It’s now a cliche due to James Bond movies, gangster movies and other films that a mafia boss is brutal and a bad, evil guy will feed his enemy to something that can eat him alive. Here’s life imitating cliched Hollywood art:
An Italian mobster fed a rival gangster to starving pigs — and then marveled at how the victim screamed and how the swine gorged themselves, police say.
The gruesome tale — right out the movie “Hannibal” — came to light when police released a wiretapped phone call by Simone Pepe, a member of the ‘Ndrangheta, the most powerful and violent of Italy’s four Mafias.
The caller recounts how he used an iron bar to beat Francesco Raccosta, a member of another family in the Calabrian region, and then threw him into a sty.
“It was so satisfying hearing him scream … mamma mia, he could scream!” he said, adding that there wasn’t “a thing left” after the feeding frenzy.
“People say sometimes they [the pigs] leave something,” he added.
Perhaps pigs are really into Italian food.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.