Final Word from Thursday, July 29, 2010
If you saw a random picture of fugitive businessman Tomáš Pitr, who was arrested this week by the Swiss police, you might mistake him for a tennis player or a marketing manager. Some mafia thugs don't look like bona fide gangsters. You probably wouldn't pick many capos of the Five Families out of a lineup either, just based on how they look. (There is one exception, but we don't want to end up in concrete boots!) At the same time, some people have mafia mugs without officially belonging to any family. Education Minister Josef Dobeš and M&A Director Vladimír Schmalz of ČEZ could make a clock stop with their mobster scowls. Radek John can also put on a good gangster face, esp. when it's complemented by his all black-and-grey outfit. Miroslav Kalousek doesn't particularly look like a made man, but he certainly talks like one, esp. when his speech is extra-slurred by rum. For all the talk of the ABL mafia, the very pale Vít Bárta might be the CR's first vampire mobster. He clearly does his best work far from sunlight.[Czech Republic mergers & acquisitions VV TOP 09 Switzerland]
Glossary of difficult words
fugitive - a person who has escaped from a place or is in hiding, esp. to avoid arrest or prosecution;
thug - a violent person, esp. a criminal;
mug - (informal) a person's face;
capo - the head of a crime syndicate, esp. the mafia;
lineup - a group of people including a suspect for a crime, assembled for the purpose of having an eyewitness identify the suspect from among them;
M&A - mergers & acquisitions;
scowl - an angry or bad-tempered expression of the face;
made man - a person who has been officially inducted into the mafia;
slurred - spoken in such a way that the sounds run into one another.