-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 The life, and death, of Mr. Badalamenti is important to cryptography people and cypherpunks for two reasons. First, the so-called "Pizza Connection" case is one of the very few times, if not the first, where actual wiretap data was good enough to convict someone. The other reason it is important is that it was the case in which Louis Freeh made his bones as a prosecutor. Combine the two, and you end up with an FBI director who was singularly ill-disposed to the idea of telephonic cryptography. In his advocacy of the NSA's then-failing "Clipper" chip project, he superheated what was already a firestorm of rage everywhere liberty is treasured. Fortunately, financial -- and not political -- cryptography is the only cryptography that matters. :-). For all the attacks on the chip by political advocates civil libertarian grounds, and, ultimately, its sheer technical incompetence by members of the cryptography community, it was, in fact, the absolute business *necessity* of SSL for credit card transactions and secure access to business information that settled the issue of ubiquitous strong cryptography once and for all. The camel's nose isn't sticking the tent. The camel's nose is stuck *out* of the tent, and the camel is inside, ready to spit in the eye of anyone who wants to take his stash. Physics causes finance. Finances causes politics. It was ever thus. It will ever be thus. Cheers, RAH ------- <http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=domesticNews&storyID=50 05854§ion=news> Reuters Top Italian Mafia Boss Dies in U.S. Prison Fri Apr 30, 2004 06:29 PM ET By Ellen Wulfhorst NEW YORK (Reuters) - Top Mafia boss Gaetano Badalamenti has died in a U.S. federal prison where he was serving a sentence for international drug smuggling, authorities said on Friday. Badalamenti, 80, died of cardiac arrest at a federal medical center in Devens, Massachusetts., on Thursday evening, said a spokesman for the federal prison system. Badalamenti, born in the village of Cinisi in Palermo in 1923, was one of the key figures in the Sicilian Cosa Nostra in the 1970s. Known as Don Tano, he was a close friend of Charles "Lucky" Luciano, one of America's biggest mobsters in the 1970s, and part of the so-called 'triumvirate' that ran the Sicilian Mafia. Others in the triumvirate were Luciano Liggio and Stefano Bontade. But the 1970s saw the rise of another clan which included Salvatore 'Toto' Riina, who went on to become the Sicilian Mafia's boss of bosses, and Badalamenti was forced to flee to Brazil and then Spain. He later went into business with organized crime figures in New York who were using pizza parlors in a giant operation that smuggled more than $1 billion worth of heroin from Sicily. In 1987, Badalamenti was convicted and sentenced to 45 years in prison for his role in what was called the "Pizza Connection." In 2002 in Italy, he was convicted and sentenced to life in prison in absentia for the 1978 murder of a left-wing disc jockey who regularly insulted the Mafia boss. But last October in Italy, he and former prime minister Giulio Andreotti were acquitted of involvement in the murder of journalist Mino Pecorelli in 1979. Badalamenti had been housed until Feb. 27 at a federal prison in Fairton, New Jersey before he was moved to the medical facility in failing health, authorities said. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP 8.0.3 iQA/AwUBQJQZ38PxH8jf3ohaEQLgjwCgkS46hzVOH4U+UzZfHHcybowOdc8AoPBg HI6qtQ68QLvnYc0ROdmSyu/w =ntDC -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'