The ritual seems "ridiculous" now, the witness acknowledged, but it was deadly serious when he joined the Mafia 37 years ago in Palermo, Sicily. One of the four men conducting the ceremony pricked the initiate's finger and rubbed the blood on the picture of a saint. The picture was then set afire. The act meant that "if I should betray the organization, my flesh would burn like this saint," Tommaso Buscetta told fascinated spectators in a jammed federal courtroom in New York City last week. The stocky mobster then coolly proceeded to betray his blood brothers in a most dramatic way,...
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