Interior designer Kate is working on a room for one of her clients when she has a chance meeting with the son of one of Sicily's most esteemed families, Giovanni Calvelli. While his cold and arrogant disposition initially leaves Kate turned off, for some reason she can't take her eyes off the macho magnate. While Kate thinks she'll never see him again, just a few hours later Giovanni shows up at her home with a forgotten article, and with one foot in the doorway says, "You're into me, aren't you? You don't have to hide it. The feeling is mutual."

Kate was just a mistress to a very passionate Sicilian man until the day fate forced them to think about what they really had together.

It was just plain old physical attraction. That didn’t mean it was any “big love” or anything, did it? Kate was just mistress to a very passionate Sicilian man, Giovanni Calverri. And sex was all it was ever supposed to be. Until the day when everything changed. When fate forced them to put their steamy arrangement on hold—and think about what they really had together…

July 12, 1979: The fearsome Bonanno family boss, Carmine Galante, is gunned down in a gruesome ambush at a Brooklyn restaurant. The hit launches an FBI investigation that soon becomes the largest in the bureau's history, as agents uncover a trail leading to a clandestine arm of the Sicilian Mafia. Evidence points to an all but unknown criminal franchise at work in the U.S. within the strife-torn Cosa Nostra. The mystery deepens. Surveillance photos snapped secretly from FBI vans and lookouts in Queens and Brooklyn show a cast of characters the bureau's mob experts cannot identify. What is in the cartons these Sicilians are loading into the trunks of their Mercedes? Who is trying to spirit $60 million out of the country and why? And where is the mountain of money coming from? The FBI has stumbled across a billion-dollar drug pipeline that is funneling tons of Turkish morphoine base to Sicilian labs and heroin into the United States through pizza parlors, cafes, and boutiques. Where the French Connection ends, the Pizza Connection begins. This is the dramatic inside story of that historic case and the struggle of the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration, Customs Service, and New York Police Department to deal the Mafia a crippling blow. The early 1980s are a crucial time for the FBI. It is emerging from the debacles of J. Edgar Hoover's administration, which long refused to acknowledge traditional organized crime, and is about to take on a new assignment policing anti-drug laws alongside the DEA. The exploding case is assigned to an unlikely pair of agents: the intense, Sicilian-born Carmine Russo and the laid-back Charlie Rooney. Together with an expanding army of investigators in the U.S. and abroad, they follow a trail that leads from sidewalk pizzerias and pay phones in Long Island, New Jersey, and rural Illinois, to bank vaults and hideouts in Miami, the Bahamas, Zurich, Palermo, Rio, Madrid, Turkey, and Bulgaria. Thousands of hours of wiretapped conversations and surveillance photos reveal a deadly, shadowy world of coded messages, midnight dropoffs of heroin packed in paper bags and shirt boxes, and vast fortunes laundered through some of America's biggest brokerage firms. But the crimelords Russo and Rooney stalk are not their only nemesis; they must also fend off jealous and impatient bureaucrats, and more than once crooked cops come close to blowing the case.

Danilo Dolci is the renowned "Gandhi of Sicily." Since 1952 he has conducted a nonviolent crusade against the misery and violence of Western Sicily. A Passion for Sicilians portrays his struggles against official apathy and Mafia pressure, his long series of hunger strikes to arouse the public conscience, and his calls for measures to eradicate poverty. The book also brings to life the people of Partinico, the fascinating neighbors Mangione knew on Via Emma. We meet a Mafia killer, the Cardinal of Sicily, a Sicilian princess who defies the law as she spreads the gospel of family planning, and the denizens of Palermo's infamous slums. Written in a highly engrossing style, this book is an exciting rendition of an old world groping toward new values. Jerre Mangione is professor emeritus of American literature at the University of Pennsylvania. During his sojurn in Italy in 1965, he was a member of Dolci's staff and one of his closest confidants. Mangione is the author of nine other books.