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There were a lot of terms you had to learn, as opposed to the shylock business where all you had to know how to say was 'Give me the fuckin money.
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Elmore Leonard (Get Shorty (Chili Palmer, #1))
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The term 'flying monkey' is called 'abuse by proxy.' The flying monkeys do the bidding for a narcissist. The term flying monkey was coined in the movie The Wizard of Oz. The flying monkeys were under the wicked witches spell to gang up on poor Dorothy and her friends.
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Dana Arcuri CTRC (Toxic Siblings: A Survival Guide to Rise Above Sibling Abuse & Heal Trauma)
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Aoife horny?” he asked, and I saw the concern in his eyes. Concern. For my woman’s horniness. My life was starting to belong in one of the Pink Panther movies.
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Serena Akeroyd (Filthy (The Five Points' Mob Collection, #1))
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Jokes and movies, comic books and professional wrestling, television shows and news programs—they all present dramatic interpretations of facts and fiction in the format of a narrative for the same reason we put chairs in cars.
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David McRaney (You Are Now Less Dumb: How to Conquer Mob Mentality, How to Buy Happiness, and All the Other Ways to Outsmart Yourself)
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had a television set until I sold it at the height of the Vietnam War. Those sanitized snippets of death—made distant by the camera’s lens—meant nothing to me. But I believe it meant something to these cattle which surround me. When the war and the nightly televised body counts ended, they demanded more, more, and the movie screens and streets of this sweet and dying nation have provided it in mediocre, mob abundance. It is an addiction I know well.
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Dan Simmons (Carrion Comfort)
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Sometime in the fifties I remember seeing On the Waterfront in the movies with Mary and thinking that I’m at least as bad as that Marlon Brando character and that some day I’d like to get in union work. The Teamsters gave me good job security at Food Fair. They could only fire you if they caught you stealing. Let me put it another way, they could only fire you if they caught you stealing and they could prove it. • chapter eight • Russell Bufalino In 1957 the mob came out of the closet. It came out unwillingly, but out it came. Before 1957 reasonable men could differ over whether an organized network of gangsters existed in America. For years FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had assured America that no such organization existed, and he deployed the FBI’s greatest resources to investigate suspected Communists. But as a result of the publicity foisted on the mob in 1957, even Hoover came on board. The organization was dubbed “La Cosa Nostra,” meaning “this thing of ours,” a term heard on government wiretaps. Ironically,
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Charles Brandt ("I Heard You Paint Houses", Updated Edition: Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran & Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa)
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All their lives they had slaved at some kind of dull, heavy labor, behind desks and counters, in the fields and at tedious machines of all sorts, saving their pennies and dreaming of the leisure that would be theirs when they had enough. Finally that day came. They could draw a weekly income of ten or fifteen dollars. Where else should they go but California, the land of sunshine and oranges?
Once there, they discover that sunshine isn’t enough. They get tired of oranges, even of avocado pears and passion fruit. Nothing happens. They don’t know what to do with their time. They haven’t the mental equipment for leisure, the money nor the physical equipment for pleasure. Did they slave so long just to go to an occasional Iowa picnic? What else is there? They watch the waves come in at Venice. There wasn’t any ocean where most of them came from, but after you’ve seen one wave, you’ve seen them all. The same is true of the airplanes at Glendale. If only a plane would crash once in a while so that they could watch the passengers being consumed in a “holocaust of flame,” as the newspapers put it. But the planes never crash.
Their boredom becomes more and more terrible. They realize that they’ve been tricked and burn with resentment. Every day of their lives they read the newspapers and went to the movies. Both fed them on lynchings, murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, wars. Their daily diet made sophisticates of them. The sun is a joke. Oranges can’t titillate their jaded palates. Nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack minds and bodies. They have been cheated and betrayed. They have slaved and saved for nothing.
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Nathanael West
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I'm living in a horror movie, all right. Only the horror doesn't have anything to do with necrophilia or black masses or crosses hung upside down, or with vampires who can't swim or zombies who work in sugar cane fields and can't stop shambling off cliffs when some guy with a jawbreaker accent says so, No, this is real life. It was running out all around him. the footprints of assassins and neo-fascists and government officials with secret closets full of tutus, private armies training in ships named after the wives of oilmen, of drunken presidents in bed with the mob and the cartels that slice up the world and stick FOR SALE signs on the pieces; while the real kings of earth lie moldering in their graves, their brains stolen away in the night and their bullet wounds altered to match storybook plots that would be laughed out of any preschool classroom. And all this while the billions sweat and grow old like the living dead, their lifeblood sucked dry by the takers of souls who need our labor to feed a hunger for power without end. The undead? What a cheapjack explanation for so much misery. There is more than enough to account for it all without falling back on the unnameable. It's already here. The trick is to see it and not flinch- there's no future in denial. It's as simple, and as enormous, as that. The truth, however bleak, was almost comforting.
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Dennis Etchison (California Gothic)
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MY OWN BUSINESS . . . M. O. B. MOB assumes the right of every individual to possess his inner space, to do what interests him with people he wants to see. In some areas this right was more respected a hundred years ago than it is in the permissive society.
'Which is it this time, Holmes? Cocaine or morphine?' asks a disapproving Watson.
But Holmes won’t have fink hounds sniffing through his Baker Street digs. If he accepts an American assignment 8 narks won’t beat his door in with sledge hammers, rush in waving their guns “WHATZAT YOU’RE SMOKING?” jerk the pipe out of his mouth and strip him naked.
We will make the MOB stand on criminals and criminal communes clear. A criminal is someone who commits crimes against property and crimes against persons. We feel that criminals are not minding their own business. Someone
who steals your typewriter, starts barroom fights, kicks an old bum to death, is not minding his own business at all. The Thuggees of India, the Mafia, the Ku Klux Klan are examples of criminal communes. Strangling someone and stealing his money, throwing acid in his face, lynching beating and burn ing people to death is not minding one’s own business.
On one side we have MOBS dedicated to minding their own business without interference. On the other side we have the enemies of MOB dedicated to interference. Equipped with new techniques of computerized thought control the enemies of MOB could inflict a permanent defeat. MOB want to know just where everybody stands. Wouldn’t advise you to try sitting on that fence. It’s electric.
Your enemies then are the enemies of MOB. You can do more to destroy these enemies with tape recorders and video cameras than you can with machine guns. Video tape puts any number of machine guns into your hands. However, it is difficult to convince a revolutionary that this weapon is actually more potent than gelignite or guns. What do revolutionaries want? Vengeance, or a real change? Both perhaps. It is difficult for those who have suffered outrageous brutality and oppression to forget about vengeance, which is why I postulated the wholesome catharsis of MA, the Mass Assassination of enemy word and image. And this brings us to a basic question that every revolutionary must ask himself. Can I live without enemies? Can any human being live without enemies? No human being has ever done so yet. If the present revolutionary movement is to amount to more than a change of management, presenting the same old good-guy, bad-guy movie, a basic change of conscious ness must take place.
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William S. Burroughs (The Electronic Revolution)
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In a letter, he described it as “a painfully big city wherein dwell practically no native sons of The Golden West, but a heterogeneous mob of movie actors and actresses and emigrants from Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa . . .
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Susan Orlean (The Library Book)
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This maneuver is what got Senator Joe Biden elected,” Sheeran claimed in the 2004 deathbed biography, I Heard You Paint Houses—whose macabre title is a mob euphemism for the mess a hitman makes when he blows someone’s brains out. Martin Scorsese’s movie The Irishman was based on the book.
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Miranda Devine (Laptop from Hell: Hunter Biden, Big Tech, and the Dirty Secrets the President Tried to Hide)
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But when Perna first put on the uniform in the late 1980s there was another unsolved murder case in town that drew attention for its organized crime ties, blatant ruthlessness, and murder-for-hire origins. The “Pizza Killing,” as it was dubbed, even sounded like a mob movie or an episode of The Sopranos, with everything except a theme song. Edward Potcher, 37, owned Jack’s Pizzeria at the corner of Springfield and Boyden avenues in Maplewood when he was shot four times at close range on August 12, 1986, in the pizzeria. He died just hours later.
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Joe Strupp (A Long Walk Home: A young woman’s unsolved murder and her sister’s lifelong search for answers)
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A unpleasant Mob antecedent was the catalyst: Willie Bioff, one of the most remarkable – and evil – walk-on players in the history of Hollywood, had the mission to control the movie unions. Bioff was a clever kid. At nine years old on the streets of Chicago, he was on commission (plus tips) from a group of brothels in the Levee. This red-light district on the Near South Side of the city was twenty square blocks of illicit relaxation: there were 500 bars, the same number of whorehouses, about 50 pool rooms and a dozen or so gambling joints. There were peep shows and cocaine parlours. It was an area where any pleasure or disease was cheaply available. Hollywood was home from home, stars were easy to extort and compromise – drugs, sex, illegal dalliances and perversions – but there were the potentially damaging headlines if matters went wrong.
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Mike Rothmiller (Frank Sinatra and the Mafia Murders)
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With a home out in the Springs he could leave his wife, their daughter Nancy (born 8 June 1940), son Frank Junior (10 January 1944) and Christina (10 June 1948) and take off for his Sunset Towers apartment in town and often the arms of actress Lana Turner or those of many other lovers. Marian Collier, who died in 2021, worked as a showgirl in Las Vegas before moving on to movies in Hollywood working with names like Marilyn Monroe. She was forthright about Sinatra’s need never to spend a night alone and told us: ‘For many years I rarely met another woman who hadn’t fucked Frank Sinatra. For most of us it wasn’t romantic, more of a tick on the to-do list. I certainly got on better with him after I slept with him but he could be a moody son of a bitch. Vindictive.’ And jealous. His antics brought attention and his friends didn’t like the spotlight; his future was cemented with the Mob; he’d laid his foundations.
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Mike Rothmiller (Frank Sinatra and the Mafia Murders)
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Calling themselves the Slush Pile Brigade as a nod to the unsolicited writings sent to publishing houses, four friends take on the publishing industry and get caught up in dangerous events beyond their control in Samuel Marquis's The Slush Pile Brigade. This high-energy, rollicking misadventure will change the way you look at the publishing industry forever. The plot--complete with car chases and the requisite gun play--is unpredictable and sometimes turns violent; twists and turns and counterturns abound. So, too, does the humor. Numerous references to classic movies, songs, and literature are sprinkled throughout...The dialogue is superb, especially the rat-a-tat round robin responses given when the Slush Pile Brigade members are in discussion. Be prepared to never look at the publishing world in the same way again."
Foreword Reviews - Five Stars (******)
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Foreword Reviews Magazine
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Not with my hair like this.” I touched its short red-gold strands. He snorted. “Oh, yeah, like that’s a master disguise no one could see through.” “But if you and Kara were covering me, then—” “Do you even know what ‘covering’ someone means?” Alex asked coldly. “This isn’t a movie. Do you really want us to have to start shooting at a screaming mob to get you out of there if something goes wrong?” Where had this argument come from? “No, of course I don’t want that,” I said. Everyone had gone quiet, watching us. Trish’s eyes were wide; her coffee mug paused in mid-air. “But Alex, you know I can usually sense if a place is going to be a danger to me. I mean, okay, it’s not foolproof, but—” “Willow.” He lashed my name at me like a whip. “I said no, all right? Drop it.” It felt like he had slapped me. In the sudden roaring silence, Alex tossed the sheet down and shoved his chair back. He left the room without a word. My
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L.A. Weatherly (Angel Fire (Angel, #2))
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It’s not just that your average liberal is more likely than a conservative to believe in laughable conspiracies—although that is clearly true. The difference is, the conservative media denounce their nuts. They don’t hold hearings on deranged theories or attend the loons’ movie premieres. By contrast, the Democratic Party champions its crazies, appearing with them in public and holding congressional hearings to investigate their screwball theories. The
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Ann Coulter (Demonic: How the Liberal Mob is Endangering America)
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He smiled on camera with movie stars for decades when he was a reality TV star; maybe he really did believe they were his friends, but now they won’t even talk to him. It’s like he traded all his old friends for this crowd, and now it’s all he has left. It almost sounds lonely. Well, at least he and the crowd have each other. At every event, they literally chant, “We love you!” and he insists they promise to love him more than any other politician. They have a co-dependent relationship.
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Ben Hamilton (Sorry Guys, We Stormed the Capitol: The Preposterous, True Story of January 6th and the Mob That Chased Congress From the Capitol. Told in Their Own Words. (The Chasing History Project #1))
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Even those of us who didn’t get sick or get sucked into poverty were prisoners in our own homes during the lockdown. There were no bars, no movie theaters, no sports, no concerts, no public entertainment of any kind. If we left the house to buy food, we had to wear medical masks. No one had a face anymore! No one could smile at you. We were a giant, soulless blob with a thousand vacant eyes. Our entire population was cut off from everything that gave us joy and everyone around me succumbed to insanity ... they spent all their time bragging about arguments they’d won on the internet with people they had never met.
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Ben Hamilton (Sorry Guys, We Stormed the Capitol: The Preposterous, True Story of January 6th and the Mob That Chased Congress From the Capitol. Told in Their Own Words. (The Chasing History Project #1))
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stickers promoted InfoWars, one of the QAnon-like websites heroically sounding the alarm about movie stars drinking tortured children’s blood to stay young. The people who stormed the Capitol seemed to think advertising that website, in the middle of their assault, would somehow advance their cause. In consideration of the fact that I am poking conspiracy theorists with a stick, I will add that these 2 photographs are from windows next to each other. Those who wish to confirm that the InfoWars stickers were indeed on the Capitol window can view a video I took
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Ben Hamilton (Sorry Guys, We Stormed the Capitol: The Preposterous, True Story of January 6th and the Mob That Chased Congress From the Capitol. Told in Their Own Words. (The Chasing History Project #1))
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I must’ve missed this part in the parenting handbook. Chapter 12: When fleeing from your mob boss husband, be sure to communicate the details of your escape with your nine-year-old son early and often so that you don’t stunt his psycho-emotional development. Also, always bring snacks to the movies.
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Naomi West (Caged Thorn (Aminoff Bratva, #2))
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All the experts proved what we’ve all known all along. That they are full of shit. They all got it so wrong they needed cover and when they saw something, no matter how asinine, it became gospel to cover their abject failure. Still, the left wouldn’t feel sorry for itself for long. First it picked up the Russian spy story and started pushing it to every devastated reporter who would listen. Then it did everything it had told us the Trump supporters would do if Hillary won. Think about it. For weeks leading up to the election, we had been hearing about all the horrible things Donald Trump would force his supporters to do if he lost. DJT wouldn’t accept the defeat they were all so sure was coming. The editorial boards at the New York Times and the Washington Post both ran many articles warning us about the chaos that was about to ensue. According to popular opinion, Trump supporters were going to riot in the streets, refuse to accept the results of the election, and begin some kind of underground coup against the duly elected president, Hillary Clinton. They would start a second civil war. The streets would become absolute anarchy. And when things didn’t go the way the Democrats had wanted them to go, what happened? Let’s see. They held riots in the streets. (Check.) They refused to accept the results of the election, cooking up one of the strangest spy-movie stories I’ve ever heard in order to maintain their collective delusion. (Check.) Then they formed an underground group of online keyboard warriors called “the Resistance,” dedicated to taking down my father one stupid hashtag at a time. Prominent journalists, liberal activists, and actors have all identified themselves as proud members of “the Resistance” on Twitter. When I’m attacked by an outraged mob online, their voices are usually among the loudest. (And Check.)
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Donald Trump Jr. (Triggered: How the Left Thrives on Hate and Wants to Silence Us)
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The scene is an early example of a theme that preoccupied Lang throughout his career: the speed at which ordinary, law-abiding citizens can turn into a savage mob.
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Harold Schechter (Ripped from the Headlines!: The Shocking True Stories Behind the Movies' Most Memorable Crimes)
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That movie, what you call a spell, I believe, works to induce hate on a mass scale,” Molly says. “Like how a lynching riles individuals into a mob.” Sadie scoffs. “Then why come it only riles white folk?
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P. Djèlí Clark (Ring Shout)
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The initial guiding principle was simple: “Buy the rights to a fine play, hire the biggest names available, and hope the public will listen.” But competition for big names was fierce in New York. When film stars came east—usually on a train between movies, en route to Europe—they were mobbed by agents seeking their appearances on the big variety shows. An appearance on The Rudy Vallee Hour or Shell Chateau paid more and was less demanding—a bit of fluff between musical selections, which an actor could learn in a single rehearsal. The demand for top stars was so desperate that Lux scouts created devious ways of snaring them. One “bright young fellow,” as described by Radio Guide, simply grabbed up Leslie Howard’s suitcases and led him through a gauntlet of competing agents to a waiting cab. Only when they were settled in the car did it occur to Howard to ask who he was. “I’m from The Lux Radio Theater, and you’re going to act for us tomorrow night,” said the brash young fellow. He had caught (and subsequently booked) a hot young star by knowing that “a man will always follow his suitcases.
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John Dunning (On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio)