of the Mob has been the subject of hundreds of movies, many of them Oscar-winners.\u00a0 It’s been immortalized in thousands of books, TV shows and other staples of popular culture.<\/p>\n

In short, the Mafia is about as “secret” as Linday Lohan’s battle with substance abuse.\u00a0 And a big part of this immense, society-choking wave of publicity comes at the hands of Italians – Mario Puzo, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorcese, Robert Di Niro, Marlon Brando, Robert Duvall, Joe Pesci, James Gandolfini…<\/p>\n

There are, of course, other ethnic organized crime outfits; Jewish and Irish syndicates were once very powerful in the US; the Russian, Japanese, Albanian and Vietnamese syndicates are visible and brutal.\u00a0 The Armenian mob dominates Twin Cities business radio on Saturdays.\u00a0 They all have one thing in common; someone <\/em>talks about them – to cops, prosecutors, the media, writers, producers or whatever.\u00a0 There is always some body of knowledge out there about each of these organizations.<\/p>\n

But there is one organized crime syndicate that dwarfs all the others in terms of reach, power, brutality and especially secrecy.\u00a0 And nobody knows about it.<\/p>\n

———-<\/p>\n

In the movie The Usual Suspects<\/em>, the ubervillain Keyser Soze is a human macguffin, a supercriminal whose power and menace is multiplied by the fact that nobody has ever seen him and lived; that nobody knows if he really even exists. He is, one character says, “a story mothers tell their kids when they misbehave; like Keyser Soze will get you in the night”.<\/p>\n

Soze is fictional.<\/p>\n

But there’s a syndicate that’s all too real – rendered all the more sinister by the fact that it has mastered the key to secrecy; make denying its very existence less a matter of fear than utter putative preposterousness.<\/p>\n

It hides in plain sight, behind a cloak of its utter improbability<\/p>\n

———-<\/p>\n

Reporter Anthony DiLigio has undertaken one of the most daunting feats in the history of investigative reporting.\u00a0 I’m going to quote his piece pretty much in full, as he goes…<\/p>\n

…Inside the Norwegian Mob<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The story begins Friday in Shot In The Dark.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Everyone’s heard of “The Mob”.\u00a0 The “Cosa Nostra”.\u00a0 The “Mafia”.\u00a0 The Italian organized crime syndicate, ostensibly established on the principles of Omerta, the fabled, iron-clad code of silence, is ironically the most famous, best-publicized organized crime syndicate in the world.\u00a0 The “secret brotherhood” of the Mob has been the subject of hundreds of movies, many […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6357","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crime-and-punishment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6357","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6357"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6357\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6764,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6357\/revisions\/6764"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6357"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6357"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6357"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}