We've seen this scene repeated over and over through recent history in the Empire State. First we saw fast-talking, bombastic Hollywood film producer Jack Woltz and his prized $600,000 race horse Khartoum, whom Woltz decided not to race and instead put him out to stud.
Then some deranged mob boss with cotton balls in his jowls (half a continent away in New York) had the beloved Khartoum beheaded, with the old nag's melon mysteriously showing up under Woltz's bed covers (making for quite the 6 a.m. wake-up call, BTW). All that just because the brash Woltz was not a man in a position to be made to look ridiculous. He ain't no band leader, after all.
Next it was the curious case of one Luca Brasi (he lived on the second floor, but wasn't a second story guy). Always a New York muscle man (and quite the pro wrestler under the moniker of The Zebra Kid) and never known for his flaming wit, the "scary guy" was nevertheless enlisted by the supposedly wise Don to go undercover and pull a con job on the murderous Tattaglia brothers.
Seeing right through Brasi's subterfuge (couldn't see that coming), the Tattaglias promptly pinned Brasi's hand to a bar counter with a knife and guillotined the life right out of the fat man from behind. After tossing Brasi's obese hide in the East River, the brazen brothers sent the Don a Sicilian message: A couple of dead fish wrapped inside Luca's bulletproof vest. The warning imparted: "Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes."
But that wasn't the end of the animal abuse. In the decades that followed, Queens resident Tommy DeVito and his friends hit a deer one night on the New Jersey Turnpike. The poor animal got stuck in the car's grill, resulting in a late night visit to the home of Tommy's mama, Catherine Scorsese.
Tommy needed to borrow a giant butcher knife to hack off the deer's hoof (or is it a paw?) and get it the hell out of the car grill. While one man looked one way, and the other man looked the other way, Tommy BTW drafted the big butcher knife into double duty, using it to polish off made man Billy Batts, who just happened to be resting for a spell in the car's trunk. That's when Tommy's BF Henry knew he'd gone from rags to riches (or not).
All of that background now exhaustively detailed, we get to today's news (talk about a NON-inverted pyramid) involving some slimeball hacking off a pig hoof (or is it a paw? foot?) and sending the bloody appendage through first class U.S. mail to one New York U.S. representative and republican Peter King (link to full story at bottom).
King in March led the controversial congressional hearings on the development of radicals within the Muslim-American community, giving people antagonistic to those hearings a motive to pull off the hog hack job that was posted to King.
The very latest tonight is that a note accompanying the swine hoof "contained anti-Semetic ramblings" and "referenced" the hearings, which would appear to make it quite possible that this Perhaps Meccan Message came from none other than some demented individual within the American Muslim community.
But that didn't stop the Council on American-Islamic Relations from actually trying to blame the sloven bloody slab on some right-wing extremist accidentally sending the "message" to the wrong target, i.e. King:
"My guess is it was an anti-Muslim bigot, and bigots not being brain surgeons they probably got their signals crossed," said some braintrust called Ibrahim Hooper (any relation to Tobe or Sonney?) from the Council. Well, bigots aren't the only ones limited in their brain surgery propensities, Mr. Hooper.
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-31727_162-20050620-10391695.html
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