The Pizza Connection was an actual FBI case that made the careers of Giuliani and others in both US and Italian law enforcement. The case involved a group of hardcore killers/drug dealers from Sicily who had cornered the world’s heroin supply and were now planning to use pizza parlors in NYC and the rest of the US to distribute their product. For every four boxes of mozzarella, one was the babanya, the term they used for the uncut dope. The Sicilians were referred to as Zips, and were about as far from Gucci-wearing non-Italian-speaking American hoods as possible. As one of these characters, whose nickname was “The Strangler of Christians,” once said about the American mob, “their problem is they don’t understand about massacres, it takes them two weeks of discussion to kill one guy.”
Watch our episode of VICE Meets with Abel Ferrara.
